The problem of free inquiry in Baptist institutions of higher education.

Academic freedom appeared with a new conceptualization in early twentieth-century America. It was formed by the forces of secularism, professionalization, and evolutionary science, and Baptists disagreed about how to react to the new concept just as they disagreed about how to react to those forces.

Their disagreements involved clashes between two sets of dispositions that had achieved an informal harmony in the mid-nineteenth century. That harmony splintered, and Baptist education has ever since been at odds with itself and American educational society over how to construe academic freedom. (1)

Common and Aloof in Disposition

In the years surrounding the American Revolution, Baptists became known as the most democratic of all denominations. Their members came from the ranks of the common people, and their worship was personal and full of emotion. They ignored established ecclesiastical hierarchy and ordained ministers who were generally untrained and who offered leadership that was personal and charismatic. (2)

Ironically, Baptists also had a zeal for church discipline. Although liberty of conscience was a historic Baptist ideal, Puritan inclinations limited its application within the church. The responsibility of the local church to constitute a visible and pure community of the converted meant that those who rejected established Baptist doctrine and practice must be excluded from the local fellowship. Disciplinary review was usually dealt with in the monthly business meeting and was practiced avidly until the late nineteenth century, particularly in the South and frontier areas. (3) Growing aversions to Puritan standards as well as the desire to retain members contributed to the decline. At associational, state, and national levels, however, the desire for purified institutions remained strong. (4)

Many Baptists were suspicious of professionals, professionally trained ministers in particular. These suspicions were partly a manifestation of a longstanding distrust of the learned ministers of denominations who had previously persecuted Baptists, but there was also a deep belief that true religious faithfulness required isolation from the corrupting forces of society. (5) Warren Sweet famously stated: "Among no other religious body was the prejudice against an educated and salaried ministry so strong as among the Baptists, and this prejudice prevailed not only among frontier Baptists, but pretty generally throughout the denomination in the early years of the nineteenth century." (6)

These attitudes contributed to a pervasive anti-intellectual and anti-educational sentiment. If ordinary uneducated folks were an acceptable source for religious authority and if religion was more a matter of the heart than the mind, then what good was education? It might not be just benign but destructive, confusing the believer about the simple and heart-felt nature of divine truth and encouraging preachers to speak in terms not comprehensible to Baptist congregations. (7)

Respectable and Intellectual in Disposition

Alongside the first set of dispositions ran another. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the successes of revivalism increased the number of members and the financial support available in Baptist ranks. This success prompted many Baptists to downplay their traditional cultural exclusivism and seek social respectability. Educational institutions became an important means to pass along what was gradually being construed as a proud Baptist heritage. (8) Most colleges in the South were formed with close ties to their local communities and their state Baptist conventions through financial support and the appointment of boards of trustees by the conventions. In the North, a society method was the rule, in which institutions were organized and promoted by individuals and managed by boards whose members elected their successors. (9) The most frequent goal of educational institutions was to provide an educated ministry. The longstanding distrust of a professional class of ministers was suppressed by the worry that many members were being lost to denominations with better educated ministers. (10)

Even those Baptists who espoused a deep-seated anti-intellectualism were participating in a sophisticated intellectual platform pervasive within early America. Scottish Commonsense Realism spurned abstractions and emphasized the ability of any person directly to perceive the nature of the world. Collecting facts about the world made it possible to discover the laws underlying the activity of the world and human beings. These laws were eternal, unchanging, and created by God. (11) One who understood these laws understood how to interpret nature, human society, and even the Bible, because proper biblical interpretation proceeded according to this same scientific methodology. (12) Influential Baptists from Isaac Backus to John Leland to John Leadley Dagg to Francis Wayland supported this commonsense philosophy. (13)

From this perspective, a Christian need not fear investigation or new ideas. When all the facts were collected, then the truth of God would always win out. In this vein, John Leland could state in the preface to his article "The Bible Baptist" that "The doctrine and spirit of the following remarks, are left for the reader to judge of for himself. Truth is in the least danger of being lost, when free examination is allowed." (14) Francis Wayland, the president of Rochester University, maintained that "no truth can be inconsistent with itself. And hence it might be expected that whenever natural and revealed religion treated upon the same subjects they would teach in perfect harmony." (15)

Harmony Achieved and Lost

Until about 1870, virtually all colleges in the United States promulgated some version of Scottish Commonsense Realism. Even state universities acknowledged that truth was connected with Christianity and maintained elements of religious life in their operations, holding chapel services and employing many professors and college presidents who were ministers. (16) Most colleges had a senior-year capstone course in Moral Philosophy, which was taught by the president and attempted to bring together the diverse studies of the college curriculum into the one truth as shown by Christian scripture. (17)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Baptist higher education had achieved a tenuous harmony among its diverse dispositions. Institutions, particularly in the South, were tied to the sentiments of their often distrusting constituencies. This populist institutional polity, undergird by Scottish Commonsense philosophy and inspired by desires for pure and disciplined institutions, demanded that ordinary Baptists monitor and guard the content of teaching in their educational institutions so that nothing opposed to their common beliefs would issue from them.

Forces were already afoot to upset this educational harmony. In the 1860s, scientists began to chaffe against the restrictions of the old empiricism and natural law and promote a creative and speculative version of scientific investigation. This moved deeply against the sensibilities of Scottish Commonsense science. (18) Sentiments for secularization were mounting. Some of these derived from anti-religious motivations. The immense practical and technological successes of science caused many to advance science as a moral authority independent of religion. (19) Some sentiments for secularization came from Christians, even Baptists such as Francis Wayland, who maintained that certain public activities could be carried out best without sponsorship from religious organizations. (20)

The mounting professionalization of American intellectual life divided disciplines into ever more narrow fields, and efforts to divorce theology from science were begun. (21) Many professors teaching in America were recently educated in Germany and had brought back commitments to objective science as the method of professional academia. This model applied evolutionary science to all realms of study including religion and replaced an emphasis on the transmission of tradition or the development of character with an emphasis on the development of new knowledge. (22) The appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 had not created an immediate rift within American theology because previous evolutionary schemes had been theologically accommodated even by many biblicists. By the 1870s, however, the utilization of Darwinianism for non-biblical accounts of creation combined with other mounting forces produced distinct fissures in higher education. (23)

Three Responses to the Crisis

Mark Noll has described three intellectual responses among evangelicals to these challenges. (24) The liberal evangelical response attempted to accept the new science and make a new theological harmony utilizing it. The populist response, later developing into fundamentalism, accepted the practical developments of the new science and technology but resisted the ideological changes of the intellectual culture that came with it. The majority response was a platform of intellectual hesitancy. Unwilling to give up the traditional arguments for the unity of Christian truth as understood by the old science but also unwilling entirely to dismiss the new science and technology, most evangelicals wandered in intellectual uncertainty.

Baptists displayed virtually the same three responses. The liberal response was typified by such thinkers as William Rainey Harper, Shailer Mathews, and Augustus Strong in the North and Crawford Toy, William H. Whitsitt, and William Poteat in the South. Following one of the traditional methods of Scottish Commonsense Realism, they sought to accommodate Christian theology to the best science, even if it was modern evolutionary science.

The populist and fundamentalist response appealed to Baptist dispositions to judge academic scholarship on the basis of popular commonsense sentiments, to reject cultural institutions when they seemed dangerous to Baptist purposes, and to maintain doctrinally pure institutions. Evolutionary theory was posed as the origin of all modern problems, and no accommodation to it was allowed. J. Frank Norris in the South and William Bell Riley in the North became national figures advancing this platform.

The majority response among Baptists, although containing some of the intellectual vacillation Noll described, reflected the same divisions posed by the liberal or popular responses, but with softer edges. In the North, where modernism and fundamentalism were both strong, the middle ground was composed of two factions oriented toward either the liberal or fundamentalist extreme. This opposition led to major splits in 1932 and 1946 when conservative elements, unable to achieve their goals within the Northern Baptist Convention, withdrew to form their own organizations. (25) In the South, where modernism had little success, the middle ground was oriented toward the conservative response. While most Southern Baptists did not agree with the extremes of fundamentalism, they also did not believe that the theory of evolution could be mingled with theology without endangering true faith. (26)

Academic Freedom and the AAUP 

The intellectual changes at the end of the nineteenth century led many American professors to emphasize three things: the application of scientific methodology to all realms of life, the university as the environment where scientific inquiry was carried on, and professors as the specialized professionals who advanced knowledge. These commitments quickly ran into opposition from university officials. In 1900, Edward Ross, a professor at Stanford University, was fired because a major school benefactor, Mrs. Jane Stanford, was upset by his position on Chinese immigration and labor. (27) In 1913, John Mecklin at Lafayette College was fired for teaching that religious beliefs developed according to social evolution and for making use of higher criticism. American scholars already were organized into numerous professional societies according to discipline, and the Mecklin incident sparked an assembling of scholars from across disciplines to frame a letter to the president of Lafayette College inquiring into the details of the incident. The refusal of the president to recognize the standing of professors or to reply to their questions increased the momentum to establish a national organization to protect professors. (28)

In 1915, Arthur O. Lovejoy and John Dewey gathered scholars at a meeting at Johns Hopkins University to form the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Its 1915 Declaration of Principles set forth its indebtedness to German educational ideals as well as American empiricism and Darwinian science. It maintained that truth was best found by the application of the scientific method by specialists whose only restraint on practice or inquiry was the work of other experts. (29) Such an arrangement was crucial for the university to fulfill its public trust to provide advanced knowledge for society. (30)

The 1915 Declaration of Principles reflected a distrust of sectarian education. It criticized those religious institutions of education that did not "at least in regard to one particular subject [religious doctrine], accept the principles of freedom of inquiry, of opinion, and of teaching; and their purpose is not to advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators, but rather to subsidize the promotion of opinions held by the persons, usually not of the scholar's calling, who provide the funds for their maintenance." Furthermore, such institutions should never be allowed to pose before the public as institutions of full educational respectability. (31)

A Three-fold Baptist Response to Academic Freedom

Because of close relationships between the AAUP model of academic freedom and modern evolutionary science, Baptists responded to the developing idea of academic freedom in ways similar to their responses to modernism. Progressive Baptists accepted AAUP ideals and integrated them into their institutions. William Rainey Harper had espoused AAUP-like principles fifteen years before the organization's establishment, and sought to make the University of Chicago a non-sectarian institution where scholars worked without external interferences and where truth was determined by a pure struggle of opinion among experts. (32) Augustus Hopkins Strong, president of the Rochester Divinity School in the late nineteenth century, allowed his faculty rather prolific freedoms of inquiry and publishing and supported Walter Rauschenbusch amidst all the controversy that Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel theology provoked. (33) William Louis Poteat at Wake Forest University admonished his student ministers to develop the scientific spirit and remember that "there is no infidelity so deep or so dangerous ... as the fear lest the truth be bad." (34)

Baptist fundamentalism strictly resisted this version of academic freedom. Newly established fundamentalist Bible institutes rejected all the new educational ideals and focused on the practical skills needed for missions and evangelism. (35) J. Frank Norris waged a pitched battle against Baylor University in the 1920s, urging it to oust professors such as Grove S. Dow who espoused evolution. Norris founded his own Bible Baptist Institute whose every activity was carried out under his close and eccentric scrutiny. (36) Thomas Todhunter Shields, a northern fundamentalist, together with William T. Riley and Norris formed the Baptist Bible Union of North America in 1923. In search of a setting in which to train leaders for this organization, Shields took over the financially plagued Des Moines University, which had formerly been a Northern Baptist school. As head of the trustees, Shields dealt in a heavy-handed manner, dismissing many members of the faculty, requiring the remaining ones to sign faith declarations, and spying constantly on students to root out unbelievers. (37)

The broad middle of Baptist life accepted neither of these two extremes, but was generally unfavorable to AAUP ideals. In 1920, the issue of liberal teaching in Northern Baptist schools had become intensely charged, partly because of the Social Gospel work of Rauschenbusch and partly because of a perceived decline in Christian emphasis. The Northern Baptist Convention formed a committee to determine whether the content of collegiate teaching was acceptable to Baptists. The report of the committee, while recognizing that most schools were beyond reproach, indicated that many teachers practiced unsound teaching and spread strife and discord: "It is the duty of the Baptists communities ... to displace from the schools men who impugn the authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God and deny the deity of our Lord." The uncertainty of the convention as a whole, however, was revealed by the passing of a supplemental resolution expressing confidence in all Baptist instructors. (38)

Baptists in the South showed less division. Although alumni of Wake Forest University and Baylor University tended to support the few progressive intellectuals in their schools, most Baptists preferred a close policing of their institutions. In 1922, the Alexander Baptist Association of North Carolina passed a resolution claiming their "God-given right to determine what shall be or what shall not be taught in these schools [Baptist colleges and universities in North Carolina]" and requested that the teaching of evolution be terminated. (39) By unanimous vote, the 1926 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) categorically rejected every theory of evolution and requested that its missionaries, boards, and institutions reject it as well. (40)

E. Y. Mullins exemplified those in the middle ground who struggled with the intellectual predicament. As president of the SBC in 1922, he objected to departures from historic Baptist doctrines in the educational institutions of the denomination, but he also admonished the convention not to practice injustice or block the investigation of truth. (41) In 1925, he urged Baptists not to infringe on the function of science in society and suggested that the scriptures ought not have final authority in areas such as the hard sciences. As president of Southern Seminary until 1928, Mullins provided considerable freedom of inquiry, retaining W. O. Carver and A. T. Robertson, both of whom allowed some place for the role of evolutionary thought in theological study. (42)

The tendency of Northern Baptist educational institutions to be administratively remote from their religious constituencies allowed these schools freedom to follow the AAUP ideal, but this remoteness spelled the decline of Baptist-sponsored education in the North. The Baptist constituency, much of it anti-intellectual, felt betrayed by its schools and resisted providing financial support and did not send as many of its sons and daughters to Baptist colleges. By the 1940s, schism and severe declines in funding from Baptists had distanced the schools even further. Many of them had nationally acclaimed academic programs, but they disclaimed any Baptist identity. (43)

In the South, modernism remained sparsely represented, and the administrative structure of Baptist colleges, universities, and seminaries tied the institutions quite closely to the dispositions of their grass-root constituencies. The rapid expansion of the denomination in the 1940s and 1950s consumed most of its attention, and few issues involving free inquiry rose to group consciousness.

Problems with the AAUP Platform

The American Association of Colleges, which was comprised of American college presidents and was also formed in 1915, rejected the 1915 Declaration of Principles, partly because the AAUP membership excluded college presidents and faculty below the rank of full professor and partly because of the statement's institution of the tenure system. Talks over the next twenty-five years resulted in a reconciliation of the positions of the two organizations. Together they adopted the 1940 "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," and almost immediately it became the generally accepted standard of academic freedom in America. (44)

The 1940 statement readdressed the ideals of the 1915 declaration, but appeared less hostile to religious institutions. It provided that "limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment." (45) This provision became known as the "limitations clause." Its initial intent was to ensure that faculty applying for positions at religiously affiliated institutions, where alterations of the AAUP ideal were involved, be informed of such alterations at the outset, but it quickly led to varying interpretations of the status of academic freedom for faculty in religiously affiliated institutions. (46)

In 1965, the AAUP appointed a Special Committee on Academic Freedom in Church-Related Institutions to study the clause and elucidate its meaning. This committee, chaired by Baylor philosophy professor W. J. Kilgore, did not take the clause to be encouragement for religious institutions to establish limitations or standards different from the rest of higher education. The committee suggested that any institution appealing to the limitations clause should be able to show that the restraints were crucial to the religious and educational purposes of the institution and should make such restraints known to prospective faculty and to the public at large. Faculty members should respect the stated mission of an institution to which they were appointed, but they retained the freedom to express positions that disagreed with the institution. (47)

Most still found the "limitations clause" to be unclear. In 1970, the AAUP set forth an interpretive comment for the 1940 statement that was supposed to clarify the "limitations clause" but instead made it more uncertain: "Most church-related institutions no longer need or desire the departure from the principle of academic freedom implied in the 1940 Statement, and we do not now endorse such a departure." (48) Some concluded that the interpretative comment provided the terminus point for the limitations clause, which they said had functioned as a "temporary concession" from the beginning. A report by a subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure in 1988 concluded that the 1970 interpretation did not remove the "limitations clause" from the 1940 statement, and therefore religious limitations on academic freedom should not immediately invoke censure from the AAUP. Such institutions, however, should not represent themselves as "authentic seats of higher learning." (49)

A 1996 report by the same committee distinguished between institutions that "function within a set of doctrines or beliefs, and ... usually do not affirm recognition of academic freedom, even subject to restriction" and institutions that provide for academic freedom in all respects except for core doctrines connected with the mission of the institution. To the first class of institution, AAUP standards did not apply, and complaints from faculty at those institutions would not be followed up. AAUP standards did apply to the second class of institution, and if such institutions did not follow the requirements of the "limitations clause" as applied to the specific case, they could be subject to censure. (50)

While these statements represented thoughtful development since the 1915 declaration, the issue of whether Baptist institutions that impose religious restrictions on faculty hiring and teaching were due full academic respect remained uncertain. Two factors complicated the situation. First, Baptist institutions of higher education, like virtually every other church-related institution, need a respectable academic reputation in order to survive. If an institution appeared on the AAUP's censure list or did not qualify for classification as "an authentic seat of higher education," then its future was in jeopardy. As a result, every institution wanted to be seen as a respecter of academic freedom. Second, the AAUP, and indeed much of American higher education, presumed that there was one standard for all respectable institutions and only one appropriate platform for academic freedom. (51) This presumption blinded much of American higher education to the appeals of Baptists and other church-related groups to a different model of academic freedom from that of the AAUP, a model derived from their nineteenth-century dispositions. The Elliot controversy brought these issues into focus.

The Message of Genesis

In 1961, Midwestern Theological Seminary Professor Ralph Elliott published The Message of Genesis. Utilizing elements of higher criticism and published by the SBC's Broadman Press, this book prompted the 1962 convention messengers to pass a resolution decrying the teaching of views in SBC seminaries that would undercut the historical and doctrinal accuracies of the Bible. The resolution also instructed the administrative officers of these institutions to take steps to address the problem. In response to this admonition, a committee appointed by the trustees of Midwestern Seminary conferred with Elliott and asked for assurances that he would never again seek publication of this then out-of-print book. When he refused, the committee recommended to the trustees that he be dismissed, and by a majority vote he was. (52)

The responses to this incident indicated the extent to which academic freedom had become an important ideal for Baptist higher education. The pressures to secure regional accreditation, recruit students, and raise funds were forcing even conservative Baptists to claim academic freedom for their institutions, although it was a model of academic freedom derived from the American tradition of Scottish Commonsense Realism. K. Owen White, pastor of First Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, spoke out on the Elliott controversy in a noted editorial, "If the appeal is made for 'academic freedom; let it be said that we gladly grant any man the right to believe what he wants to--but, we do not grant him the right to believe and express views in conflict with our historic position concerning the Bible as the Word of God while he is teaching in one of our schools, built and supported by Baptist funds." (53)

The 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, an update of the 1925 confessional statement, was at least partly elicited by the Elliott controversy and contained an article on academic freedom: "In Christian education there should be a proper balance between academic freedom and academic responsibility. Freedom in any orderly relationship of human life is always limited and never absolute. The freedom of a teacher in a Christian school, college, or seminary is limited by the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ, by the authoritative nature of the Scriptures, and by the distinct purpose for which the school exists." (54)

The differences between this religious institutional model of academic freedom and that of the AAUP are significant. The religious institutional model limits individual faculty expression for the sake of the religious mission of the institution. The AAUP model emphasizes the freedom of individuals who are part of a scholarly profession that transcends any particular educational institution. Institutions following the religious institutional model seek to fulfill a religious trust to their founding religious body. The institutions must be free to pursue inquiry within the boundaries of their doctrinal commitments or else they cease to be what they were intended to be. There is arguably an indirect public trust at work in this model in that a diversity of religious institutions in a society can contribute to a more vigorous society. The AAUP model maintains that the protection of the freedom of individual faculty from external influences serves a public trust to provide new knowledge for the good of society. Without this protection, the work of professional academics can be sullied by the intrusion of parties who have neither the training nor disposition of scholars.

A High Wire With No Net

Baptist institutions of higher education, like many church-related ones, have found themselves in a precarious position over the last sixty years. On the one hand, they must remain loyal to a constituency whose conception of higher education may be at odds with broader American ideals and commitments. That conception is often narrow in religious focus, populist and commonsensical in judgment, and hostile to modern science. (55) On the other hand, they must serve a constituency of the broader American educational establishment and pass muster on the various criteria expected in a highly monolithic, and frequently elitist, system. (56) Given the deep disagreements between these two extremes, it is somewhat surprising that the AAUP has censured very few Baptist institutions. Three reasons seem to account for this. First, the ambiguities involved in the "limitations clause" make it difficult to apply. Second, most Baptist university administrators want to avoid the stigma of AAUP censure and its potential influence on accreditation and recruitment. As a result, efforts are made to settle faculty grievances before they reach the AAUP and certainly before the institution is censured. Third, hiring restrictions permitted by the Bona Fide Official Qualification (BFOQ) clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (57) and most interpretations of the AAUP's "limitations clause" allow Baptist institutions to limit the hiring of faculty to those who agree with the specific religious mission of the institution. Surveys of Baptist professors find that an overwhelming majority feel quite free to teach and research what they want. (58)

A question that has percolated underneath Southern Baptist education for the last one hundred years is whether or not institutions established, sponsored, and closely monitored by ordinary folks, frequently espousing nineteenth-century philosophical and educational ideals and rejecting many elements of modern learning, can be considered authentic institutions of free inquiry? If one believes that all truth is commonsensical and parallels an "open-eyed" interpretation of the Bible, then the answer is yes. If one believes that truth is best advanced by professional academics trained in the most current intellectual methods, then the answer is no. Perhaps the question itself can be altered, and perhaps there are other ways to answer it, but the inability to frame the question and offer alternatives to it is one of the greatest contemporary shortcomings of Baptist higher education in particular, and of evangelical higher education in general. (59)

In the last twenty years, the actions of many Baptist universities suggest that they have answered the question in the negative. A resurgence of fundamentalism in Baptist life has prompted a wave of intellectual and political purification within Baptist institutions. Fearing the changing sentiments of their constituencies, many Baptist institutions of higher education have altered their relationship to their state conventions preferring relationships much like a society model. It will take decades to see if these institutions follow the earlier path of Northern Baptist schools, but unless Baptist educational institutions are successful in educating their own constituencies and American higher education at large about the divided allegiances they feel, these institutions will continue their precarious walk on the high wire, constantly in danger of disaster at the hands of any ideological wind.

(1.) Walter B. Shurden set forth several such cleavages found in the South in "The Southern Baptist Synthesis: Is it Cracking?" Baptist History and Heritage 16, no. 2 (April 1981): 2-11.

(2.) Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6; Gordon S. Wood, "The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution," Leadership in the American Revolution, ed. Gordon S. Wood (Washington: Library of Congress, 1974), 73, 77, 80; Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9; and Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 61.

(3.) Wills, Democratic Religion, 6, 27, 33, 87-88, 108-09, and William Warren Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture 1765-1840 (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963), 141-42.

(4.) Robert G. Torbet, A History of the Baptists, 3rd ed. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1963), 452.

(5.) Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 95-97, and Edwin Scott Gaustad, "The Backus-Leland Tradition," Baptist Concepts of the Church, ed. Winthrop Still Hudson (Chicago: The Judson Press, 1959), 127.

(6.) Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture, 111.

(7.) Leon McBeth, "Southern Baptist Higher Education," The Lord's Free People in a Free Land: Essays in Baptist History in Honor of Robert A Baker, ed. William R. Estep (Fort Worth: Evans Press, 1976), 115, 117; Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 67, David B. Potts, Baptist Colleges in the Development of American Society (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988), 96; and Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 9-10.

(8.) McBeth, "Southern Baptist Higher Education," 115; Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 92-93; and Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 95.

(9.) McBeth, "Southern Baptist Higher Education," 125; and H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 564.

(10.) Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture, 167; and Potts, Baptist Colleges in the Development of American Society, 109.

(11.) Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 56, 160.

(12.) George M. Marsden, "Everyone One's Own Interpreter? The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America," The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, eds. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 80.

(13.) William G. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 188; and E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture 1795-1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978), 124-25.

(14.) L. F. Greene, ed., The Writings of John Leland (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), 78.

(15.) Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1865), 132.

(16.) Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.

(17.) George M. Marsden, "Introduction," The Secularization of the Academy, eds. George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4.

(18.) Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 167.

(19.) Christopher P. Tourney, God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 19.

(20.) Francis Wayland, The Elements of Political Economy (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853), iv.

(21.) George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 142.

(22.) Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 102, 112.

(23.) Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 137, and Reuben, The Making of the Modern University, 31.

(24.) Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 101.

(25.) Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 913.

(26.) James J. Thompson, Jr., Tried as by Fire: Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982), 122.

(27.) Reuben, The Making of the Modern University, 4-5, 196.

(28.) American Association of University Professors, "About AAUP," January 2002, http:// www.aaup.org/aboutaaup/hist.HTM (accessed 30 August 2003), and George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 302-06.

(29.) Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 400-03, and American Association of University Professors, "1915 Declaration of Principles," "Appendix I" in AAUP Policy Documents & Reports, 9th ed., ed. B. Robert Kreiser (Washington, D.C.: American Association of University Professors, 2001), 291.

(30.) American Association of University Professors, "1915 Declaration," 294-95.

(31.) Ibid., 293.

(32.) Reuben, The Making of the Modern University, 89, and Richard J. Storr, Harper's University: The Beginnings; A History of the University of Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 97.

(33.) LeRoy Moore, Jr., "Academic Freedom: A Chapter in the History of the Colgate Rochester Divinity School," Foundations 10, no. 1 (January-March 1987): 78.

(34.) Quoted in Suzanne Cameron Linder, William Louis Poteat: Prophet of Progress (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 73.

(35.) Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 149.

(36.) Barry Hankins, God's Rascal: J. Frank Norris & the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 30, and Norman F. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963), 120, 122.

(37.) Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 107, and William Henry Brackney, The Baptists (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 257.

(38.) James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges & Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 402-03, and Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 111.

(39.) Quoted in Linder, William Louis Poteat, 122.

(40.) Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964), 66.

(41.) Linder, William Louis Poteat, 121.

(42.) Thompson, Tried as by Fire, 113, 117.

(43.) Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light, 405-06.

(44.) Hofstadter, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, 483-90.

(45.) American Association of University Professors, "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure with 1970 Interpretive Comments," January 1990, http://www.aaup.org/statements/Redbook/1940stat.htm (accessed 30 August 2003).

(46.) See Report of Committee A for 1939 as quoted in Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, American Association of University Professors, "The 'Limitations' Clause in the 1940 Statement of Principles," Academe 74 (September-October 1988), 54.

(47.) Special Committee on Academic Freedom in Church-Related Colleges and Universities, "Report of the Special Committee on Academic Freedom in Church-Related Colleges and Universities, AAUP Bulletin 53 (December 1967): 369-70.

(48.) American Association of University Professors, "1940 Statement of Principles."

(49.) Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, 52-58.

(50.) Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, American Association of University Professors, "The 'Limitations' Clause in the 1940 Statement of Principles: Some Operating Guidelines" 83 (January-February 1997), 49-52.

(51.) Marsden pointed out, as many others have, that much of American higher education presumes the innate authority of the scientific method and has failed to realize that philosophical work of the last fifty years has indicated that scientific method is a prone to political and ideological bias as any method. Marsden, "Introduction," 6.

(52.) Barley, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century, 157.

(53.) K. Owen White, "Death in the Pot," A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage, ed. H. Leon McBeth (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990), 500. White inserted the bold text into his article.

(54.) Southern Baptist Convention, "1963 Baptist Faith and Message," A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage, ed. H. Leon McBeth (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990), 515.

(55.) A recent poll of American adults indicated that only 44 percent believed that human beings developed from earlier species of animals. Whereas, the National Academy of Science gives unqualified support to contemporary evolutionary theory. Eugenio C. Scott, "Antievolution and Creationism in the United States," Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997): 263-89.

(56.) Larry C. Ingram made this observation in regard to sectarian institutions in general in "Sectarian Colleges and Academic Freedom," Review of Religious Research 27 (June 1986): 227. Walter R Metzger provided virtually the same description of Lafayette College in 1913. Hofstadter, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, 475, n21.

(57.) This clause allows religious institutions to show religious preferences in hiring when they can demonstrate that such preferences are needed to maintain the religious mission of the school. United States Congress, Civil Rights Act, US Code (1964), ?[section]2000e-2.(e).

(58.) Larry C. Ingram, Robert Thornton, and Renee L. Edwards, "Perceptions of Academic Freedom in Southern Baptist Colleges," Southern Baptists Observed: Multiple Perspectives on a Changing Denomination, ed. Nancy Tatom Ammerman (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 227.

(59.) A similar lament is voiced by Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 3-27, Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 429-40, George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Nathan O. Hatch, "Evangelical Colleges and the Challenge of Christian Thinking," The Reformed Journal, 35 (September 1985): 10-18.

J. Jeffrey Tillman is professor of philosophy and religion, Wayland Baptist University, Wichita Falls, Texas.