Trump and his allies bet their assault against the academic world will bring a political victory, regardless of economic pain or audience results. Based on the polls, they may be right. Last year, according to Gallup, only 36% of Americans said they had “a lot” or “a lot” of confidence in higher education – out of around 20 points since 2015.
Churches have a similar public relations problem. About the same proportion of Americans say they give significant confidence in the organized religion (against around 60% there is a generation). During the decades which followed the Vietnam War, the faith of the Americans in all kinds of large institutions collapsed.
But recent data have brought a touch: churches benefit from a small but significant rebound, especially among young people. Perhaps these millennials and zoomers have reached maximum exhaustion with nonsense due to scrolling Tiktok. Perhaps young men among them are looking for an alternative to the message of the secular media according to which they are guilty of “toxic masculinity” until they are innocent.
At a time when the press secretary of the White House announced a “stupidity” freeze freezing while displaying a giant cross necklace, it is easy to suppose that traditional Christianity and the secular academic world are permanent enemies, on the opposite sides of a civilizational chasm. But in fact, the fate of churches and universities has long been linked. For academics struggling with the way of regaining public confidence, there are surprising lessons in the recent Christian resurgence-and, perhaps, a counter-intuitive strategy to transform the current campaign towards paralyzed universities and humiliated into an opportunity to recover basic ideas on the objective of higher education.
During the two decades after the Second World War, churches and universities both sailed at the Zenith of cultural influence. The Americans were inclined to trust the experts, whether they were preached from a pulpit or gave conferences in front of a blackboard. It can be difficult to imagine now, but at the time, cheesy theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Henry P. Van Dusen have honored the cover of Time, and democratic presidential campaigns have bought splashing advertisements The New York Times To show the endorsements they received from university teachers. Even the Republicans have courted the support of the “Eggheads” university. During the 1960 presidential election, the National Republican National Committee – dedicated to John F. Kennedy’s “Brain Trust” – recruited a Stanford political scientist named Cornelius P. Cotter to convince more teachers than the Republican Party was a “serious intellectual enterprise”, told journalists.
