Religion in the Colleges
Campus Gods on Trial.
by Chad Walsh.
Macmillan. 138 pp. $2.50.

Chad Walsh is poet in residence and professor of English at Beloit College; he is also a minister in the Episcopal Church. Naturally, then, he is concerned with the religious situation on the American campus. In Campus Gods on Trial, Mr. Walsh seeks to expose the falsity of the many substitute faiths that flourish in the academic community and to vindicate classical Christianity as a total philosophy of life. The book is essentially a work of apologetics in the better sense of the term.

Mr. Walsh begins with describing the “average Christian” student’s religious background: the home dominated by fundamentalistic Biblicism (“the fiery furnace”); the “liberal” home in which Christianity is “indistinguishable from a vague humanitarianism and the duties of citizenship” (“the lukewarm bath”); the atheistic home; and in a few cases the home in which religion is a “warm fire.” He follows this up with a brief discussion of what the student finds when he gets to college and his confused response to the diverse influences impinging upon him.

Only with the third chapter, entitled “Mostly Isms,” does the real purpose of the book begin to emerge. In it Mr. Walsh gives the more obvious “campus gods”—Progress, Despair, Humanitarianism, Americanism, Capitalism, Communism (which he improperly identifies with Marxism)—a quick going over. He finds something true in most of these faiths; the trouble begins when they try to exalt themselves into total philosophies of life demanding total allegiance. They then become idolatrous and destructive.

This theme is continued in a discussion of cultural relativism and “natural law” in which Mr. Walsh tries to maintain a position that embraces both as “parts of a larger and complex reality.” The pictorial device he uses to illustrate his position is the rather familiar one of a divine broadcasting station constantly sending out “messages of advice and guidance over the air waves” for reception by men; “but some radio sets are better than others, and some people listen more attentively and catch more quickly what comes from the loud-speaker.” Hence both the unity and the diversity that we find among men in their moral ideas and standards.

The “psychoanalytic” argument that religion is mere wish-fulfillment is dealt with in the fifth chapter, while the next two are devoted to the much more critical problem of science and scientism. “Science,” Mr. Walsh says quite truly, “is a useful servant. Scientism is a deity. The real scientists rarely practice the cult of Scientism (faith in science as a complete way of life). The faithful worshipers are the bystanders and hangers on of science: people who know just enough about what science can do to be sure that it can do everything.” He indicates the possibilities and limitations of science, and warns against the confusion of science properly so called with Naturalism and Positivism, two more of the “campus gods.” He also shows how it is possible to find an entirely adequate place for science in a religiously grounded multi-dimensional picture of reality that does justice to all human concerns and interests.

In the next section of the book, taken up with the “atmospheric,” “psychological,” and “heartfelt” objections to religion—it’s “old stuff”; it’s a “failure”; it’s not “objective”; it’s an “infringement on freedom”; it’s “too spiritual and otherworldly”; it’s “too exclusive,” “too individualistic,” etc., etc.—I think Mr. Walsh is at his best and most convincing. The shortcomings and corruptions of present-day Christianity are dealt with in a candid spirit. He makes it perfectly clear that the living faith he speaks of is not a comfortable creed for the self-righteous. It is “medicine, and the church is a hospital. Both are for hypocrites, double-talkers, and phonies like you and me. . . . The course of treatment is lifelong. But there are two things we can be sure of: We shall have plenty of companionship with our fellow-patients all along the way. And the physician is absolutely reliable.”

In the last three chapters, striking a more direct and positive note, Mr. Walsh discusses the “credentials of Christianity,” and in the course of this he permits himself some rather dubious arguments. He outlines a six months’ “experiment” in daily prayer, Bible reading, churchgoing, and Christian living. He concludes with an exposition of the “three words of Christianity”: man, God, and love.

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It is impossible to read this work without being impressed with its clarity and competence. Mr. Walsh’s admirers are not altogether wrong in hailing him as the “American C. S. Lewis.” Yet I cannot escape the feeling that the book misses fire—perhaps just because of its confident pigeon-holing, its pat dealing with something so complex and individual as the religious concern of human personalities—and that it does not really deal with the religious situation on the American campus as I have come to know it in the course of the past few years.

Perhaps I can best indicate what I mean by noting that Mr. Walsh’s picture of the student mind on religion is one of almost unrelieved obduracy and indifference. No one reading the volume will find in it so much as an inkling of the fact that on the American campus there is, to quote Dean Pike’s recent review of this very hook, “a new openness to the Judeo-Christian tradition, a deeper questioning of the dogmas of secularism.” The tide, it seems, is definitely turning. Commenting on John Hallowell’s Main Currents of Modern Political Thought in the Saturday Review for March 3, 1951, Professor H. Stuart Hughes noted somewhat wryly: “Ten or fifteen years ago, no self-respecting ‘enlightened’ intellectual would have been caught dead with a religious interpretation of anything. . . . Now Mr. Hallowell confirms the suspicions that have gradually been drifting up to us from the students we confront. The avant-garde is becoming ‘old-fashioned’; religion is now the latest thing.”

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Mr. Walsh is apparently still writing about the student mind of a decade or two ago. Of course, the mass of students, like the mass of Americans, are still religiously illiterate and secular-minded. But the intellectual tone has begun to change. Even the obduracy and indifference are of a different order: the indifference is less assured, the obduracy is more serious and sophisticated. Increasing numbers of students are aware of a deepening religious concern. And the intellectual vanguard on the campus is definitely thinking along new lines, lines that make Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, and Tillich, Maritain and de Lubac, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Heschel, the “idea-men” of the time.

Because Mr. Walsh seems unaware of all this, or at least gives it no recognition in his book, his whole approach suffers from a certain flatness and conventionality. His theology appears, with some minor qualifications, to be quite sound as an interpretation of Christian faith in the Anglican tradition. But that is just the trouble, it is merely “sound”; there is no tension, no dynamic, no passion in it. There is very little to stir the imagination to intellectual excitement and commitment. Mr. Walsh’s well-bred, rather “tweedy” style well suits the relaxed temper of his book.

What I am saying really amounts to this: Mr. Walsh’s book is not in the line of religious thinking of this time of crisis, and it is “crisis” theology, if anything, that appeals to the new student mind. Mr. Walsh, in short, does not seem to me to speak to the condition of the student of our time.

Yet he does say one thing that is profoundly and perennially true:

you may choose,” he tells the student, “the choice will be the major turning point of your life.”

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