Provoking the Sacred: Baptist Connections and Heritage at Wake Forest University
By
Matthew T. Phillips
Submitted to Dr. Grant A. Wacker according to the requirements of RELIGION 293: Religious Issues in Post-WWII America
Duke University Divinity School Durham, North Carolina April 23, 2003
A mile and a month apart, Baptists announced the beginning of a school and the
severing of old ties. In October, the scene was Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest
University. A modern acoustical “sound cloud” hung over the podium: the mass of
sheetrock, speakers, lights and wires obscuring the artistry and symbolism of the old cross-
shaped iron grille over the organ pipes. Divinity school dean Bill J. Leonard preached to a
crowd of students, faculty, community members, and representatives from the nations’
universities gathered to celebrate the opening of Wake Forest’s Divinity School, which he
described as “Christian by tradition, ecumenical in outlook, and Baptist in heritage.”1 Just over a month later, in the coliseum complex down the street, a modular floor was doing the obscuring, covering the basketball floor used by the Wake Forest Demon Deacons so that the room could be a little more somber as the Baptists of North Carolina conducted their annual State Convention. The convention’s morning business did not include an acknowledgement of the new divinity school, but they did discuss Wake Forest, passing by
“a substantial margin” a resolution criticizing the university for not barring use of the chapel for homosexual union services and serving alcoholic beverages on campus. The convention then initiated a constitutional amendment severing remaining ties with the school.2
At first glance the Convention’s resolution (and the giant sound reflector in the
chapel, for that matter) would appear to be evidence of the secularization of a historically
Baptist school, but Wake Forest—not only the divinity school, but the university as a whole
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over the past decade—presents an opportunity to challenge and reshape conceptions of
secularization in the modern American university. The opening of a new seminary and
several other symptoms represent a ground swell of religious activity at all levels of the
school. Wake Forest University perceived a mission and even a mandate that is not
necessarily connected with its institutional denominational heritage, but may still be very
much Christian or, in Wake Forest’s case, even may be described as uniquely “Baptist” in
the sense of overarching beliefs about how life and faith are to be approached if not in the
sense of the institutional denomination.
Secularization in Higher Education As institutions of higher education in the United States have struggled to weather
the times, their relationships with churches and denominations have been dynamic by
necessity. Foundational theory about the religious affiliations of modern American
universities comes from George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University. Marsden
writes that Protestantism insured its own irrelevance in higher education. The liberalism
that many Protestants had supported became the argument against the prevalence of
Protestantism in higher education. The “inclusive” higher education pattern that emerged gave Protestantism no more priority than any other religious perspective, and in fact placed them all on a distant periphery. For Marsden, the difficulty in describing the trends in higher education comes not from the schools that stand out from the secularizing crowd
(he excludes large groups of these from his study), but rather from the subtle differences in disestablishment of religion and secularization.3 Either means a reduction in the effect of
religion on mainstream higher education and so, to persons seeking to retain ancient
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connections between the church and the academy, both are bad. The product of this
disestablishment of institutional religion, Marsden asserts, is a “virtual establishment of
nonbelief, or the near exclusion of religious perspectives from dominant academic life.”4
In the sociological work Religion On Campus, Conrad Cherry and other sociologists of religion described their problems with existing secularization theories, saying that in their own experiences teaching in various types of universities, “religion as taught and practiced has been alive and well.”5 But Marsden’s concern that religion had ceased to
shape the modern American university could be true in a setting where the teaching and
practice of religion is alive and well.
Elizabeth Newman, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological
Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, saw evidence of Marsden’s theories at her alma mater and the subject institution of this paper, Wake Forest University. She shared her observations
of the university’s president in his efforts to explain the religious orientation of Wake
Forest, noting that he seemed to search for explanations that deflected concerns from both
sides, saying that the school’s chief commitment should be to “the unique and promising
path which is [Wake Forest’s] alone.” Still, she admits, at least the struggle is happening at
Wake Forest at a time when struggle over Christian identity simply does not happen in most places.6
Even as they report on struggles (or lack thereof) over Christian identity in higher
education, scholars struggle with how to use terms like “secularization,” “religious,” and
“establishment.” At least part of my thesis is that the theories regarding the secularization
of higher education are inadequate, so my arguments hinge on definition. Though my
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definitions may not align exactly with the authors mentioned, they will in some
combination cover the issues raised in their theory. The first category for definitions is the
sphere of religious activity. Cherry can say, for example, that in his experience religion as
taught and practiced is alive and well, but a school where students regularly attend campus
ministry meetings and enroll in religion classes is not necessarily a school where university
officials consistently refer to the institution as “Christian.” Although the distinction is
more subtle, a school where officials talk openly about Christian principles and try to incorporate them in the administration of the institution may or may not be shaped on a day-to-day basis by a collective religious identity. These distinctions lead to a division
between three different spheres of religious activity: institutional leadership and definition,
optional (and possibly peripheral) religious practice and study, and a pervasive, almost
environmental, religious identity within the community of the institution. Another way to
represent that third sphere would be as the truth behind institutional claims of religious
identity.
Cherry and his co-authors assert that religious teaching and practice is alive and
well in institutions of higher education. That statement does not negate—and in fact
accents—the importance of exploring the reduction in institutional claims about religious
identity. If religious practice continues, then it is all the more strange when fewer
university administrations claim or advertise their religious identity and when religious
perspectives in administration are excluded. Marsden is aware of religious practice among
students, and this type of activity is purposefully dismissed in his work. Optional religious
practice does not contradict secularization or disestablishment of religion.7
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“Disestablishment,” then, refers to the exclusion of religious and religious language from the official face of the school. Christian identity and especially denominational connections are downplayed or omitted from promotional publications. The converse—
“establishment” is troubling, so I will say “official religion”—is marked by use of religious language and promotion of Christian identity and heritage, but also by organization of campus activities and speakers. In Wake Forest’s case, the establishment of a new divinity school and the celebration of the “Year of Religion” are both examples of official religion.
“Secularization” refers to something deeper than religion courses and official promotional language. This is the more elusive category that cannot be observed in administration statements or campus ministry attendance statistics, but rather in the sense of mission and unity of purpose on a campus. The converse—again, the exact converse
“sanctification” is a loaded theological term, so I will say “spiritualization”—is seen not in press releases, but in the responses thereto, and not in religious ceremonies, but in the attendance of those occasions and the kinds of conversations that follow. This is included in Marsden’s use of the term “secularization,” but that term is used more specifically here.
The final term, though it has been roughly assumed until now, is “religious.” As the modifier which describes phenomenon as running counter to “secularization,” it is not necessarily Christian, although this paper is concerned with an institution which is
Christian in tradition. Wake Forest itself demonstrates awareness of this distinction when the school included a statement about the school’s “Judeo-Christian and Baptist heritage,” in its 1999 report to the Baptist State Convention. This language had perhaps grown out of increasing sensibilities to other religious traditions as a result of the school’s focus on
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religion through the 1997-1998 school year, which also drew a distinction between
“religion” and “Christianity.”8
Years of Religion Analysis of three major events at Wake Forest in the late 1990s provides the challenging data to theories of secularization. First, there was a stepped breaking of all administrative, financial, and nominative ties between the North Carolina Baptist
Convention and Wake Forest University throughout the decade. Second, as the introduction alludes, the Wake Forest University Divinity School opened in 1999 following ten years of exploration and preparation, with consistent updates to and tentative support from the state Convention. Finally, the university celebrated a “Year of Religion in American Life” during the 1997-1998 academic year, bringing scholars in residence for special programs and shaping the freshman curriculum and campus concerts and lectures to the theme.
Breaking Apart The relationship between the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina and
Wake Forest University was not static until 1986, but it was in that year that financial and administrative ties were substantially severed. Until 1979, Wake Forest had been related to the Convention in the same way as the other Baptist colleges of North Carolina, receiving substantial financial support through the Convention’s budget and having its Board of
Trustees elected by the convention. In 1979, the relationship began to change as the university was granted nomination rights for trustees and funding was made optional for independent churches through Cooperative Program giving.9 That plan was reevaluated as
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scheduled in 1985, when the convention was unable to pass a proposal to allow the
university more latitude with the Board of Trustees.10 The year’s financial numbers
suggested the mounting problem. In the regular report by Wake Forest to the Convention
for 1985, the university reports that giving by Baptist churches amounted to only 4.2
percent of giving for the year, which equated to 0.37 percent of the university’s budget for
the following year.11 Control over two-thirds of the Board of Trustees was disproportionate
for the level of financial support the state’s Baptist churches provided.
This cycle of relationship-defining activity reached its conclusion in 1986 when a
different kind of agreement was reached that established a “fraternal relationship” between
the university and the State Convention. When the Convention had been unable to reach
agreement in 1985, the university’s Board of Trustees defined a mechanism for self-control
and asserted its desire to maintain its Baptist heritage and relationship with the
Convention.12 The State Convention’s Council on Christian Higher Education proposed the “fraternal relationship” to the Convention of 1986. The substantial changes between
the “covenant relationship” and the proposed “fraternal relationship” were self-control for
the university’s trustees and the end of Cooperative Program giving to the university.
Though the looming possibility was not mentioned in the proposal to the convention, the
convention president noted that “the alternative would be court action to bring about an autonomous board of directors for Wake Forest University, [and] that such suit had not been threatened but, in his opinion, would come.” The resolution passed with 81 percent of the vote.13
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So far, Wake Forest’s story was very similar to that of other denominational colleges
and universities. The Convention was aware that, at its own request, the university had enlarged its constituency to reach outside North Carolina and to people of diverse religious backgrounds.14 In order to represent and serve this broader range of people, the university
needed a more diverse board of trustees, and the level of institutional connection that had
existed up until that time no longer made sense. But the changes did not end in 1986.
In 1997, another evolution in the relationship between the university and the
convention began, this time initiated by the convention. After applauding a state initiative
to combat underage drinking, a convention member made a motion to direct the
convention’s Council on Christian Higher Education to study the fraternal relationship
with Wake Forest University because the university was selling alcohol on campus.15 At the next year’s convention, after conversations with university leadership and at least one trustee, the convention toned down its rhetoric in 1998. The proposed resolution affirmed North Carolina colleges which prohibit the sale of alcohol on campus and encouraged other institutions to adopt such policies. No mention of Wake Forest was made in the resolution, although the discussion made clear that Wake Forest’s policy was the reason for the rule.16
The alcohol question had not been fully resolved when the university outraged
some members of the convention in 1999 by failing to prohibit use of Wait Chapel for a
homosexual union service. Not willing to remove the university’s name from the constitution as requested by some convention “messengers,” the convention’s executive
committee proposed that Wake Forest be named a “historical educational institution,”
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limiting funding to scholarships for Baptist students and removing Wake Forest from its
non-voting seat on the Council on Christian Higher Education. The accompanying
proposal for a constitutional amendment was amended, then failed to pass.17 The convention addressed the issue again the following year and approved the executive committee’s motion to sever funding ties (except for Baptist student scholarships) and remove Wake Forest from its seat on the Council on Christian Higher Education. In
2000, Meredith College was also included in the motion, so the two schools were moved to
“historical relationship” status together.18
A New Divinity School During almost exactly the same period of time the convention was reevaluating ties
with the university, planning for a new divinity school gathered steam at Wake Forest
University. The denominational heritage of the new school was clear from the beginning—
the first gift, $500, came from First Baptist Church in New Bern, North Carolina—but the
connection was limited to a claim of heritage: the school calls itself the first university-
based seminary in the United States to begin without an institutional denominational
connection.19
Explaining this connection with Baptists and ecumenical orientation became one
of the dean’s central tasks. In his inaugural convocation address, Bill Leonard deflected
questions about denomination orientation, unwilling to embrace terms like “non-
denominational” or “post-denominational,” although the dean did give a telling nod to one joke about the school: “one wag suggested we are pan-denominational—we’d support
any denomination that would pan out for us.” His response to the joke, and the
overwhelming tone of the university’s public presentation of the divinity school, was that it
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would seek to prepare students for a world where denomination questions were becoming more frequent.20
Questions about the divinity school’s denominational orientation received reactions from other seminaries that mirrored the reactions from the Baptist Convention to the university as a whole. In a wire service article carried by the Christian Century, Duke
Divinity School dean L. Gregory Jones said the hype about post-denominationalism is premature: “there’s a hunger for roots that is causing people to return to the particularities of denominational traditions.”21 The implication of the responses from Wake Forest’s historical tradition and from other academics is that the university stands alone on matters of religion, reaping praise when its approach is successful but unable to shift blame or fall back on traditional constituencies when times are rough.
Monks, Moyers, the Cardinal, and a Snake-Handler While the official opening of the divinity school in 1999 was a significant historical event in the life of Wake Forest University, students were caught up in other controversies on campus, and gave only passing notice to the new school.22 The celebration of a theme year geared to the study of religion garnered much more attention from the university community-at-large. The “Year of Religion in American Life” was celebrated in the fall of
1997 and spring of 1998. It was the second theme year the university celebrated, following the “Year of the Arts” in the 1996-1997 academic year. The Durham Herald-Sun reported that the first month of the school year would include “a Buddhist monk, a rabbi and an
Appalachian snake handler” as the university dealt with “America's three-century struggle with religious pluralism.”23
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The Herald-Sun also notes that religious pluralism was not embraced by the entire campus. While a Buddhist monk was lecturing on campus, a conservative Christian group invited a convert from Buddhism to Christianity to speak, dovetailing group goals with the
university’s effort.24 Some of the differences in institutional statements about religion and
the pervasive sense of religion among the campus community become clear with this
evidence: in this case both existed and conflicted, albeit amicably.
The identity of the speakers themselves is something of a banal point, but for two
reasons they deserve attention in the context of this paper. Headlining speakers for the
year included Jewish author Rabbi Harold Kushner, Baptist sociologist and pastor Tony
Campolo, Baptist journalist Bill Moyers, and Francis Cardinal Arinze, President of the
Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. First, note that these speakers did
not appear at Wake Forest because it is a North Carolina Baptist school, but rather because
it is a nationally recognized university. The ability to bring together several highly
renowned individuals in a short period of time is an indication of the school’s transition
from Baptist college to independent university. Perhaps more importantly, though, these
speakers point to a triple goal of fostering diversity (Kushner and Arinze), recognizing
heritage (Campolo and Moyers), and exploring the relevance of religion to mainstream
American culture (Kushner and Moyers).25
Holding Steady: Wake Forest’s Motivations What motivates this growth in institutional religious activity despite a deepening
divide between the university and North Carolina Baptists? Caught in the midst of a battle
between conservatives and liberals for control of the Baptist name and identity, Wake
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Forest administration and faculty have decided to let traditional Baptist principles shape
the school’s mission without letting institutional Baptist connections limit religious and
educational mission. It is theological and education goals that necessitate the separation
from Baptist denominational structures.
An effort to be more baptist than the Baptists is especially apparent in the
promotional material for the divinity school. The history of the school shared on its
website refers to two of the most prominent Baptists in North Carolina history, Samuel
Wait and Thomas Meredith. Meredith, later founder of the Biblical Recorder and early
Baptist organizer, gave Wait a letter of recommendation when he arrived in North
Carolina. Use of Meredith’s familiar name has a similar function for the Wake Forest
Divinity School, demonstrating its roots in the state’s Baptist history. Meredith and
Samuel Wait, who was the first principal of Wake Forest’s predecessor institution, founded
the predecessor organization to the Baptist State Convention primarily to channel money
to education and missionary efforts. In the modest-length document, “Baptist” appears 18
times (most often in relation to churches or organizations with the word in their name),
but Wait’s name (not including pronoun references) appears 23 times. The divinity school
identifies itself with Baptist people and Baptist principles, but “Baptist” as a
denominational structure is only mentioned once, and that to report that Wake Forest was
opened “in cooperation with” the state convention’s predecessor organization.26
General theories, especially Cherry’s, would also suggest that the school desired to
educate professionals and remain culturally relevant: institutional Baptist connections could impede the process of recruiting and placing the best students. This was one of my
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initial hypotheses, but I determined that it was not helpful for explaining the data at Wake
Forest in the 1990s. If the time period is extended five or six years earlier, a different
picture emerges. It was during the mid 1980s that Wake Forest was asserting independence from the Baptist State Convention and seeking to elect its own trustees.
Language of the school and the convention at that time suggested a need for the university
to be independent to serve its enlarged constituency in order to be more effective at fund-
raising and to train students for life in an increasingly pluralistic society.27 The data does
not support a claim that the second set of divisions between the convention and the school in the late 1990s had anything to do with professionalism.
Summary and Conclusions In the final decade of the twentieth century, Wake Forest University completed its
transition from its historical status as a North Carolina Baptist college to its goal of recognition as a national university. Financial and administrative connections with the
North Carolina Baptist State Convention were part of the cost of this transition. The State
Convention severed the last significant connections when they no longer wanted to claim the institution that Wake Forest had become, but by no means had religion or even Baptist
heritage become taboo for the university. The decade that saw the school’s transition to
national university status also saw its celebration of a “Year of Religion in American Life”
and the fulfillment of its founders’ earliest dreams when the university opened a divinity
school in 1999.
The 169th Annual of the Baptist State Convention records, in what is presumably
uncharacteristic faithfulness to the original speaker’s words, that a messenger argued in
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1999 that the Convention and Wake Forest were like “a mother and child, saying the
mother had not been able to whip the child into submission; therefore she would disinherit the child.” He did not want to see the two separate, because “Wake Forest is the
Convention’s baby, like it or not, and the Convention is the baby’s mama.”28 If that point
is accepted, it would be hard to call the trend at Wake Forest in the 1990s anything other than secularization. But, as the university gently reminds website visitors, the Baptist State
Convention and Wake Forest University were born at nearly the same time.29 If the
university’s implied point that the convention and the school are siblings is accepted, then
a more complicated set of trends in official religion, religious teaching and practice, and
spiritualization emerges.
This test case provides evidence for an alternative to secularization. Wake Forest
does not see itself as having moved away from Baptists, but rather having remained firmly
planted in its Baptist heritage as denominational structures have shifted away from those
foundations. The story has broad implications, informing our understanding of
institutions struggling with increasingly flexible denominational identities. Wake Forest is
unique for the increase in official religion—institutional language and programming that is
religious in nature—and has a sufficient and expected level of participation in the practice
and study of religion, but observation of Wake Forest is most instructive because it is a
place where secularization has not occurred in the school’s environment or in the response
to official religion. Wake Forest provides a context for redefining secularization even as it
spiritualizes itself.
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Notes
1 Bill J. Leonard, “‘Not Instruction, but Provocation’: Doing Theology at a New Divinity School” Wake Forest University Divinity School, Oct 12, 1999
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15 Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Annual of the 167th Session of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (Winston-Salem, North Carolina, November 10-12, 1997), 67-68. 16 Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Annual of the 168th Session of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (Winston-Salem, North Carolina, November 9-11, 1998), 66. Presentations on the convention floor also made it clear that the convention benefited substantially from its fraternal relationship with Wake Forest (cf. p. 61). 17 Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Annual of the 170th Session of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (Winston-Salem, North Carolina, November 13-14, 2000), 92-96 and 99. 18 Steve DeVane, “BSC ends ties with WFU, Meredith” Biblical Recorder (Friday, Nov 16, 2001)
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29 Wake Forest University, “The Divinity School at Wake Forest University | About the School”
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