Prologue I
Prologue I, God and Buckley at Yale (1951); Prologue II, Henry Sloan Coffin’s Yale (1897); Prologue III, Yale Embattled: Noah Porter versus William Graham Sumner (1880). Three historical vignettes in reverse historical order suggest changing stages regarding how Christianity might be related to a modern university. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) challenged the university’s claims to be Christian. Defenders of Yale dismissed any anti-Christian influences in the curriculum as matters of academic freedom and pointed to the extracurricular religious influences at the university. When William Sloan Coffin (’97), who chaired a special committee to answer Buckley, was a student, a broad character-oriented Protestantism held a respected place among Yale students and faculty. Going back to 1880, though, it was no longer possible for the Yale President to insist on Christian teaching, as President Noah Porter discovered in his efforts to restrict the teachings of Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner. Despite the imminent disappearance of explicit Christian influences in public culture, it was possible with the broadened definition of religion to see the situation as the spread of religious enlightenment.