Christianity at Harvard

Ears around Harvard Yard were tuned to Nathan Pusey's baccalaureate address last week with more attention than is usually accorded to a college president on such a day. Reason: Pusey was talking religion, and these days religious questions are sweeping the Cambridge campus with what Pusey himself called cyclone force. The controversy reached a peak over the issue of whether Memorial Church, dedicated to the memory of Harvard's dead in World Wars I and II, should be used for non-Christian marriage and funeral ceremonies (TIME, May 5).

During the course of this controversy, the Rev. Dr. George A. Buttrick, Preacher to the University, suffered vicious attacks for antiSemitism, launched against him not so much by Jews as by those who care neither for the religion of Christ nor Moses. No Christian in the land could have less deserved these attacks than Dr. Buttrick, for Dr. Buttrick is as tolerant in his personal relations as he is eloquent in the pulpit. But behind the "Mem Church" uproar lay a deeper issue that divided a university with a strong secular tradition, fostered, among other Harvard presidents, by Unitarian Charles W. Eliot (1869-1909), Unitarian Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1909-1933), Scientist James B. Conant (1933-1953). The issue, whose significance goes far beyond Harvard: How religious can a secular university be?

Secular Paradise. The disparity of faiths and backgrounds that makes it hard for Harvard students to worship together, said President Pusey in his baccalaureate speech, "promises to grow worse rather than better in the years to come." But religion in a secular university confronts a far more significant difficulty: "the advance of secularization." Despite academically polite language, Pusey took a sharply critical look at this "way of life which . . . proceeds deliberately without concern for religion." So great have been the successes of secularism that it "has itself become a faith and raised a hope that man can through his own efforts--without God--solve all the remaining problems which stand between him and a secular paradise on earth."

Secularism, says Pusey, forms a new kind of fundamentalism whose "temples may be laboratories and factories, perhaps also libraries ... Its noxious influence--noxious I believe to spirit, imagination and to mind--works among us almost unopposed." The result, says Pusey, is a world in which the words of Educator Sir Walter Moberly are increasingly true: " 'Some think God exists, some think not, some think it is impossible to tell, and the impression grows that it does not matter.' "

The Most Important. But it does matter, Pusey insists. The most important questions are not the secular ones, but "the questions which religion answers for her believers by supplying meaning to life, by kindling hope, and by giving through faith in God a basis for ethical behavior."

Then Pusey added one of his careful qualifications: "[If] Harvard has helped you to find a meaning and a center for your life . . . outside religion," he told the graduating students, "there can be no fault in that. Agnosticism can be an honest and, at least in the face of false gods, an entirely healthy state of mind." But, added Pusey, the evidence shows that agnosticism will not work for man in the long run, "for trust we must in someone or something, surely, for our spiritual and mental health, not merely in ourselves. The final answer must, we hope, be God."

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