Fading Big Five

From the 1930s until the turbulent 1960s, a handful of elite seminaries exerted an all-powerful influence on American Protestantism. The liberal religious voice of the Establishment, they drew unique strength from their ties with great universities and remained proudly free of control by the denominations that eagerly hired their graduates. With wide control over the production of theological doctorates, they dominated church life and thought.

No longer. A critical Rockefeller Foundation report to be issued this week documents the fading church-leadership role of the Big Five which have trained a majority of the nation's non-Catholic seminary teachers with American doctorates: the divinity schools at Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Vanderbilt, and New York's Union Theological Seminary. When they and two others* approached the foundation in 1973 about grants, it ordered up instead a thorough study of the seminaries by Theologian George Lindbeck--himself an alumnus of Yale Divinity, where he now teaches--in collaboration with Harvard Social Scientists Karl Deutsch and Nathan Glazer.

Not that the Big Five are losing status within the universities. They are, in fact, gaining it as they move from training for the ministry toward academic study about religion. This swing to "religious studies,'' the report states, is the biggest change in religious higher education since separate divinity schools arose early in the 19th century.

However, this new emphasis has greatly widened the gap between their once primary clients, the churches, and the Big Five. At one time, four-fifths of their graduates with the basic divinity degree went into church jobs or further study of religion; now less than half do. A surprising number simply drop out of organized religion--a defection that may reflect loss of faith and the shrinkage of the job market as the liberal Protestant churches continue their decline in membership. (Since 1966 the United Methodist, United Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches and the United Church of Christ have lost a total of 2.4 million members.) Meanwhile, the more conservative independent Evangelical schools and church-run seminaries are growing in size and prestige, though the report finds that the latter too are absorbing the "religious studies" approach.

Freer Sex. The clergymen still turned out by the Big Five, says the report, go through training that has lost much of its onetime scholarly rigor. Elective courses have proliferated as the schools try to please students with incoherent vocational goals. At the same time, language requirements and basic required courses in the Bible, church history and doctrine have vanished. Students learn a little about a lot, but never master any one religious tradition. The schools provide "general education for those interested in a diffuse variety of religious studies, personal quests for the meaning of life, social activism and pastorally oriented behavioral science."

The scene has also changed drastically. The student body is no longer a community, but "an unsorted collection of groups and individuals." With the "radical decline" in chapel attendance at seminaries, students only rarely worship together. "Manners," says the report, "are more relaxed, sex freer, and acquaintance with drugs often more than theoretical."

A stiff dosage of reform is the remedy prescribed by the authors of the report. They call for a restoration of abandoned scholarly discipline, and "particularism"--commitment to perpetuation of specific traditions. They also urge more "pluralism" to give representation in the Big Five to such hitherto missing religious groups as the rising "conservative Evangelicals," who now make up roughly half of U.S. Protestantism.

Seminary leaders who saw earlier drafts of the report are understandably unenthusiastic, though Harvard Dean Krister Stendahl himself is critical of bland "university theology" that has no roots in religious communities. Lindbeck's Yale boss, Dean Colin Williams, and Vanderbilt's Dean Sallie TeSelle both claim that their schools are striving to preserve various traditions and train church leaders. As for Chicago's Associate Dean Martin Marty, he says his school has little interest in training ministers and thinks his friend Lindbeck "is a little too mournful about the shattering of the stained-glass windows of the suburban churches of the '50s."

* Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, set up by nine church-run seminaries, and Notre Dame's theology department. They were studied also, but the report largely applies to the Big Five.

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