Parallelism of U.S. Religious Trends and Christian Higher Education Enrollment from the 1960’s through 2001

During the 20^th century the course of the religiously-affiliated college has taken two basic paths. The first is the direction of liberalism where the institutional mission and curriculum become more integrated with emergent trends occurring in society. This trend lends itself to the disengagement of parent religious organizations from their educational institutions and a decrease in the focus of and marginalization of religion in higher education. The other direction takes a distinctly opposite path in the direction of often radical conservatism. This direction is built on the assumption that a secular society needs to have grounding in religious, and specifically, evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity.

The secularizing direction means that the religiously-affiliated institution loses its distinctiveness and even detaches itself from its religious and theological base. Institutions more susceptible to the force of liberalization are the mainline Protestant colleges and the Catholic universities. The effect of secularization seems to win out when a secularized liberal education is accommodated into the mission and curriculum of the institution. This story has been cited by numerous authors in stark relief and maps out the journey of liberalization into the 21^st century (Burtchaell, 1998; Gleason, 1995; Marsden & Longfield, 1992; Marsden, 1994; O’Brien, 1994; Reuben, 1996; Sloan, 1994; Veysey, 1965).

The more conservative direction focuses on two branches of higher education that are confident in maintaining their commitment to their religious calling. These are the “militant” fundamentalist colleges that are more sectarian in nature and the evangelical colleges and universities that come from a more open position with respect to society at large. This tale has not been told to the same detail as the disengagement of the religiously-affiliated college, but its features have been mapped out quite well (Carlberg, 2002; Schultze, 1993; Hamilton, 2005). The impulse to sectarianism and radically conservative evangelicalism in contention with the more politicized representation from the New Christian Right is evident in this story. Institutions on both sides of fundamentalism in this story take a far more internally consistent understanding of their unique religious mission certainly than the path of secularization of other institutions – one side to redeem the world from sin, and the other side to redeem the nation’s fallen political and moral institutions.

In between these largely theological-historical narratives is a spate of research that has been done on the social changes occurring in the post-WWII baby boom generation and the concurrent changes in value orientation of students from the student movement through the renewed conservativism in the early 1980’s which we will see below. The problem with both the study of the religiously-affiliated college and the social and cultural trends in the 20^th century that elicited an apparent shift in patterns of religious behavior is that the research has not been linked or sufficiently related. What is needed is a more acute contextualization of the stagnation and even decline of the mainline denominationally-affiliated institutions and the more recent rise in the enrollment and popularity of the more conservative Christian colleges – particularly in the cases of those member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). In the following, I will place the trends in religiously-affiliated college enrollment in this context and show that both the liberal stagnation and conservative “renaissance” not only point to, but match the very clear trends in liberal and conservative social forces in the latter half of the 20^th century. Moreover, the analysis will show that despite the narratives that seem to indicate an ultimate demise for religiously-affiliated higher education, the trends in higher education enrollment and in religiosity both foreshadow a far more optimistic outlook. This will provide fertile ground for further research in enrollment trends for plotting the strategies of response for those mainline liberal religiously-affiliated colleges, and for broader data analysis and research on enrollment trends in the evangelical Christian colleges.

Reviewing numerous studies from the 1950’s through the mid 1990’s for both baby boomer religiosity and changes in student values reveals a sophisticated set of trend analyses that also run parallel to behaviors in both the liberal and conservative religiously-affiliated institutions. While research in the religiously-affiliated college has focused largely on case studies that re-create the narratives of a handful of religiously-affiliated colleges and universitites, these studies are rarely, if ever, linked to broader trends in religiosity.

Mainline Decline and Evangelical Revival

Perhaps the most extensive of the recent studies focusing on the disengagement of once religiously-affiliated colleges from their church affiliations is James Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (1998). This comprehensive study traces the narratives of 16 religiously-affiliated colleges and universities that have severed there ties from the religious bodies that formed them. Burtchaell masterfully constructs these narratives across denominational boundaries. While he admits the shortcoming in his sample are those traditions he excluded (i.e. Mennonites, Quakers, Mormons, etc.) his study offers a very detailed sample of religiously-affiliated schools selected from each of the major Protestant denominations. Burtchaell closes the volume by noting causes for the simultaneous decline of religious affiliation and heightened secularization in these schools. The argument is that the connection these schools had with the religious traditions was less an intentional bond but was rather “circumstantial and indirect” and so they were more susceptible to influence from the economic and social forces that impinged upon them (Burtchaell, 1998, p. 822). Thus the external and internal factors that prompted the “dying of the light”, as he describes it, were able to wield considerable mitigating influence on an already relatively weak bond.

This tome follows in the path of and arguably authenticates several other studies that also eulogize religiously-affiliated higher education due to the same weakened bond. Laurence Veysey in his seminal work The Emergence of the American University (1965) recounts the secular impulse in the twilight of the classical curriculum at the close of the 19^th century with the elective curriculum as advanced by Charles Eliot at Harvard, the surge of the German research model in the founding of universities such as Johns Hopkins, and the growing need of utilitarian purpose following in the path of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. The broadening and influence of research and the secular curriculum had a profound effect on the purpose and mission of higher education in the United States. As state universities became larger and more influential in this regard, the fate of not only the religiously-affiliated curriculum, but also the liberal-arts came under fire as portents of doom rose to the surface.

Perhaps a logical conclusion to Vesey’s account of the shift in higher education to the utilitarian research-based curriculum is Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University (2001). Here Kerr notes the ultimate fallout of the relationship between teaching and research is that the undergraduate experience of students may suffer. From Kerr’s perspective at the University of California, it did suffer as the university became increasingly differentiated and fragmented into departments with often very different curricular and organizational goals. However, reforming the teaching duties of faculty in the face of external pressures such as an influx of new students and rapid growth following the GI Bill and the increased flow of research dollars and the university as “instrument of national purpose” created an imbalance between teaching and research. This imbalance found several methods of resolution that Kerr notes throughout his book. One resolution was for faculty to pay more attention to undergraduate education and revert back to a pseudo in loco parentis that was, for all intents and purposes removed from the faculty profession toward the close of the 19^th century. “The changes of the 1870’s liberated faculty members from in loco parentis and those of the 1960’s enslaved them again. It was the students of the 1960’s who wanted in loco parentis in terms of personal attention but hated it in terms of impersonal rules enforced by the dean of students- the form it had to become in the 1870’s” (Kerr, 2001, p. 127).

Another means of student transformation is the role of protest and reform from within student organizations. Students are confronted by a range of choices in the multiversity and have as their responsibility to elect a program of study wisely. Moored in a pluralistic environment, the students initiated a counter-revolt against the faculty. They “were beginning to visualize themselves as a ‘lumpen proletariat’ – or, in a more modern terminology, as prisoners in the campus ghetto; and a few students wanted even then to make the campus a ‘fortress’ from which society might be attacked” (Kerr, 2001, p. 101). Kerr later notes that his original supposition that these revolts would be due to student reaction against the increased faculty focus on research rather than on the education of students turned out to be a result of students “turning their interests to external interests specifically to civil rights and the war in Vietnam” (Kerr, 2001, p. 205). As we will see, the data shows that the student protests were most likely not a result of an externalization of frustration at the university curriculum, but were the result of several related factors that all are related to the religious and political environment at the time – even at Kerr’s own U Cal Berkeley.

An argument that goes in the opposite direction of suggesting a dearth of interest in religiously-affiliated higher education is the level of distinctiveness a religiously-affiliated college has in the higher education marketplace. George Marsden, in The Secularization of the Academy (1992), and then in his more comprehensive work The Soul of the American University (1994), argues that the growing influence of liberal theology in the church-related academy watered down the distinctive nature of Christian and tradition-based education. Arguing a similar case from philosophical lines, Eric O. Springstead (1991) argues that the religious commitments of denominationally-affiliated colleges are often window dressing for aims closer to secular liberalism. That the distinction between the two governing philosophies is not emphasized in the curriculum attenuates religious ties even though the image of the college may be emphatic in its ties to a religious ideal. The resulting curriculum is rooted in individual liberalism and thus functions as a means for the student to achieve individual vocational ends. Referring to de Toqueville, Springstead argues further that the danger in eliminating the tension between religious and secular ideals is a homogenous culture where real individuality is effectively lost. The goal of the religiously-affiliated college is thus to maintain its distinctive character and promote a value base rooted in the religious tradition. Tillman (1999) also argues that there is a paradox between maintaining academic freedom and a level of religious distinctiveness between “academic epistemology” and “traditional religious epistemology”. Once again there is a connection between values and the religious tradition that is argued as a means to offer a unique educational experience.

In principle, Springstead and Tillman both raise a philosophical concern that may indeed be true, but offer no empirical evidence to verify the arguments. In the case of Tillman’s argument such epistemological theories such as “critical realism” (see van Huyssteen, 1998) and a conversation with critical theory are simply ignored which offers a highly probably solution to the epistemological problem that he raises (see Tatusko, 2005). Mannoia (2000) speaks to this issue directly though his understanding of “critical commitment”. Aside from these theoretical problems the objective data resources are missing to verify if this may be a problem for religiously-affiliated higher education. In other words, if there is an epistemological problem, what is its effect on students and does it effect overall enrollment and religiosity trends?

Others have also advanced the argument for distinctiveness in an effort to re-imagine the purpose, integrity and market-share for religiously-affiliated private higher education. Hypothesizing that the theological ties an institution has may not be as vital for a liberal arts curriculum, Allen Fisher (1995) hypothesizes that “Presbyterian colleges would not be significantly different from the unaffiliated colleges in their on moral or “values” concerns in the curriculum…” (p. 32). The sample for the study focused on the curriculum of four year colleges as indicated by reference materials published between 1987 and 1991 from the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the Christian College Coalition, and college guides from the American Council on Education and Macmillan. The academic curriculum was targeted as a college’s “most significant statement about what it seeks to teach its students” (1995, p. 33-34). The conclusion of this study shows that while evangelical colleges retain a strong link between religion and moral values in the curriculum, that Presbyterian colleges that do not offer required courses in religion are in fact less likely to have a required nonreligious moral values course than religiously unaffiliated liberal arts colleges. Albrecht and Heaton (1984) further argue a negative relationship between the level of education and religious commitment. This seems to validate the claims that liberalizing theological and traditional commitments leads ultimately to the weakening of ties between a college and its religious affiliation. Finally, James Mannoia Jr. (2000) argues that higher education informed by the Christian critical thought lends itself to a curriculum devoted to “critical commitment” which splits the difference between rigid and often exclusionary dogmatism and relativism that has no discernable foundations. While the liberal arts is designed to foster critical thinking, a Christian liberal arts education meets the goal of critical commitment with a readily available philosophical structure to serve as a foundation (Mannoia, 2000).

Douglas Sloan in Faith and Knowledge (1994) argues that the neo-Orthodox project of reinvigorating Christian education in a way to split the difference between rigid orthodoxy and secularism had only a momentary level of success, but its purchases on modern culture and social action in the late 1960’s again participated in the waning of the religious-affiliated education’s distinctive contribution to the higher education market. The initial goal of this project was to enable a commitment to religious tradition while taking seriously the social and cultural contexts and the ideals of openness and democracy. But rather than offering a method to combine the validity of qualitative theological thought with the trend toward empirically-based quantitative research, these important Protestant theologians ended up constructing a “two-sphere” approach that placed empirically-based knowledge as predominate to subjectively formed faith-based knowledge. The result was an undermining of the task they originally set out to accomplish resulting in the increased secularization of the academy. Once again, the distinctiveness of the educational experience is related to the level of commitment a given institution has with its tradition and theological orthodoxy.

While these studies emphasize the decline of the religiously-affiliated college from the Protestant side, Catholic higher education also has its share of dystopian oracles. Philip Gleason in Contending with Modernity (1995) traces and portends the decline of neo-Thomism as a guiding principle in Catholic higher education and David O’Brien (1994), albeit less pessimistically though in a similar vein with Mardsen, accounts the church’s “Americanization” calling into question the distinct identity of the church-affiliated college.

On the surface, the narrative of the religiously-affiliated college seems to be complete. The overwhelming opinion of these authors is that an already attenuated relationship cannot possibly endure the pressures from external market forces that bear upon institutional funding and continued utilitarian and professional emphases on higher education through its large research institutions. Moreover, the challenge of a religiously-affiliated institution also rests on how well it can respond to an increasingly pluralistic environment where any exclusive claims to truth are suspect and liberal theology as an alternative framework will ultimately lead to the secularization of that school and so, will ultimately lead to its dismounting from its religious morays. The other option, it seems is to harden claims to truth and become sectarian in essence not unlike Bob Jones University or Oral Roberts University. If the story is told this way, in order for a religiously-affiliated college to provide a distinct voice in the higher education market, the level of sectarianism it can achieve may determine how distinct an experience it can provide. However, these sources provide no empirical data to confirm that these trends are true or that they exist beyond the case studies that are emphasized.

Even as the sources of this decline in the mainline liberal denominational affiliations came to a head in the 1960’s with the boon of religious pluralism combined with liberal political activism, a new version of Christian higher education was waiting in the wings of a subculture more akin to the spike in religiosity in the 1950’s. This movement would later gain steam in the 1970’s with the evangelical backlash against the Carter administration on the one hand and the mobilization of the New Right through social issues such as abortion and the ERA (Himmelstein, 1990).

Contrary to the narrative of affiliation decline in mainline Protestant affiliated colleges, this path takes on a tone of renaissance and growth in more traditional religious perspectives. This growth is evidenced in not only enrollment trends particularly in the 1980’s through the 1990’s, but it also comes in the form of new college development and the formation of the Council for Christian Colleges in Universities (CCCU) – a distinctly evangelical organization body – that formed in 1976. Concurrently, Regents University begun in 1976 through the televised ministry of Pat Robertson’s CBN and Liberty College founded in 1971 through the support of Jerry Falwell’s ministry highlight the stronghold of the more conservative, evangelical end of the spectrum. NCES data and data gathered from the CCCU reveal this conservative trend. The net increase in enrollments from 1980 to 2001 was 31.67% for all institutions, 39.98% for private institutions, and a dramatic increase of 54.22% for all religiously-affiliated colleges (NCES, Table 182). Data collected from the CCCU shows a 36.9% increase in enrollment between 1990 and 1998 and an increase of 47.36% in FTE enrollment in the same period (CCCU). In contrast, all other religiously-affiliated institutions saw an increase of 15.45% total enrollment for the same period. However, the data for CCCU does not carry into 2001 where the enrollments in all other religiously-affiliated institutions jumped another 5.27% between 1998 and 2001. The enrollment numbers for CCCU member institutions are higher than both data for all higher education enrollments in the period (4.98%) and all private institutions (13.29%) (NCES, Table 182).

Hinted at in the data above is that the major mainline denominations actually increased in the period from 1980 to 2001 at a rate higher than other colleges – both public and private. In this longer period of time, all religiously-affiliated colleges increased in attendance a dramatic 54.22% which greatly outweighs all private institutions (39.98%) and all combined institutions (31.67%) (NCES, Table 182). Presbyterian enrollment increased in this period a staggering 75% with most of the increase occurring between 1980 and 1990 (64.81%) after which the increase declined sharply and then seems to have leveled off slightly to about 3.6% between 1990 and 2001. Catholic, Methodist and Baptist colleges all follow the same pattern. While these are normally associated with the mainline, it can be slightly misleading since the data collected by the CCCU representative of its member institutions has a great deal of overlap with many Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian institutions. We cannot be sure if the relative increase in enrollment is due to a conservative element. Teasing out the impact of the CCCU institutions on overall religiously-affiliated colleges against specific denominations would require more specific data and a more nuanced regressive analysis to isolate the variance. What we can be quite sure of is that there was a dramatic spike in enrollment in religiously-affiliated higher education in the 1980’s that outpaced the growth of both private higher education and higher education in general. For the purposes of this paper, these data do illustrate important trends in religiosity during the 1980’s that in many ways carried out the conservative religious agenda that had gained quite a bit of steam coming out of the 1970’s.

For the remainder of this paper, I will focus on the conditions that shaped this trend. This analysis will contextualize the decline and rise of religiously-affiliated higher education and identify a few very clear signals that indicate a backswing against the narrative of disengagement that Burtchaell invokes through his meticulous case narratives of key universities that followed this pattern.

The 20^th Century “Dip”

As the foregoing studies on religiosity to which I will refer indicate, church attendance has been a standard variable in determining overall religiosity for quite some time. This is largely based on the majority percentage of Americans that affiliate themselves with some Christian denomination. While there are other variables that can be indicators of religiosity this one has claimed the most statistical significance (see Wuthnow, 1978). Research clearly shows that after a spike in church attendance during the 1950’s, there was an equally sharp decline in the 1960’s and 1970’s followed by an equally sharp rise in the late 1970’s and through the 1980’s. Higher education follows a similar pattern. Douglas Sloan notes, “In the five years between 1964 and 1969 religious course enrollments in private, nondenominational colleges and universities increased by 45 percent. In public institutions, however, the increase in religious enrollments was a remarkable 150 percent” (Sloan, 1994, 88). Sloan focuses his work on the surge and demise of what he calls the “theological renaissance” of the 60’s which occurred in a hotbed of activity from the development of religious studies in the university, the rapid growth in higher education enrollments along with massification of education access through the GI bill among other things, and the increase in dialogue between religion and other disciplines. However, as Sloan notes, “that nature and history are both given and made; that action, thought, and imagination play no less a role in shaping the one as the other; that ethics and epistemology are intricately and inseparably intertwined and can only artificially be separated – nothing of this was considered. The great split between nature and history, and finally, therefore, between knowledge and faith continued, and, as ever, to the detriment of the faith side of the relationship” (1994, p. 200). While this describes the “dip” in largely epistemological terms, it does not take into account the sociological conditions of the baby-boom generation, nor does it take into account the subsequent rise in religiously-affiliated education and the influence of conservatives in the 1980’s through the 1990’s surge in evangelical college enrollment. It is to these two areas that I now turn.

The Big Organized Religion Chill

The 1960’s have been characterized in the popular mindset as a time of moral rebellion against the conformity and fear wrought by the 1950’s to secular attitudes and preferences. This rebellion found its expression in the foment of student protests, mind-altering drugs, and rock and roll music for what came to be known at the Woodstock generation. In many cases this may be true depending on where one was at the time. But the question is whether or not these kinds of experiences defined a majority of those coming of age in the 1960’s and 1970’s. What is evident is a decline in more traditional religious underpinnings that flew in the face of the mainline denominations that had anchored the country for so many decades in its history.

Robert Wuthnow looked at this trend in the 1960’s along with the apparent rise in religious experimentation (1978). From the data that was available, there indeed was a decline in church attendance from 49% in the mid-fifties down to about 40% in 1974 (Wuthnow, 1978, p. 122). Ruling out influences such as modernization, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and ecumenism, Wuthnow focuses on the emergent counter-culture and employs Manheim’s theory of generation units to explain why this movement carried so much weight in its effects. The counter-culture of the 1960’s in effect established its own set of symbols and norms – its own cultural consciousness – and grounded the political aspirations of the generation in terms of developing a “new consciousness” that would revolutionize society and culture in the United States. He then advances five hypotheses for why this consciousness movement took hold resulting in the shift of religious engagement of the culture. Among them are increased secularization, cross-sectional age differences in religious behavior among different age cohorts, and countercultural involvements by different cohorts (Wuthnow, 1978, p. 130).

A crucial assumption that is made here regarding the decline of more traditional forms of religions behavior such as mainline denominational worship attendance, is that the rate of attendance in the 1950’s was a baseline for normal attendance rates. Further the study assumes that the decline in church attendance in the younger cohorts at the time as a result of joining subcultural movements outweighed the cohorts that apparently did not change in their religious behavior. Such cohort analysis is also wrought with problems since in this study the sample is admittedly limited in its strong favoritism to data gathered in the Bay area of northern California (see also Chaves, 1989; Miller & Nakamura, 1996). Moreover, Wuthnow’s “consciousness reformation” hypothesis – that the movement of this cohort to new religious movements and away from traditional and mainline religion – is rooted in the assumption that personal desire that is reinforced by the rewards of membership into the subculture.

Against this theory, Sherkat (1998) argues that there is a strong relationship between religious schemata in which one is raised as a youth and those in which one operates as an adult. “(T)raditional agents of socialization have a strong and lasting impact on religious beliefs over the early life course. Parents’ religious beliefs and participation have a significant impact on their children’s beliefs and behaviors in 1965” (Sherkat, 1998, p. 1101). Therefore, it is unlikely that mere choice of alternative cultures was the primary reason for youths in the 60’s joining such a radical departures from the traditional mores in which they were raised as youths. This is but one significant blow to the idea that mere generational differences can predict religious behavior among different age cohorts.

Wuthnow was writing and using data that predated the conservativism that was soon to boom in the 1980’s. This demonstrates the need for more longitudinal analyses to understand the scope of a given trend. The most likely explanation for this trend of decline has to do with the various influences on youth at this time including not only the counter-culture, but also the liberalizing effects of higher education. Hence, the cognitive and social predilections of the youth life-cycle coupled with the conditions of the time becomes the prominent cause for both the counter-culture and for the move away from traditional religious practice (Clydesdale, 1997; Firebaugh & Harley, Hout & Greeley, 1987; 1991; Ploch & Hastings, 1994; Roozen & McKinney, 1990; Willits & Crider, 1989). Jelen (1990) further argues that among evangelicals, between 1973 and 1987, the stable correlation between age and orthodoxy indicates that orthodoxy versus liberalism is not due to a cohort effect, but rather to life-cycle patterns between youth and adults. Before we look at how this plays out in the movement back to conservatism in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, there is one other consideration that needs to be recognized.

It is widely recognized that education has a liberalizing effect on religiosity and values. When looking at the effect of education on orthodoxy it has been shown in several studies that “The trend is away from orthodox beliefs, and the amount of change is quite uniform…” (Albrecht & Heaton, 1984; Hastings & Hoge, 1970, p. 19; see also Hammond & Hunter, 1984; Schultze, 1998, p. 528). There are two other studies that actually conflict in their results with this variable. Madsen & Vernon (1983) found that in a sample of college students in Utah in 1979, that despite “a sizeable number (of students) reporting increased orthodoxy and some reporting no change” their study of religious stability “found that the average level of orthodoxy declined over the four years” that the students were in college (p. 131). On the other hand, Hoge (1971) in a comparison study between Michigan and Dartmouth students supports the notion that “the effect of college education may vary from time to time”, but that the college does not socialize students “into the prevailing attitudes of the time” (p. 193). However, the results of this study do not take into account an age-period-cohort analysis to tease out the needed data to verify this point and so, Hoge admits this limitation of the study. Thus, whether we are agreeing that it is life-cycle effects or difference in period cohorts, it seems most likely that the data and the foregoing analyses support the correlation between education and liberalization. This only further supports the thesis that a combination of socialization factors left the doors wide open for a variety of competing ideological, political and religious influences to shape the emergent patterns toward liberalization and decline in the mainline denominations as well as in the religiosity of those on campus. What this also adds is a construct from which potential returns to the traditional sources of religious growth and development are possible as the energy from the activist movements and influences waned. But for the 1960’s through the mid-1970’s, it appears that the net effect of the time period, its social and political pluralism, the age of the students, and the liberalizing effect of education all participated in a decline of traditional beliefs and participation in traditional organized beliefs. While Kerr (2001) may have seen activism against the research-based curriculum and organization, the data simply do not reveal this as a major factor in terms of the development of the counter-culture and protest movements, nor does it seem to have affected student values and religiosity in one way or another.

To The Right

In To the Right Jerome Himmelstein (1990) examines the rise of the New Religious Right noting that the dovetailing of new social issues such as the ERA and abortion with the mobilization of evangelicalism through mass-media crystallized a segment of the population that merged into the mainstream of American politics and religion. One of the catalyzing forces for the rise of this movement was the perceived failure of the self-professing evangelical President of the time, Jimmy Carter, to increase the political influence of the evangelicals who rallied around him. This became one of the issues, along with a fumbling economy, that would eventually shift the evangelical vote in favor of the Republican party in 1984. Part of this story is the rise in fundamentalist higher education through Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and Pat Robertson’s Regents University which were both founded in the 1970’s largely on the hill of prosperity offered up by the faithful of their broadcasting empires’ virtual congregations across the country.^*

Trends in religious behavior swung back to something more akin to the 1950’s in the 1980’s. But when this occurred it actually balanced out the overall church attendance rates since the 1960’s. Chaves (1990) notes that religious involvement has hovered between 37% and 41% with a spike in church attendance in 1955 and 1958 at 49%. This spike in the 1950’s is likely related to increased fear of Communism as the decline in fear of Communism has been positively correlated with a decline in traditional religious commitment among college students (Hastings & Hoge, 1970; Hoge, 1971). Whatever the case may be, the nadir of traditional religious involvement seems to be right around 1972 when the end of student activism was complete due to its failure to end Vietnam and revolutionize society (Altbach & Cohen, 1990) and its lack of a rational and epistemological foundation to give it adequate credibility in the academic arena (Sloan, 1994). It is also about this time that church attendance hit its lowest point relative to overall attendance trends (Wuthnow, 1978). But as the numerous studies on church attendance have indicated, this fluctuation has served to balance out the overall net effect of traditional religious involvement since the 1960’s and have kept a relatively stable attendance rate for most of the 20^th century (Miller & Nakamura, 1996).

The causes for a return to more traditional religious involvement point to several possible factors, but life-cycle is perhaps the best condition that establishes the late 1970’s and early 1980’s shift in religious behavior. Studies show that child rearing is positively correlated with traditional religious involvement and church attendance and that it is possible that traditional socialization forces during youth contribute to religious orientation and commitments later in life (Firebaugh & Harley, 1991; Sherkat, 1998; Willits & Crider, 1989). This explanation is more plausible since emerging cohorts will most likely act upon the religious influences from their childhood rather then break from this socialization due to desire and preference. The prospect of child-rearing is thus correlated with religiosity and once again supports the notion of religious involvement through life-cycle change (Roozen & McKinney, 1990). Combined with the stability of attendance rates, the pattern of church attendance and traditional religiosity is thus not as much of a decline in the late sixties and early seventies as it is a spike in the 1950’s. Studies on college values and religiosity example the same shift as students in the 1970’s and 1980’s pick up many of the value bases from the 1950’s and return to a more traditional religious pattern (Hastings & Hoge, 1981; Hoge et. al., 1981; Hoge et. al., 1987).

There are a few solid conclusions that we can thus make based on these various studies. First, the pattern of religiosity among the overall American population and college students from the 1950’s through 1984 follows a very clear dip and rise rather than a constant decline and the overall net effect of this is that the church attendance hovers at around 40% for the general population. This shows that despite the literature on the decline of religiously-affiliated higher education, there is still a market for it to serve that has never really left, and that this market may be ripe for increases should the trends in student religiosity and values maintain the course upward from the 1980’s through 1990. Indeed, patterns in higher education enrollment confirm that this may be true. Research also confirms that there has been a shift in trend to more conservative Christian denominations. Moreover, this shift is related primarily to lifecycle and fertility effects rather than choice or preference indicating a potentially self-perpetuating trend due to demographic imperative (Hout, et. al., 2001). This may offer sufficient confirmation of the trend in enrollments in CCCU affiliated institutions through the 1990’s. This simply follows in tow with the striking isomorphism between US religious trends and trends in college student values and enrollments in religiously-affiliated higher education. Looking at the data from 1980 to 2001, it is clear that religiously-affiliated higher education enrollment outpaced all college enrollment by 22.55% and all private higher education enrollment by 14.24%. Adding to this figure, the CCCU increase of 36.9% from 1990-1998 shows an upswing in the marketplace for religiously-based higher education with on the conservative side rather than the more liberal side. Part of this may have to do with the increase in the conservative market if the demographic imperative holds, and it also may confirm the hypothesis that orthodoxy creates a more marketable distinctiveness for religiously-affiliated higher education and so, marketing to the religious base is more effective for the more orthodox institutions. While this may confirm some of the issues raised by Scriven (1999) who argues that Christian higher education must be “partisan” but in terms of being “countercultural” and engaging of the whole person, understanding the epistemological tension between religious commitment and academic freedom raised by Tillman (1999) seem to be an imperative to do so judiciously (see also Dumestre, 1991). However, this conclusion is only speculative at this point.

Legitimation of Religiously-Affiliated Higher Education

It is quite clear that the spike, dip, and rise in religiously-affiliated higher education, the enrollments in evangelical and more religiously orthodox higher education, and the religious trends of the latter 20^th century to today are symmetrical, and congruent. The confluence of these trends can only be a good signal to religiously-affiliated higher education in the next coming years. As Hout, et. al. (1998) conclude, “The research is good news for both mainline and conservative churches. The mainline clergy need not feel responsible for their denominations’ slippage so long as the main source of change is the fertility decisions of Protestant families. Meanwhile, conservative clergy and laity can feel gratified that their most recent growth has little or no ideological content; its source is the greater number of young people raised in their tradition” (p. 498).

The story of those colleges that have remained linked to their religious founding in spite of the portents of doom for religiously-affiliated higher education has just scratched the surface in Robert Benne’s Quality with Soul (2002). In this short volume relative to Burtchaell’s work, Benne expressly offers a qualification by telling the narratives of six colleges that have not strayed into the “darkness” of secularization. Benne follows a nearly identical method as Burtchaell by centering his argument on case studies of six religiously-affiliated colleges. The shortcoming of this book is that it does not place the persistence of the ties these colleges have with the religious traditions in a wider conceptual, sociological, and theological framework. In The Future of Religious Colleges (Dovre, 2002), a few proposals are offered for the rational sustenance of a distinctive religiously-affiliated higher education experience. Finally, in Called to Teach (Ferguson & Weston, 2003) the bar on the distinctiveness of a religiously-based education in a collection of essays that were produced in conjunction with the Consultation on the Vocation of the Presbyterian Teacher in 2000 which spurred the enactment of “Renewing the Commitment: A Church Wide Mission Strategy for Ministry in Higher Education” approved by the 213^th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (Committee, 2001). There is thus a counter-narrative to the decline and the burgeoning need to offer an examination of the saliency of a religiously-based higher education in the contemporary higher education market. What I have done in this paper is combine disparate sources that have traced similar but since unconnected trends that give a far more nuanced understanding of religious higher education and its currency in the higher education market. It should also be a signal to religiously-affiliated higher education institutions to engage in broader and deeper objective analyses of their behavior relative to the higher education market. While the philosophical and theological means for legitimation of Christian higher education are certainly valuable, especially for the design of curricula that holds religious conviction and academic freedoms simultaneously (e.g. Mannoia, 2000), it is also important to look at this course of higher education in objective terms relative to the higher education market and to national religiosity and enrollment trends. It is my hope that research will continue along these lines.

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