The Secular Thesis Revisited: Religious Life on the Secular College Campus Today

Abstract

This essay considers the shifting terrain of the “religious” and the “secular” in liberal arts education from the perspective of a religious life administrator. The argument shows how current debates about secularity provide a helpful lens for understanding the changing forms of student religious and spiritual practices. Campuses are now finding their secularity challenged: long-held assumptions that equate modernity with an increasing secularization–and that equate religiosity with an incomplete modernity–have come under critical scrutiny. The pressures on secularity should not be understood as its defeat by triumphal or resurgent religion, but as secularism encountering its own limits, and perhaps making room for new modes of understanding beyond modernity’s crisis of belief and unbelief.