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This past February, when Robert B. Sloan announced he would resign the presidency of Baylor University, the news sent tremors throughout Christian higher education. Sloan has been the lead architect and builder in an ambitious 10-year plan to transform Baylor into a top-tier research university with an "intense faithfulness to the Christian tradition." This would require more than simply remaining Southern Baptist. It would mean "deepening its distinctive Christian mission."

Evangelicals, with their network of small, cash-strapped colleges, have long dreamed of a Christian university that could hold its own with Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Berkeley. To them it seemed that Sloan just might have the ability to make the dream a reality. But his program drew powerful opposition from many quarters within the Baylor constituency.

Back in September 2003, Sloan had overwhelming support from Baylor's trustees. But within eight months his board majority had melted to a single vote, making it pretty obvious that the wind was blowing against him. In resigning, Sloan made it clear that he hopes his move to the post of chancellor will quiet the controversy and allow his program for the university to go forward. But will it? And what does Baylor's case bode for other Christian colleges and universities, in light of the recent slew of books that parse out the integration of faith and learning?

Sloan's announcement has given many card-carrying evangelicals an ominous case of déjà vu. Our recessive conservative genes have conditioned us to see this phenomenon as the inevitable process of secularization in higher education. In the conservative analysis, Christian colleges and universities are all perched atop a slippery slope. One moment of relaxed vigilance—one twitch or stumble in a secular direction—and down slides the college into the tar pits of apostasy. The only thing left of its former faith would be a stately chapel building—a fossilized artifact of the college's Christian past. The process started with Harvard—once the pride of Puritanism—and has since claimed almost every once-Christian college.

This fear exists for valid reasons. Today, schools connected to certain orthodox denominations—notably Southern Baptists, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and Churches of Christ—do face a real possibility of secularization. This is because these schools have always thought of their religious identity mainly in denominational terms, rather than thinking of themselves more broadly as Christian colleges. The hard truth is that the old denominational identity that has kept their schools Christian is dying.

In the case of the Southern Baptists, their version of Christianity was intertwined with the distinctive cultural features of the South. For many, being Southern Baptist was as much about being Southern as it was about being Baptist. But no more. The integration of the South into national American culture is nearly complete, and American culture will not sustain Christianity in the way Southern culture did.

As Southern distinctiveness dries up, the cultural foundations of Southern Baptist identity are crumbling from beneath the denomination's schools. The result is that all Southern Baptist colleges and universities face a stark choice. They must either build new kinds of Christian foundations for their schools, or watch the Christian character of their schools fall into disrepair.

A similar identity crisis has begun to show up at Missouri Synod Lutheran schools—notably Valparaiso University—and Churches of Christ colleges like Pepperdine University. Fewer of their students and faculty have ties to the denomination, and those who do arrive with weaker denominational commitments. For all these schools, the problem is how to prevent their identity crisis from producing secularization.

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June 2005, Vol. 49, No. 6