How did politics of the Global Cold War reshape the relationship between religion and education in the United States? What are the consequences of this historical period in contemporary educational institutions and movements? This session explores these questions, and many more, in relation to key mid-20th century sites in which policymakers, students, and teachers struggled over the status and study of religion within educational institutions. From deliberations over academic freedom at the American Association of Theological Schools, to projects to institute "moral and spiritual values" curricula in public schools, to evangelical campaigns to construct the adolescent as an internal threat to the nuclear family, to the institution of the field of religious studies in the context of the First Red Scare, these papers complicate our understandings of the political and institutional grounds on which teaching and scholarship about religion has developed, and on which it proceeds.
In 1951, the Commission on Accrediting of the American Association of Theological Schools (AATS) stripped a member institution, Asbury Theological Seminary, of its accredited status after determining that Asbury exhibited “conditions that jeopardize the general tone and educational efficiency of the seminary.” This paper explores the events and conditions at Asbury Theological Seminary which preceded this unprecedented and unrepeated action by AATS and the ways in which the maintenance of academic freedom was used to justify the Association’s action against Asbury, despite the Association not having an official position on academic freedom in its constitution, bylaws, or standards at the time. The paper also explores the evolution of positions and guidance about academic freedom by AATS, spurred by Claude Thompson’s treatment by Asbury; the Association’s adjudication of academic freedom as an institutional “right practice;” and the development of contemporary standards of accreditation, which do not include the phrase “academic freedom.”
Although the U.S. Supreme Court found school prayer and Bible reading unconstitutional in the early 1960s, these religious activities were part of a larger effort to promote “moral and spiritual values” in public schools, an effort that exalted white American heritage through the deification of the “founding fathers.” In the Cold War 1950s, moral and spiritual values curricula were influential nationwide but are now understudied. I examine how moral and spiritual values programs rendered the founding fathers as God-like and parental figures. I argue that public schools participated in this parentage because moral and spiritual values programs encouraged teachers to situate themselves as purveyors of white American heritage to children, who were to see themselves as its inheritors, regardless of their own racial identity. Decades before the Religious Right’s "family values" discourse, moral and spiritual values programs in public schools established “values” as intrinsically connected to whiteness and maleness.
This paper traces the development of the adolescent as a key part of the nuclear family in America during the 1950s. It does so by mapping the evangelical strategy to fix the problems that adolescence posed to the nuclear family and the evangelical imagination of kinship. As anxieties of juvenile delinquency abounded during this period, evangelical Christians worked to understand the dangers that mass media and popular culture posed toward youth by relying on the framework of the nuclear family. The adolescent posed an internal threat to the family that needed to be dealt with as a collective unit. Evangelicals relied on the Protestant theology of confession and sanctification in order to develop strategies of dealing with the internal threat of the adolescent. In developing this strategy, evangelicals hoped to discipline adolescents into particular kinds of adults while simultaneously reifying the importance and strength of the nuclear family.
This paper investigates the role of the First Red Scare as a catalyst for the institutionalization of religious studies in US colleges following World War I. Following the war, a dedicated cadre of educators, clergy, administrators, and philanthropists capitalized on postwar anxieties concerning ethnic assimilation and American religious identity to produce potent new arguments for religion’s educational value, effectively creating the US study of religion as an Anglo-Protestant nationalist project. I examine this discursive process in detail, focusing on one particularly important group: the National Council on Religion in Higher Education (NCRHE), which formed in 1922 to coordinate the study of religion on a national scale. Drawing on unpublished archival material, I argue that the NCRHE articulated the goals and methods of US religious studies through a complex discourse of patriotic anti-materialism. I conclude by appraising the significance of this history for contemporary critical assessments of the field.