Hollinger

David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History at UC Berkley, is adamantly against the effort to re-include Christian perspectives in universities. His main argument is that the academy would better serve society by sticking to the secular voice and “not bending those rules to pay more homage to Christianity,” whose followers he considers to be falsely painting themselves as victims. Hollinger is frustrated by the way Christians have refused to confront valid reasons for why people drifted from accepting a Christian voice and at what he sees as Christians’ reluctance to acknowledge the historical links between Christian values and discrimination.

The Academy has Heard Enough of the Christian Voice

The academy is fair in the way it treats the Christian voice, according to Hollinger; and he sees no reason for higher education to be interacting with Christianity in particular. He bases his argument on the importance of the rules and writes that “what matters most are the rules, formal and tacit, of the relevant epistemic community.” He claims that if these rules don’t reflect religious perspectives then the religious views are what lack validity. The direction that the changing epistemic rules should take is what he considers to be the main issue and he claims the direction that Christians like Charles Marsden propose will lessen the “critical distance to Christian cultural hegemony that academy has long struggled to create and maintain.”

He gives the example of certain values and ideas as “generic cultural commodities,” which Christians have claimed for themselves. The example he gives is of the presupposition that general virtues of being well behaved, religious and Christian all are the same. For Hollinger, Christianity is seen as a source of untapped resources, not a standard of belief. He focuses his derision on what he terms the “evils of Protestant hegemony.” His answer to Christian academics is to focus on intellectual matter rather than moral needs. Hollinger believes that the deficiency of Christianity is not one of the problems of universities today because the Christian voice is prevalent enough as it is.