I am an academic, but I won’t pretend as if I believe that there’s anything moral about the structure of higher education in America today. I know many, many principled people who do incredible work in academic institutions. Nevertheless, the institutions themselves have become extractive. Though I know this, reading Jay Caspian Kang’s recent essay for the New Yorker—in which he argues that the university has become the new church of secular liberals—made me itch with a little bit of rage.
The issue, for me, isn’t that I thought he was completely wrong. I think he got a lot of things right, in fact. But something about his political strategy, and his genealogical amnesia, felt sort of dangerous to me.
I am among what seems to me a growing number of people who are recognizing that the politicization of religion has become a major issue for the left. It’s something that people are talking about. My colleague Liz Bucar has written about this here on Substack, and I recently picked up Ryan Burge’s new book. But, especially because I can imagine that Kang’s work will be seductive for many progressives, I felt like I needed to challenge his argument that there is a church-shaped hole on the American left.
I WILL START, however, with what I think that Kang gets right. This essay was the culmination of a series that he wrote for the New Yorker, reflecting on what I’m going to describe as a church-shaped hole on the American left. His series examines what it’s meant, politically, for the left to become essentially untethered from religious institutions as a critical element of the Democratic base. This final essay in the series, on the university, argues that the left has relied on universities to be the new center of moral authority. They’ve asked universities to do something that people used to expect from their church.
Meanwhile, these institutions have abandoned moral formation as part of their central educational impetus, instead becoming credentialing factories that serve up a residual byproduct of thin moral film.
We’ve ended up, Kang argues, in a situation where this “church” costs people more than $100,000 a year to attend, leaving them with a lifetime of debt and (more often than not) mediocre employment. Even when people depart with some values or principles in tow, these often feel hollow and rootless. I agree with Kang that this has happened, and that it’s a huge problem.
One of the things that really irked me about his essay, however, was the fact that he seems to be accepting conservatives’ narratives (from people like Chris Rufo, Roger Kimball, and Peter Wood) about what the university in America is, and how it functions. Such critiques are fueled by what pundits like Rufo believe is the moral corruption of wokeness. And they are critical of universities because they (coercively, if we follow this narrative) produce woke progressives. “These critics do not want to change the basically religious function of the university,” Kang writes, “so much as they want to swap out the sermons.” They want to make the university a different sort of ideological factory.
Kang understands his own strategy to be a sort of counter-MAGA positioning. “Rather than fighting about so-called viewpoint diversity in higher education, and swapping different ideologies back and forth to match our political beliefs,” he writes, “we need to ask whether the university should have this role at all.” The university, he argues, is “not good at incubating social-justice movements”. Its “priests” are just “cloistered faculty.” And it’s an institution for elites. All of these these things make the university undesirable as a center for moral value. With all of this in mind, Kang believes that progressives need to essentially minimize the role that the university plays in moral life.
What does Kang believe the left should do, instead? He doesn’t really address that matter, in this particular essay. But if you look back through the other essays in his series, it becomes clearer. He believes that the left should turn, instead, to the church. Instead of asking the university to be a church, in other words, he thinks that the left needs to get back in touch with the church.
Like MAGA conservatives, Kang looks back nostalgically to earlier periods of greatness in American life. Unlike conservatives, of course, he’s looking for great moments in left politics. He finds this (unsurprisingly) in the Civil Rights era, and phenomena like the sanctuary movement. If only we could go back, he suggests, we might make the American left great again. Maybe the church can get us there, like it did back then.
I have no desire to minimize the historical import of these movements. Nor do I want to pretend as if I don’t think that religion is, in some ways, an underutilized dimension of politics on the left. I think it could be. But Kang’s framing reads, to me, like just another example of the fact that the left seems to have been entirely evacuated of vision and values, becoming nothing but a reactionary mirror of the MAGA movement. With little to say anymore but “not that!” the left has ceded the narrative about what political life in America should look like to conservatives. Despite the fact that the Kamala Harris campaign showed us that this didn’t work, Kang’s counter-MAGA positioning illuminates how many on the left can’t leave this strategy behind.
What Kang misses, by accepting the MAGA framing of what the university is and how it functions, is the actual history of colleges and universities in the United States. Notably, the university didn’t replace the church in the US. Rather, in many cases, colleges and universities in America were produced by and for the church. Church and academy have been caught up in a rather tempestuous sort of entanglement for centuries, in and beyond America. The church-academy connection is a relational struggle that is almost as old as universities themselves. Kang’s replacement thesis doesn’t really work.
Have Americans on the left struggled to secularize higher education? Sure. But the secularization of institutions of higher education in America, like the small liberal arts college where I teach (founded by and for Presbyterians), wasn’t motivated by a cynical distaste for religion. In part, it was a genuine (if partial) attempt at pluralism. Many of these institutions understood that religious life in America was becoming more diverse and complex. They wanted to reflect this in their curriculum, to represent a changing student body. Did this have moral consequences? Sure. Were some of these consequences unfortunate? Probably. But this is a complex problem to investigate and understand. And Kang’s argument encourages us to look away from it, and instead turn to the church.
Even if the university becomes nothing but a crude and amoral credentialing factory, it still plays a role in the ecology of moral life in America. Producing credentialed laborers for the capitalist economy is a social function with moral stakes. I agree that we should not expect the university to be a church. Nor do I think that we should turn to universities as the sole arbiters of moral value. I don’t think there is any one center to moral life in America. But I also think that if colleges and universities divest from the work of formation (moral and otherwise), they are completely and entirely lost.
To suggest that colleges and universities play a role in our moral ecology, in America, is one way to ensure that Christian churches aren’t the only spaces where people can engage in the sort of formation that generates moral leadership. In a country where many people are not Christian, or they are Christians who feel as if the church doesn’t acknowledge their humanity or values, colleges and universities have become an alternate space where they can explore the shape and structure of their moral lives.
This doesn’t mean that colleges and universities should be the only place where this is happening. Nor does it mean that colleges and universities have been doing a particularly good job at providing this service. But to deemphasize or eliminate the role that these institutions play in our moral ecology is to accept a hit to the kind of pluralism that the left has often claimed to value. The question of how to practice this sort of pluralism in these institutions is a genuinely difficult, and unresolved, question that should not be pushed to the side. Colleges and universities have failed at this aspirational project, in some crucial ways, which is something to confront.
The right hasn’t been successful in America because they have religion on their side. The politicization and capture of Christianity by the right is part of their success, of course. But they’ve also been successful because they’ve integrated themselves into institutions at many levels (like school boards and city councils) and reformed them from within. People like Rufo hate the university because it’s resisted easy capture. People like Kang do Rufo and others a service, by presenting their arguments as authoritative narratives in venues like the New Yorker. Encouraging the left to stop pondering the difficult and thorny problem of morality in higher education is an abandonment that, I suspect, the left will later come to regret.
I SAY THIS BECAUSE I think that the left may be suffering from abandonments that have already been visited upon American colleges and universities. It’s a shame that someone like Kang can be educated in the American university system, and invited to write for publications like the New Yorker, and yet still have so much genealogical amnesia about the kinds of institutions that formed them. But it’s not a priority, in the curricula of most American colleges and universities, to transmit this sort of knowledge.
The genealogical amnesia that leads Kang to dissociate the university from the church in a simple manner (offering nothing but a wonky replacement theory to explain their strange institutional relationship) is pretty commonplace. Many disciplines outside the field of religious studies are loathe to discuss the role that religion has played in their own history and formation. And the field of religious studies is one of the most contingent and fragile, in many institutions of higher education today. This means that knowledge about religious genealogies tends to be hidden, muted, or excised.
Kang feels like universities have failed him, and other Americans. And I agree that they probably have. But I don’t think that it’s because they’ve failed to turn him, or others, into amazing professionalized social justice activists who can do Real Work for the left. Nor do I think this should be the university’s aim. I think it’s because genealogical amnesia is a problem that colleges and universities don’t seem to care about. And I think this is a detriment to both the right and the left.
In an interview about his series with Tyler Foggatt for the New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast, Kang and his interviewer descend into a vibes-based debate about the language of human rights that feels almost childish. They seem to disagree over which is more appealing: the thinner (but more universal) secular language of human rights, or the thicker (but religiously particular) language that calls all people children of God. The fact that there is a long social and political history that effectively entangles these different languages in complicated and challenging ways doesn’t happen to come up. If it had, it might have allowed for a conversation about the fact that these are resonant options, differently expressed. And they could have parsed what’s lost or gained in the secularization of that religious sentiment. But their exchange seems to present these as two unrelated ideas. That’s genealogical amnesia.
Kang argues that what he calls (in a rather self-aware and cynical manner) the “protest economy” feels hollow. Left protests are animated by thin secular ideas that people don’t really understand, he says. He proposes that it’s in contact with the church that people could thicken their moral language.
But even in his own writing, the strongest evidence he offers in favor of the church as a space for moral formation comes from a conversation with a graduate student, in pursuit of higher education. Kang interviews Wayne Hsiung, an animal-liberation activist turned seminary student, to talk about what the church might offer activists. Even Kang, in other words, turns to higher education for some wisdom about what’s happening to our moral lives. Although perhaps he doesn’t “count” seminaries as part of the ecology of university life in the US?
Hsiung, who is a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, doesn’t necessarily seem to be suggesting (like Kang) that the American left needs to turn to the church. But he does speak with wisdom about the value of moral communities, especially the value of ancient ones. They can provide, among other things, old stories that build a deep group cohesion. And they can also provide a form of contact with a “supreme” or more than human power that facilitates relational bonds across many other forms of difference. “I think left civilization, not just left movements, will die,” Hsiung tells him, “ unless there is some form of moral community to organize it all.”
I think that Hsiung has a clear sense of the genealogical bonds between contemporary activist politics and values and ancient traditions. This drew him to the church, but I don’t get the sense that he’s suggesting that Americans on the left need to become more Christian, like him. Perhaps he’s just offering people a reason to break out of their genealogical amnesia, and to better understand how the things they value are related, in complicated ways, to the moral worlds they thought they’d moved past and discarded.
I DO THINK THAT Kang seems to have a church-shaped hole in his heart, and that may be fueling more of his arguments than he realizes. In the opening to his first essay in the series he admits that, while he is non-religious, he does “feel a pang of jealousy for people of faith who seem animated by a higher mission.” They seem to have a sense of calm, and a form of humility, that he doesn’t always see in American protests or, he adds, when he looks “in the mirror.”
He also recognizes, in a general way, that the politicization of religion in America—which has made Christianity coincident, for many people, with conservatism—has hollowed out the American churches that lean left. But he doesn’t really seem to wrestle with what this means, nor does he seem to be aware of what he is effectively advocating for in these essays.
There is something almost extractive to the way that Kang is approaching, or thinking about, the church. As an admitted outsider who seems to envy the church’s deep moral roots, he seems to essentially be asking what the left can extract from these church communities for the left’s own political benefit. The church is presented, in his essays, like a natural moral resource that might be tapped for things like useful infrastructure, or moral authority, or community networks.
Framing the church as a space of possibility, and looking at it from the outside, seems to distract him from understanding the role that religious people on the left are already playing in left politics. He notes that the only place where religious leaders on the left seem to be showing up are in graphic images on social media, where they’re being attacked by ICE agents while wearing their collars. He calls for progressive clergy to be louder, suggesting that perhaps their moral authority could really change the immigration debate in the United States. Imagine, he suggests, if the Catholic Church spoke out against Trump’s immigration policies!
And yet the Catholic Church, indeed the pope himself, has spoken out against these very policies. This made it into the news cycle for a couple of days and was then discarded as no longer relevant. The fact that the most powerful progressive religious voice in the world gets a day of news coverage does not seem, to me, like a failure of left religious leaders to step up and speak out. It seems more like an issue with our media platforms and information ecologies. Perhaps these media outlets just assume that their mostly left-leaning readers don’t really care. So they keep unpacking the Epstein files.
If more Americans on the left start to care about what’s happening in churches, it will be because they’ve joined churches, and they’ve started to invest in the existential realities of that institutional dimension of American life. And if churches can be a resource for the American left in anything but an extractive manner, it will be because more people on the left have joined these churches and are supporting their existence as living communities.
The argument that Kang seems to be making that I don’t think he realizes he’s making is that more Americans should become religious and join churches. His series reads, to me, like an altar call.
I DON’T THINK there’s a church-shaped hole on the American left. But I do think there is a kind of existential void on the left that makes it feel sapped of vitality. This void leaves it trapped in a mimetic relationship to the right.
I think this void looks, from some angles, like a community-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a utopia-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a morality-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a democracy-shaped hole. From other angles it looks like a religion-shaped hole. And so on. This void is shape-shifting, and I don’t think that any one structure or force will fill it. I think that the void is complex and plural, and if it’s going to be filled with anything, it should be filled with many things.
We are living in a social and political world that’s been stripped for parts, and we are dealing with the consequences. This is an insanely huge problem that’s rapidly getting worse. Solutions will not be easy or simple. But we are creative animals, and we’ve performed far greater feats at many other points in our shared histories.
I will say that (unsexy as this is for “revolutionary” leftists) investing some real love in the collapsing institutional formations in American life might do something tangible, effective, and real. This includes the church (and other religious institutions), but it also includes the university. It can include neighborhood organizations. And public schools. And so on.
The president of my college recently relayed to me something he’s learned in his time as an administrator: starting something new is always easier than changing things. But, often, it’s not what we really need. The secularization that the left has long depended upon has convinced many people that something new is not only always possible, but it’s always better. Meanwhile, it’s been pulling in subtle ways from religious tradition in order to source its own novel content. It’s been getting its fuel from change, not from novelty. But it’s presented itself as something different, better, and new.
Genealogical amnesia allows us to move forward bravely into the future, and try new things, with the confidence of someone who knows absolutely nothing and hopes for everything. Understanding the complex histories of the worlds that we’ve inherited, and understanding which parts we’re actually ready to surrender (and which we refuse to discard) is much more difficult. But I think it’s a better path forward. We inherit these histories, whether we want them or not. If we ignore them, they haunt us like ghosts. If we acknowledge them, they might become powerful relics that, with a little caution, help animate what we do.
Republished from the Substack Galactic Underworlds.
