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Religion, Culture and Anarchy: the attack on the Arnoldian vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

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The Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University not long ago ran into controversy, because of its acceptance of a bequest which endows a post in theology on condition that its holder be a practising Christian. To some commentators this case appears as an ominous harbinger of what is to come: university departments, starved of public funds, will be increasingly forced to turn to private means, sometimes under conditions which threaten the upholding of academic objectivity. There is, however, a possibly irony in the Newcastle case, an irony which should cause us to ponder more deeply the pros and cons involved: the professorial research fellow at Newcastle has a brief to reflect, theologically, on the situation in the inner cities, so although the appointment has been made against the background of governmental withdrawal of financial support from the universities, the results of the new professor’s research are much more likely to be a critical embarrassment to the government than the usual more abstruse, more detached and ‘scholarly’ products of research in religious studies.

Of course, pointing up the irony is not to resolve the argument. And old whiggish purists, like Mr Tony Benn, exhibit a proper integrity when they insist that we should not look to defeat Mrs Thatcher by disinterring the power of privilege, whether princely, aristocratic or religious.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Wilson, J. Dover (Cambridge University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

2 Arnold, 63.

3 Arnold, 43–45.

4 Arnold, 58.

5 For the argument that some aspects of socialism are ‘anti‐modernist’ in character, see my article ‘On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the crisis of socialism’ in New Blackfriars, January 1988, pp. 4–19.

6 Arnold, 62.

7 Ninian Smart, ‘The Principles and Meaning of the Study of Religion’ (Lancaster University Library, 1968).

8 Macintyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (Duckworth, London, 1988) p.399Google Scholar et passim.