The Disaffiliation of American Religious Colleges and Universities, 1895-1923

Tessa Huttenlocher, University of Chicago

In the early 20th century, many private colleges and universities founded by religious groups broke ties with their sponsoring denominations to became non-sectarian. This article pushes back against the dominant narratives of academic revolution and denominational neglect by reframing religious groups as active participants in disaffiliation. Using a unique dataset systematically linking the American fields of organized religion and higher education, I find that schools affiliated with Protestant Establishment denominations—the handful of denominations associated with the English-speaking colonial elite—were more likely to disaffiliate than other religious groups, even accounting for the higher concentration of advantageous school characteristics among their schools. Furthermore, case studies reveal that the process of disaffiliation unfolded differently for schools controlled by different Protestant religious traditions. The Protestant Establishment disaffiliated their schools by design, with minimal conflict. The Aspiring Establishment denominations, which make up the bulk of Mainline Protestantism today, disaffiliated through decoupling to accommodate the diverse stances of their affiliated institutions. Finally, the rare disaffiliations within the Non-Establishment Protestant tradition were marked by intense conflict and resistance. By considering how different religious groups embraced the disaffiliation movement differently, this paper reveals the role that religious inequality has played in shaping the nominally secularized field of American higher education.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 157. Institutional Shifts and Religious Agency: Disaffiliation, Integration, and Political Thought