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[By Christopher Roberts, Harvard College '01] In 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded Harvard College to train new ministers for the congregational Church, the established church in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. The seal of the university read, Veritas: In Christo et Ecclesia (Truth: In Christ and the Church). Veritas was written on three books, the first book VE, the second RI and the third TAS. The first two books were opened facing up, while the third was open with the spine facing up, symbolizing that some knowledge cannot be gained but through Divine revelation. Harvard was a great experiment in Christian learning modeled after Oxford and Cambridge. The university was given the name Harvard because one of the greatest supporters of the young school was a Congregational minister named John Harvard.
Things have changed a great deal since those days. In 1708, John Leverett was elected President of the university, the first non-clergyman to hold the post. This began a slow yet persistent process of secularization at Harvard. The last great religious leader at Harvard, the Episcopal Bishop Phillips Brooks (Harvard College class of 1855 and author of O Little Town of Bethlehem), died in 1891. Decades after Brooks' death, during the tenure of A. Lawrence Lowell (1903-1933), the university seal was modified to its present form: Christ and the church was removed and the book with the letters TAS now appeared with its pages turned up. Revealed truth had no place in veritas. Harvard decided that its Christian roots were superfluous to its search for and study of truth.
For believers in Christ, Harvard's choice to relinquish its Christian character is unfortunate. Had Harvard stayed true to its roots, there is no telling what good it could have done for Christianity by providing a place where faith and reason dialogue as equal partners. It would be difficult to view the decision as tragic, however. While there was no institutional commitment to orthodox Christianity, orthodox Christians were still free to take part in the intellectual life of Harvard. What is tragic is that in the past two decades, Harvard has signaled that orthodox Christians are not welcome at the university in ways that would have been unimaginable even seventy years ago.
One only needs to look to the campus ministry program to realize the degree of the university's antipathy to basic Christian morality and doctrine. At Memorial Church, the last remaining holdover from Harvard's Christian days, the rector and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, is an open homosexual. His assistant, the Reverend Dorothy Austin, is a lesbian. She and her partner, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, are co-house mistresses of an undergraduate residence hall. Attempts to convert anyone by campus recognized groups are expressly forbidden. This policy is discriminatory toward Christianity insofar as Christians believe they have a missionary mandate from Christ to "go and preach to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."
While Harvard claims that it values freedom of assembly and expression as elements of their commitment to diversity and tolerance, these basic rights do not seem to apply to Christians. University officials have informed the Harvard Christian Fellowship that its status as a university-recognized group will be revoked unless it repeals the sections in its constitution that maintain that Christian Fellowship officers believe that
Christ actually rose from the dead and the existence of the Holy Spirit. The Undergraduate Council has withdrawn funding from the group. Such intolerance by Christians is deemed unacceptable and offensive. It does not occur to the university that they are asking this Christian group to renounce their faith. At the same time, Harvard turns a blind eye to posting of sexually explicit and offensive material in Harvard Yard by the Bisexual Gay Transgender Lesbian Supporters' Alliance, most of which many Christians would consider blasphemous.
Respect for freedom of conscience does not get much respect in Harvard Yard either. University officials see no need to inform students that their tuition money is used to pay for elective abortions and distribute contraceptives. Many students who think abortion is murder end up paying for the gruesome procedure.
In the light of such violent opposition to orthodox Christianity, it is easy to imagine the challenges a Christian student would face in the classroom when he refuses to leave his faith at the classroom door. Professor Harvey Cox of the Divinity School preaches the "secularization of religion", which means believing in a religion with no God. In the majority of courses at Harvard that do not treat religion explicitly, any attempt broach questions of value is usually dismissed as treating "metaphysical questions" inappropriate for scholarly discourse.
One can only hope that the trend does not escalate to outright persecution of Christians at Harvard.
