When Charles M. Stang ’97, now an assistant professor of early Christian thought at Harvard Divinity School, was at the College, he was “not at all” religious.

But through the course of his undergraduate career as a philosophy concentrator living in Kirkland House, he says he became increasingly spiritual, so much so that he says he “felt called to the life of studying and teaching about religion” by the time he graduated.

And 11 years after finishing college, he joined the HDS faculty and is now teaching up-and-coming ministers and academics about Christian tradition during the third to fifth centuries.

Harvard today plays host to students at both ends of Stang’s own spectrum of religious experience, having departed substantially from its original role as a training ground for Christian clergy to become a place for students to explore religion, or not.

‘GODLESS HARVARD’?

In 1636, Harvard was founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

Although the University was never formally affiliated with any religious denomination, its original motto was “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” or “Truth for Christ and the Church.” And its 1646 statutes decreed that “every one shall consider the main End of his life and studies, to know God and Jesus Christ which is Eternal Life.”

In this vein, many of Harvard’s early graduates went on to become clergymen in Puritan churches.

“Massachusetts was founded by religious people,” says Jonathan C. Page ’02, the Epps fellow and assistant chaplain at Memorial Church. “Back then, theology was queen of scientists. Therefore anyone who went to Harvard was a leading citizen of the colony—a good theologian.”

But over the course of the next century, Enlightenment ideals, which posed strong critiques against religion, found substantial intellectual support at Harvard, so much so that Puritan minister Cotton Mather, class of 1678, described the school as “godless Harvard.”

In 1886, Harvard became the first college in the United States to remove compulsory morning prayers and chapel under President Charles W. Eliot. And throughout the 19th century, Harvard consistently produced the fewest ministers compared to peer institutions, Page says.

As separate seminary programs began to arise, the role of religion in the undergraduate curriculum became nebulous, and the University began to offer courses in Christianity for college graduates, eventually sparking the creation of the Divinity School in 1816 to encourage a “serious, impartial, and unbiased investigation of Christian truth,” according to its constitution.

MULTI-THEISTIC

Just as the University expanded from its mission of training ministers over the years, so too has the Divinity School broadened its scope.

By the late 20th century, a liberal Christian interpretation had taken hold at the Divinity School, dominating its pedagogy and culture, Stang says.