The Chapel at Princeton

The chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary, storied place it is in American religious history, is a restful sight. One of my good friends calls its interior a triumph of Protestant style — a grand organ with arts-and-crafts motifs sits on the far wall, subtle Hellenic decorations adorn the brass chandeliers, and the pews are made of dark wood parts painted spotless white. No images or tapestries whatsoever. Decorated to an acceptable level and given a feeling of sanctity by the restraint left to encourage contemplation. One salient detail departs from the theme: a set of bongo drums lies off to the side of the pulpit. I smirk at them — will tomorrow’s service involve the same kind of “hey look this is from somewhere in the Global South” gimmick that I, a Unitarian Universalist, was raised on? I jest that the hymnal might contain some Paul Simon. It’s familiar, it feels a little silly, and for something so otherwise magnificently consistent to a venerable theme, I wonder why they feel the need.

(Obligatorily, from Wikipedia: bongos are known from the Afro-Caribbean musical tradition in Oriente in Cuba, and it is conceivable that someone in the Princeton congregation was actually personally connected to this tradition and had brought them in. Protestants are 11% of the Cuban population, and bongos have been featured in musical scenes in New York City including musicians of Puerto Rican heritage as well as Cuban for over a century. Princeton University Press has a good book on these communities. Nonetheless, Princeton has no significant tradition involving bongo drums and I strongly suspect it was an outright gimmick especially given the proclivities of the theology students who run the services.)

Why, one wonders, is it not enough for the church to live with the particularities of its denomination’s heritage? In the case of Princeton, bongos do not play a significant historical role unless they really are a nod to the proclivities of Princetonian Richard Feynman. After all, the Reformation is all about particularity and the conscience of the community — what is it about American Protestantism that makes the signifier of the bongo drums a required part of the ceremony?

A historical answer comes quickly to mind: technological civilization still rules the world, the capital of this empire is nearby New York City, and this civilization has set the discursive agenda for churchgoing professionals and imposed the spiritual problems that they congregate to work through. The mode of technological civilizational power is, as Patrick Deneen and Karl Marx agree, the ability to institutionally and scientifically re-wire our forms of life in service of mass-producing material prosperity. The result, straight from the pages of Capital: institutions of mass production make heritage into an object to be managed and employed to keep workforces productive. We white-collar professionals are familiar with the need to keep workplaces welcoming for an ever-more-diverse world of colleagues, and it’s natural to go to church wondering about HR challenges. And here the congregation takes the script from the material discourse. Bongo drums, precisely because they are doubtfully part of the heritage of anyone in the congregation, starkly affirm the formal principle of interchangeability: “anyone of any heritage is good with our God!”

If we believe this, then today’s mainline Protestantism is perhaps stuck in what Hegel wanted it to become: a thin institutional boilerplate on top of general humanist commitments, more a mechanical commitment of a community to stay with the times, to facilitate confession, and to provide place for individual contemplation and prayer away from the demands of the world. It must have bongo drums because it must stay with the times, speak the language of the congregation, and allow the contemplation to proceed from the lives of its flock as they are currently wired. In this case, it’s the anxieties and ethical complexities of globalized professional life, and hey — fair enough. I have those in spades.

There’s a deeper question to ask, though, that draws a line directly through Princeton: how did we come from the Protestant ethic of Max Weber and Woodrow Wilson to the globalist commitment that demands bongo drums? A genealogical answer is at hand in the chapel in Princeton: you can look at a radical change every couple decades for the last hundred and twenty years of its history. I’ve tried to spell one out as a matter of testing my own erudition on the topic to fill in the claims of several articles in Compact Magazine.

First, the turn-of-the-century transformation of universities to produce managers. Princeton President Woodrow Wilson famously rebuilt the school in imitation of Oxford and Cambridge, rather than the German research model implemented by William Rainey Harper in his twenty-five years at Chicago and Charles Eliot in his fifty years at Harvard. In this historical moment, American technological culture was birthed into a proper civilization — elite schools whose goal had been to provide a Classical education to small classes of American elites were now adding faculties of commerce and social sciences, the express goal of which would be to train managers and administrators. Wilson gave a keynote speech titled, as would become the unofficial motto of the university, “Princeton in the nation’s service.”

In nearby New York City, the effect of scientific-managerial education and its service to the nation was dramatic: professional schools birthed the Progressive Era. Princetonian Robert Caro devotes a chapter of The Power Broker to a splendid narration of this world — thanks to young university graduates employing empirical methods of civilization, building codes would be established and slums demolished, common schools reformed, subway tracks planned and laid, and police and fire commissions expanded to service the metropolis. Economist Robert Gordon reminds us that the quality of life in American cities actually decreased between 1870 and 1900, and would only inflect as a result of aggressive, progressive social reform. What was born in New York would be imitated across America’s cities, inaugurating the rule of scientific method over core functions of urban life. Economic life would be increasingly run by professional administrators rather than Classically-educated merchants or self-made tycoons.

Second, the transformation of university science to operate at the federal level. The Manhattan Project — the race to build the atomic bomb which heavily implicated the Princetonian Albert Einstein — was, institutionally, the first national-scale consortium of scientific research institutions. Universities that had produced scientists and managers who for the last forty years had staffed progressive municipal bureaus, private corporations, and individual physical laboratories, convened in New Mexico under the aegis of the federal military. In a fiery crucible was born the military-industrial complex: with the bomb came the justification for wartime levels of science funding, in perpetuity. The fallout: the GI bill, expansion of federal money to state universities, the swelling of the University of California system to house more scientists than human history had ever employed, the creation of DARPA to manage the coffers of grant money, and the eventual restructuring of high school curricula around laboratory science and the Standard Achievement Test.

Princetonian William H. Whyte, in his epochal work The Organization Man, laments the effect of education on what in 1954 was considered mass scale: fully ten percent of the country now had a tertiary degree! Students were graduating predominantly with bachelor’s degrees in business rather than the humanities or sciences, and would report that their goals were primarily to “serve the nation” through general management at industrial corporations. So cemented now was the ideal of technological civilization that the educated youth struggled to imagine a life pursuit outside of applied empirical methods. Life was now re-wired to demand an education in science at the secondary level that would become a tertiary education in the customs and outcomes of civilizational institutions. In other words, cultural literacy for middle-class life would now center around formal education partially funded by federal grants. With the accompanying creation of suburbs and federal highways, society would homogenize and the core traits of individual citizenship would be defined (as Michel Foucault would observe) by educational and professional institutions.

Third, the expansion of American university education to global scale. We who work at technology companies surrounded by globally-sourced cohorts of Princetonians often forget that the Ivy League was not a place widely applied to by out-of-state students until the 1980s. Universities have started in the last 40 years to demand diverse student bodies (starting with, for instance, the prevalence of co-education only as recent as 1970) and to widely solicit international applicants. I have it on good authority that international tuition is the primary revenue stream for the University of California, Berkeley. The opening of universities coincides, of course, with the general opening of the labor market and the disappearance of much organized American labor (itself a product of the changes of the Progressive Era.) Common today is the complaint about the difficulty of obtaining an H1B visa — the expectation of universities and professional firms is now that recruiting and hiring should effectively ignore national borders and that therefore the function of education and professional life is to export empirical methods to American-trained professionals across the entire globe.

Today, higher education is really a comprehensive social institution. Fully 40% of the United States population now has some kind of postsecondary degree, and the President of the United States continues to push — at this point by means of explicit debt relief — to subsidize and encourage tertiary education. College degrees are widely required for employment as a simple matter of class credential. Philanthropists routinely purchase the names of buildings or departments and may earmark donations to provide for highly specific social institutions on campus. Schools continue to hire administrators and reduce the power of faculty. Competition for degrees from top schools is now increasingly fierce, and an entire economy has emerged around SAT tutoring. In effect, it seems that empirical methods have been applied to extract results from institutions originally designed to teach them. Students flood online forums colluding to “game” career outcomes from their Computer Science degrees. Disparities in department participation by sex and demographic are the constant topic of debate. Civilization is once again re-wired: the normative subject is a white-collar desk worker, life is lived in full exposure to the global economy, advancement comes from treating institutions like games, middle-class stability is effectively dependent on a credential now explicitly subsidized by ruling politicians.

So goes the rough genealogy. To sit in a chapel in Princeton that conspicuously contains bongo drums makes quite a lot of sense: as cultural discourse has come to be dominated by large white-collar employers and the universities that credential their employees, it is because of the global commitment of the American firm that there must be some symbolic nod to the principle of universality. In some sense, they’d like to buy the world a Coke.

Okay, normatively, what do we make of this? We got what we wanted, didn’t we? Protestantism birthed the intense emphasis on literacy and on the ethics of profit-driven commerce. Technological modernity has fulfilled those principles that are true to those Weberian Protestant roots, hasn’t it? Or has it merely obscured in my mind roots that go deeper than the origin of American capitalism? If I understand Luther correctly, we should care about truths revealed from above and not traditions built by humans. I do believe that we should, after Bacon, endeavor to re-wire society and to use scientific mastery to serve what we believe are virtuous aims. Even Heidegger and concerned conservatives agree with Bacon, don’t they?

And yet — bongo drums? Really? Can the Protestant regalia not speak for itself? Is the Word not universal enough?

Let’s imagine, my friend asks me, if a church decided to stick with the Reformation’s original commitment to particularism. No bongo drums, no need to nod to any globalized professional life, just a set of admittedly poor and lame traditions from nineteenth-century Scotland or wherever. Wouldn’t that be more honest, and frankly a bit more rooted? What would actually happen if we tried to put some of the religio back into contemporary religion?

I have sat in such a church — specifically, a Nordic-American Lutheran congregation. White room, simple pews, modernist laminar birch paneling, bilingual service, a nod to the history of Christianity in the Nordic countries, and coffee. Every regular attendee is probably at least sixty years old — baby boomers and even some wartime babies — and all of them descended from turn-of-the-century immigrants. Occasionally the children and grandchildren will make an appearance. In a display of generational parallax, a few college-aged girls showed up once for the celebration of Lucia and their parents remarked about how participation in a cultural heritage tradition “looked good for college.”

Here is the concrete effect of particularity: it’s a useful way to indicate oneself as qualified in a certain sense for educational credentialing. Colleges will infer from having been part of a Nordic Christian ceremony that you’re the kind of kid who is perhaps community-minded or able to help the student body think globally. What I take away crucially from the remark is that a re-wiring has certainly occurred, but it’s not the kind of barbaric or excessive effect that one might fear when one think about the collapse of tradition. I felt a real belief from the child, the mother, and the grandfather that the prosperity afforded by a college degree is a good thing. I cannot speak for the family, but, although some of my own ancestors would have celebrated Lucia, I personally struggle to find a connection to the ritual — perhaps it remains as an unconscious image, but it does not have roots for me.

Neither do the bongo drums, of course. But that’s the point of them, I assume — in a certain way, to be reminded that Protestantism has become a space of no specific tradition (or, the same, all traditions principally equally well) is perhaps the only way I can feel connected with my own roots at all.