Keith Huey, Ph.D.
Rochester University
Professor of Religion
APPROACHING CAMPBELL’S POSITION
In my earlier presentation, I provided a brief overview of the historical origins of the Churches of Christ. Along the way, I spoke of four complementary approaches people have taken, as they have attempted to make sense of the antebellum origins of this heritage.
- One approach is the “Ecumenical View,” which suggests that these churches were seeking to build a generous, orthodox alternative to the perplexing cacophony of American sects and denominations. This is an appealing approach, and there are significant irenic voices to cite. Overall, however, it comes with a limited list of supporting narratives and documents.
- Another is the “Restorationist View,” which claims that these people were trying to “restore” the first-century church, to clear away centuries of crusty traditions, and to do Bible things in Bible ways. This, I believe, is closer to the truth, but its usefulness is mostly limited to the postbellum South.
- Third is “the Millennial View,” which views the movement as a harbinger of God’s long-awaited millennium, the “amelioration of society,” where peace and justice and knowledge will reign upon the earth. This, I would argue, fits closely with the career of Alexander Campbell in particular, but not with most of his allies.
- And fourth is “the Populist View,” which understands these people as frontier rabble-rousers who hoped to overturn the elitist authority of clerics, creeds, and councils. As you might recall, I think this is the best approach we can take, if we want to see the big picture.
In this presentation, however, we will not be looking at the big picture. We are looking, for the moment, at the career of Alexander Campbell, and we are restricting ourselves to his philosophy of education. For this, we will surely notice his populist prejudices, and his millennial visions will loom just as large.
CAMPBELL’S CONCERNS WITH EDUCATION
Campbell was schooled at home in Ulster, in Northern Ireland, and he never attended a full collegiate program. Yet, he was extremely well-educated, and he possessed a prodigious intellect. Despite the brevity of his attendance at the University of Glasgow, he flourished in that environment. His educational interests were surely nurtured by his father, Thomas (an ordained Presbyterian minister), who was renowned, wherever he went, for his significant pedagogical talents. This included a controversial episode in Kentucky, when Thomas attempted to teach a crowd of black men and women. Back in Ulster, the younger Campbell had worked as an assistant for his father, and later, in 1818, he opened his own “seminary” in Brooke County, Va. These passions ran deeply in the Campbell family: his sisters, Dorothea and Jane, founded and administered their own schools as well. The younger Campbell’s role as an educator has been frequently visited by Restoration scholars, and has been the subject of several dissertations, numerous chapters, and significant articles.
In the midst of these labors, Campbell was deeply critical of the educational status quo. For him, God’s millennium would be a spectacular upheaval of unprecedented brilliance, and it would require some very heavy lifting from a well-prepared order of teachers and schools. The millennial project was much more, he lamented, than the existing systems could handle. In his prospectus for the Millennial Harbinger journal, he promised to attend to a series of critical issues, including the “inadequacy of all the present systems of education, literary and moral, to delvelope [sic] the powers of the human mind, and to prepare man for rational and social happiness.” True to his word, he addressed this concern – sharply and relentlessly – in subsequent Harbinger issues.
As an anti-clerical populist, Campbell had little interest in training students for professional ministry. He regarded such schools with contempt. He sought, instead, to promote a diverse range of scholarship, what we might call the “Liberal Arts.” He was keenly interested in farming, medicine, history, literature, business, and politics, and he hoped to prepare his students for all such endeavors.
As Campbell said to a convention in Clarksburg, Virginia, in 1841:
There are seven arts that human nature must acquire in a judicious course of primary and fundamental education. These seven arts are as essential to education as society always was, and is, and ever more shall be, as food and raiment are to the human body . . . They are as follows: – 1st. The art of thinking; 2d. The art of speaking; 3d. The art of reading. 4th. The art of singing; 5th. The art of writing; 6th. The art of calculating; and, 7th. The art of book-keeping.
In the charter of his own Bethany College, he called for “the instruction of youth in the various branches of science and literature, the useful arts and the learned and foreign languages.” In the catalogue, he offered ancient languages and history, algebra and general mathematics, chemistry, natural philosophy and natural sciences, mental philosophy, evidences of Christianity, morals, political economy, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. He also believed in physical education, and he counseled his readers to:
Exercise gently, gradually, constantly, without oppression, without fatigue, without excess, every organ, faculty, power, and capacity, whether physical, mental, or moral . . . as God has made body, soul, and spirit, do you train them all . . . Exercise, it must be conceded, enlarges and improves every member and organ of the body.
Above all else, however, Campbell was concerned about the issue of moral development. It is a very common error, he said, to suppose that “in cultivating the intellect we are cultivating the moral sentiments and feelings.” In 1836 he spoke to the College of Professional Teachers in Cincinnati, where he insisted that “moral culture” is an essential (but neglected) part of “national and popular education.” This moral neglect, he argued, had corrupted youthful minds, and many had been “forever ruined by receiving a college education.” This was, for him, an oft-repeated theme. In 1832 he said that “most of the common schools” waste their time with “a mere smattering of words, without the knowledge of anything in nature, society, or religion.” In 1841 he stated that “intellectual without moral culture is a curse to each and every community . . . a national calamity rather than a public benefaction.”
QUEST FOR NON-SECTARIAN MORAL TRAINING
Churches, it would seem, were well-positioned to address these shortcomings in moral preparation. Catholics and Protestants (in America and in Europe) were prepared to assert their academic potential. Jesuits came to be known as the “schoolmasters of Europe,” and Lutherans launched their own educational projects in Germany. Anglicans and Puritans, meanwhile, had established academies and universities in England. Moreover, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, a British Evangelical movement, had labored to extend these privileges to those who could least afford it. Likewise, in the New American Republic, preachers were universally zealous to “prepare a responsible citizenry.” Various streams of the Puritan movement, in particular, controlled a sizeable portion of the New Republic’s educational enterprise, with flagship institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
Campbell’s disdain for clerical imposition, however, prevented him from joining these kinds of efforts, and his critiques were exceptionally cynical. In 1825, for instance, the Kentucky legislature considered a proposal for a new university in the town of Danville. It would be incorporated and endowed by the state, but it would also be administered by the local Presbyterian synod. Campbell was appalled by the temerity of the Synod, and he asked:
What sort of a spirit do they exhibit in this effort? What moved them to solicit such a favor for themselves, to the exclusion of all other Christian sects? I see in them the spirit of the two sons of Zebedee. They beg for the highest places in the kingdom. They obsequiously approach the legislature of Kentucky, and pray them to grant that their sons may sit at their right hand in their dominion and rule.
Campbell believed that State authorities could deliver the right kind of educational (and moral) system, but they needed to stand completely clear from sectarian interference. With this in mind, he developed an argument for State-sponsored “common school” education. In 1829 he was elected as a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention, and he came with these statements in hand:
- Ignorance is the parent of idleness, and this becomes the fruitful source of immorality and crime of every gradation.
- To prevent crime is much wiser than to punish it.
- Government having for its object the prevention rather than the punishment of crime . . . ought, if it act wisely, to devote its energies to the erection and maintenance of the safeguards of life, liberty, reputation, and property, which it is agreed on all hands, are INTELLIGENCE AND VIRTUE.
- Schools and seminaries of learning, well conducted and sustained, are essential, in every community, to the expulsion of ignorance, and the promotion of intelligence and virtue.
- They are, therefore, the most necessary, useful, and every way appropriate objects of legislation, and of governmental supervision, protection, and support. . . .
The Virginia Convention, however, did not provide a useful platform for Campbell’s educational activism, and, despite the depth of his convictions, he was forced to keep them to himself. He was largely dismissed as a mere clergyman, and the Convention was consumed, instead, by intractable sectional disputes.
Back home in 1830, Campbell used his Millennial Harbinger to unveil a three-point proposal. First, he suggested, the entire state of Virginia should be subjected to a modest school tax; second, those taxes should pay for a central state university and for common schools in every corner of the state; and third, a body of teachers should be trained and licensed by the new university. Clearly, he was willing to vest considerable authority in Richmond, and he trusted its capacity to manage teacher compensation and to create pedagogical excellence.
In the following years, his recommendations became more detailed. In Clarksburg, in 1841, he presented the “most systematic” summary of his ideas. He was weary of sectional disputes, and he was unwilling, at this point, to wait for Richmond’s unlikely cooperation. He asserted that:
. . . common schools can be introduced in Western Virginia without any or at least with very little additional expense to the richer classes, or to the whole community, I am confident can be made apparent to all. But, in order to this, we must go to work not only energetically, but systematically. We must not wait till all the East and the West agree on one system. This would be equivalent to postponing indefinitely the matter altogether.
Campbell then outlined the “ways and means” for his strategy. He urged his audience to make a persuasive campaign of lectures and periodical publications. He also advocated letters to Richmond, pleading for an equitable portion of the state’s “Literary Fund.” He believed counties (or districts of counties) should have the power to levy taxes of their own, and he proposed the creation of school districts. Each district would have a supervisory committee and a treasurer.
In 1835 Campbell had specified a system “patronized, sustained, guarded, and controlled by the State,” and in his Clarksburg address, he believed the government should exercise “very strict and rigid supervision.” Compared with other contemporary approaches, these proposals were highly bureaucratic, and they were destined for resistance in the context of the New American Republic. Many feared, quite rightly, that centralized systems could challenge the rights and privileges of minority cultures and parents. Common schools were destined to become “agents of cultural standardization” and “outposts of native culture.” Decent and educated people could easily believe in alternatives.
In his own language, Campbell had little to say about the bureaucratic-localist controversy. State sponsorship had obvious financial advantages, and he was quite unworried about the tyranny of centralized systems. He had very little sympathy for “minority cultures,” such as Catholicism, which were (in his opinion) opposed to God’s millennium. Those kinds of minorities could be safely excluded from his vision for the future, and could not be safely accommodated. Indeed, in Campbell’s view, anti-Catholic prejudice was a very good thing, and worked (ultimately) in everybody’s favor.
He was also willing to accept the risks of centralization because he wanted to build an alternative to clerical and sectarian influence. It was essential, as John Lowell Morrison observes, to protect the system from “corrupted clerical trustees.” As we have already seen, Campbell rejected the Presbyterian programs especially, but he also repudiated ecumenical societies, as well. To him, they were little more than the iniquitous schemes of a “learned priesthood,” designed “to keep men in ignorance and bondage,” teaching people to “put out their own eyes, to fetter their own feet, and to bind the yoke upon their own necks.” With such impressions as these, he was driven to commit his ambitious proposals to the hands of civil servants who were rational, broadminded, and objective – like him.
A POLAR STAR: THE EDUCATIONAL ROLE OF THE BIBLE
Campbell, of course, was familiar with human weakness. For that reason, he rested his confidence on the prudent application of the wisest, most trustworthy, and impartial book ever written. That book, of course, was the Bible, the indispensable key to an authentic moral education. This was a primary theme in his address to the Charlottesvile Lyceum in 1840, where he argued that the value of ancient moral philosophy was completely dependent on its origins in the Abrahamic traditions. Likewise, in 1856, with another address in Cincinnati, he insisted, over and over, that the Bible must be employed as a public-school textbook. “A school, an academy, a college, without the Bible in it, is like a universe without a centre and without a sun.” “We want the Holy Bible of Protestant Christendom,” he continued,
to be consecrated in the heads, the hearts, the consciences and the lives of our sons and daughters. We, therefore, plead . . . especially with the curators, the superintendents, the presidents, the professors, the teachers, of all seminaries of learning, to permit their pupils, if not to cause them, duly to listen to God speaking to them, teaching them and directing them in the path of life and honor and blessedness eternal.
This was a frequently-argued position, and was a philosophical cornerstone in his educational community at Bethany.
It is scarcely imaginable, in the present day, to imagine the Bible as a public-school textbook. Doctrines of church-state separation have clearly evolved since the times of the New Republic. Nonetheless, Campbell was already aware of the objections that his Bible-reading proposals might elicit, and he was current with the relevant legal debates. In response to a hypothethical Jacobin critic from the French Revolution, he attempted to uphold the principle of Bible-reading without sacrificing the principles of the Constitution. For him, the First Amendment did prohibit an alliance between Congress and particular sects of Christianity; it did not, however, prevent the promotion of nonsectarian Christianity.
Some had argued that the Bible could never be used without sectarian prejudice; to them, however, Campbell had a scornful rejoinder. “What!” he exclaimed. “Is the Bible a sectarian book? Which sect made it?” In his 1856 address “On Education,” he explained that the Bible is a book of facts, and not of theories.” It can be used, therefore, “without one speculative oracle, on the part of teacher or pupil.” In the 1837 meeting of the College of Professional Teachers, they passed a Bible-reading resolution with one condition, submitted by Campbell himself: teachers were not to offer “denominational or sectarian comment” in conjunction with their scriptural readings. He was remarkably confident about the practicality (and constitutionality) of that principle.
Once again, however, his sympathies were explicitly Protestant, and his program was urgently promoted as a bulwark against the anti-millennial threat of Catholicism. “Remember,” he said, “that the Catholic bloodhounds of the dark ages were persons who never had read the Bible . . . who have always feared light from that book, as Satan loves darkness.” In 1838 Campbell admonished his readers:
. . . let no squeamishness on the subject of a state religion, prevent the reading and teaching of the Bible . . . The Bible is the shield of the nation; and if it be not read and universally taught from Dan even to Beersheba, the Catholics will take away our place and nation just as certain as the waters of the Ohio descend into the Mississippi.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
What, then, should we do with all of this? I am quite unimpressed with Campbell’s insensitivity toward the concerns of Catholic families, his flirtation with theories of “Manifest Destiny,” his naïve confidence in the objectivity of “biblical facts,” and his faith in nonsectarian public adminstrators. At the same time, however, I believe he speaks a meaningful word for anybody who lives, works, and teaches in the movement he inspired. In particular, I can think of three lessons, very closely related, that would be instructive for us.
First of all, I believe we should revive his passion for the “amelioration of society.” When Campbell used this language, he was pitching for peace, justice, and knowledge on this earth. His Harbinger prospectus, accordingly, was unabashedly political. Among other interests, it specifically advocated the “emancipation” and “exaltation” of African slaves. He did not attempt to divorce such “worldly” concerns from the “spiritual” quest for “saving souls.” This priority, unfortunately, was not retained by his heirs in the Churches of Christ, and his millennial language has been treated as a point of embarrassment. We would be faithful to Campbell’s influence, if we could recover this holistic legacy.
Second, he captured the spirit of the liberal arts, giving dignity to a broad spectrum of disciplines. He did not merely speak of diverse academic options; even more, he believed that a well-rounded person would integrate the insights of different academic fields. To receive a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethany, each student was required to “graduate” from all five of the institution’s schools. With this policy, Campbell sought to highlight the value of a “general education program,” and to reverse the isolation of different departments.
Third, he believed in the moral potential that came with every vocation. I do not know how he would integrate the Bible with mathematical, agricultural, or psychological instruction. It seems crucial, however, for a liberal arts program in a “Christian university” to nurture vocational possibilities for every field of study. We might be reluctant to speak in terms of “the millennium,” but we should not be hesitant about “the Kingdom of God.” This project should not be restricted to a band of religious professionals, and should be entrusted to accountants, schoolteachers, and nurses as well.
To this day, the Churches of Christ have been characterized by an impressive list of liberal arts institutions. Against Campbell’s wishes, we have created degrees in theology and ministry. In addition, we have unaccredited schools that specialize in ministerial preparation. Nonetheless, we have been shaped by the legacy of the liberal arts idea, and Rochester University owes its existence to this ongoing story. To me, this seems like a very good thing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bowen, James. A History of Western Education. 3 vols. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981.
Campbell, Alexander. The Christian Baptist. 2d ed. Edited by Alexander Campbell and David S. Burnet. Cincinnati: James and Gazlay, 1835. Reprint, Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing, 1988.
Campbell, Alexander. Millennial Harbinger. 1830-66. Reprint, Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing, 1987.
Colvin, Randall Arthur. Alexander Campbell and the Power of Education. Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas, 2020.
Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The National Experience 1783-1876. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
Dabney, Charles William. Universal Education in the South. 2 vols. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969.
Kaestle, Carl F. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
Katz, Michael B. “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment.” History of Education Quarterly 16 (Winter 1976).
Katz, Michael B. “From Voluntarism to Bureaucracy in American Education.” In Education in American History: Readings on the Social Issues. Edited by Michael B. Katz. New York: Praeger, 1973.
Lunger, Harold. The Political Ethics of Alexander Campbell. St. Louis: Bethany, 1954.
Maddox, William. The Free School Idea in Virginia Before the Civil War: A Phase of Political and Social Evolution. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1918; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969.
Miyakawa, T. Scott. Protestants and Pioneers: Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Morrison, John Lowell. Alexander Campbell and Moral Education. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1966.
Morrison, John Lowell. “Education, Philosophy of.” In Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Edited by Douglas A. Foster, et al. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.
Olbricht, Thomas H. “Alexander Campbell As an Educator,” in Lectures in Honor of the Alexander Campbell Bicentennial, 1788-1988. Edited by James M. Seal. Nashville: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 1988.
Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, of 1829-30. Richmond, VA: Ritchie & Cook, 1830.
Richardson, Robert. Memoirs of Alexander Campbell. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1868; reprint, Indianapolis: Religious Book Service, n.d.
Smith, Lawrence Thomas. The “Amelioration of Society”: Alexander Campbell and Educational Reform in Antebellum America. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1990.
