The Fall of the Last Mainline Seminary

The summer of 2020 is hard to forget (no matter how much one may want to). Intense anxiety hung in the air and clung to every surface. Covid-19 had undone life as we knew it. Restaurants and shops were closed. Schools and gyms were shuttered. The streets were quiet—until an infamous incident in Minneapolis struck a match that caused the nation’s simmering tensions to erupt.

The death of George Floyd launched the Black Lives Matter Movement, Antifa riots, and HR-focused board meetings. The protests set off a chain reaction of ideologically induced institutional reckoning across the country. Few schools were spared. Administrators everywhere sent off emails condemning racism, apologizing for their part in perpetuating the system, and affirming their dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Some schools restructured their administration and renovated their curriculum entirely. In the rolling hills of Princeton, NJ, one such quiet revolution took place.

Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS), once known for its orthodoxy relative to the country’s other historic schools of divinity, remade itself in the image of DEI. Ahead of the curve, the seminary set out to renovate its curriculum in 2018, after publishing a seminal report investigating its own relationship to slavery. By the fall of 2021, PTS had gutted its departments, programs of study, and remodeled core courses to reflect the new consensus: metaphysics was out, social justice was in.

And I know, because I escaped the wreckage.

As a member of the class of 2020, my prospects for post-graduation were not exactly bright. I, along with my compatriots, entered a world bleak with uncertainty. Many of us were forced to return to the unwelcome familiarity of our childhood bedrooms as hiring froze across the globe. Whatever bold, exciting, hustling, and bustling life we imagined for ourselves after college, this wasn’t it.

In that strange year, I did, however, acquire welcomed time to reflect on my post-collegiate path.

As an undergraduate at Yale, I arranged my curricular and extracurricular schedules to pursue a nagging question—really, the only question: quid est veritas?

As a native Minnesotan, I grew up with the faith of my fathers. We were members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, a blend of American fundamentalism and Old-World Lutheranism. However, several years at a classical Catholic school led me to question my church’s rejection of reason in the face of revelation, and I longed for an integration of the two.

And so, perhaps unlike my peers, I entered college with a mind full of questions informed by my Christian wonderings. What is the nature of God? Of grace? Of free will? Of human reason? Of true assent? As a student, I attended Catholic mass weekly while leading a nondenominational campus ministry. I referred to myself as an “ecumenical floater.”

With adolescent zeal, I had hoped four years of studying philosophy and debating big ideas would leave me with a clear and certain belief system. If I just sorted that out, all else would follow.

Unsurprisingly, four years at Yale left me with more questions than answers. After graduation, as I contemplated my future in a world frozen by Covid-19, the questions grew louder.

There was only one solution—I had to go back to school. I needed to read more, to dive into the history of Christianity, to grapple with the Doctors of the Church. Thus began my perusal of graduate programs in theology.

Ultimately, I enrolled at PTS due to their generous scholarship package. (I had no plans to take out loans for a decidedly non-professional degree.) I also chose PTS as I had heard, on good authority, that it was one of the saner East Coast theological institutions. (Emphasis on “was.”)

I pulled up to campus behind the wheel of my trusty U-Haul and moved myself into Roberts Hall (an old dorm building that was deemed “in need of redevelopment” and has since been demolished). Although clearly in need of repairs, the hall, like all the seminary’s buildings, was undeniably lovely.

The main campus of PTS exudes patrician elegance and WASP-y heritage. Founded in 1812, the seminary is the second-oldest in the country. Institutionally independent from Princeton University, the Seminary remains a school of the Presbyterian Church (USA). The architectural styles on its campus vary from Romanesque Revival arches to Federal cupolas, but blend together beautifully on the main, grassy quad. With an endowment of $1.4 billion, PTS is one of the wealthiest seminaries in the country. And, with a population of only 300 students, the seminary’s operational costs aren’t very big.

Soon enough, it was time for new-student orientation. I met at the main quad, as directed. I was swiftly engulfed in a sea of Presbyterian 20-somethings singing South African anti-apartheid songs. We all marched into a pastel-painted chapel and the deans told us that we were home.

In the pews were all the new students – a total of around 100. By the altar sat the administration and a few cherry-picked returning students, selected to testify to the greatness of PTS.

One of these selected students took the stand and told us not to worry about how smart everyone else may seem –– she herself lacked basic knowledge as a first-year and still thrived. She confessed that when she started at PTS, she thought “hermeneutic” was a guy named “Herman Utik.” (The audience laughed on queue.)

Another selected student said he had no idea who Karl Barth was when he arrived at PTS. Although he had since learned about Barth, he professed that he still didn’t understand the Swiss scholar’s theology. (Laughs again arose from the crowd.)

Approximately eight administrators gave eight administrative spiels, chock full of superlatives and spasms of enthusiasm. Then everyone burst into anti-apartheid song again, this time with crashing hand-claps. Just a wash of palms, smashing themselves together at an unregulated pace, faster and faster. I kept looking around me to see if anyone else was surprised by the theater of absurdity in which we had all become unwitting actors. (No one was.) This is when I began to seriously doubt my choice of theological school.

“Certainly,” I reassured myself, “my courses would prove more serious than Orientation.” (Spoiler: They would not.)

I had applied to and enrolled at PTS in order to pursue a two-year Master of Arts in Theological Studies (MA(TS)) degree in Philosophy & Theology. This degree was distinct from the three-year Master of Divinity (MDiv), which sought to form students into pastors, teachers, social workers, etc. My two-year program was designed for students considering further study, especially doctoral work in the field.

However, to the collective surprise of myself and my MA(TS) cohort, we learned – after we arrived on campus – that our degree program had been radically restructured.

The Associate Dean for Academic Administration informed us, during orientation week, that the Philosophy & Theology concentration had been, in effect, annihilated. Over the course of a 20-minute meeting, we were told that the Theology Department had absorbed the “Philosophy” part of the concentration. This absorption was mirrored in the course catalog, with zero courses listed under the “Theology-Philosophy” tab for the 2021-2022 school year.

While this restructuring was presented to us as a positive change, it meant that the program I had applied to no longer existed. Despite this surprise, I held on to the hope that I would be able to register for courses that engaged my interests, even if there were no courses available under the “Theology-Philosophy” designation. However, these hopes were soon drowned as well.

PTS had launched its “New Curriculum” just in time for the Fall 2021 semester.

Responding to the work of the “Historical Audit Committee” – a group of faculty and administrators appointed by then-president Craig Barnes to research PTS’s ties to slavery – a new committee was formed to infuse social justice into the Seminary’s curriculum.

Dr. Eric D. Barreto, co-chair of the task force that designed the New Curriculum, helped approve a new slate of courses that focused on “the pursuit of racial justice, the formation of grace-filled inclusive communities of faith, innovative imaginations for new forms of ministry, and generous care for God’s creation.” Out with John Calvin, in with Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The New Curriculum turned PTS’s standard course offerings on their head. Some courses were renovated, others were built from the ground up.

One such addition was a course called “Life Together.” Required for all incoming students, a faceless administrator placed each student into a Life Together pod. I was placed into the pod about race relations in the contemporary U.S. We spent hours every Thursday sharing our narratives and our thoughts on the mode of narrative and understanding the power of narratives and experiencing the narratives that others shared. Our first reading assignment was the 1619 Project, and our homework consisted of keeping a journal. We sat in a circle in chair-desks– in the center of our circle stood a little table covered in an embroidered afghan, upon which sat a turquoise clay jug and two gilded wooden sticks. I think there was incense.

Noticeably missing from the class? Theology and philosophy. These antiquated disciplines had been replaced with contemporary sociology. Corporate guilt was no longer a referent to sanctification, but to “whiteness.” We did not investigate the nature of the “elect,” instead, we investigated the nature of “privilege.” Our assignments were not to seek truth in any scholastic sense, but to put our feelings and experiences into words.

Other courses required by the New Curriculum shared similar themes. A two-semester Christian history sequence was remodeled to begin in the Congo rather than Jerusalem or Rome, such that a student’s introduction to church history was a presentation of missionaries as colonizers. PTS’s introductory course on the Old Testament was edited to focus on the experiences of women. In another New Curriculum course with feminist themes, the professor suggested the Virgin Mary was “raped” by the Holy Spirit.

A student review of a course designed for the New Curriculum unwittingly highlights the program’s pedestaling of identity over orthodoxy: 

The greatest part of the class was the introduction of various non-dominant theologians, especially Mujerista Theology and Asian Feminist Theology! While I’ve already had encounters with reading Mujerista theologians, I did not have the Asian perspective and Womanist theology. I loved the inclusion of Ellacuría — crucified peoples mixed in with Barth and Moltmann. This makes engaging in theology richer, deeper, and holistic. As a Latinx student, I was surprised and very pleased to see ‘folks like me’ included in the syllabus. Not very many courses reflected the student population, but this class did.

While there remained a few excellent professors at the Seminary who taught serious courses, their classes were logistically out of reach. With nine mandated courses, the New Curriculum effectively banned MA(TS) students from taking elective courses in the first year of the program – a hurdle for the many MA(TS) students who planned to apply to PhD programs in the fall semester of their second year.

Over the course of many hours struggling to rationalize the value of such an education, I found myself in a very different place from where I began. The blatant politicization of (what I had hoped were) unchanging truths at PTS was the last nudge I needed to cross the Tiber. I know I am not the only member of my generation who has been drawn to a Church that institutionally eschews trends, seeks unity, and embraces the permanent things.  

After just a few weeks at PTS, I officially withdrew from it (the administration at the time never addressed a letter I sent to them outlining my concerns). Everything I experienced led me to flee a spiritual pedagogical environment that had turned into a liberationist manque. I was back in a U-Haul, driving down the Mid-Atlantic coast, to start life anew as a Catholic. I was officially confirmed by Dominican friars who, in turn, introduced me to the intellectual riches of the faith I had hoped to discover.

I don’t write this to evangelize my Catholic faith, but to call attention to the decline of the great heritage of religious education in this country – most of our nation’s best colleges and universities began as seminaries. PTS’s moral inversion of its sacred calling to train Protestant pastors and thinkers betrays the next generation of Christian thinkers who enter its campus. I hope it may be revived, but a season of humility, candor, and wisdom must precede PTS’s reopening to the historic Christian faith.

Kayla Bartsch is a William F. Buckley, Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review.