Marilynne Robinson: belief

Transcript context

…If I think about this country, we used to have a stronger tradition of a devout liberal Christianity: the Quakers, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King. It seems to me this is weaker today in relative terms, much weaker than it used to be. Do you agree with that? And if so, why do you think it happened? I think that it’s probably fair to say that that’s true. There’s been a loss of a certain kind of confidence, no question. One thing we did is disaffiliate ourselves from our own educational institutions. Harvard, Yale — all these were Protestant schools founded by Congregationalists, Princeton by Presbyterians, and so on. When they became major national institutions, they stopped being self-identified as Protestant institutions. I think that the loss of dedicated intellectual institutions has been a sad thing for us, maybe a good thing for the culture at large. When you mentioned having taught, including at Iowa, for about 25 years, surely you noticed that academics are amongst the most secular people in American society. Why do you think that is?…

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