Finding Their Way to Faith

I n 1951, William F. Buckley Jr., in his seminal work God and Man at Yale, accused the university of teaching its students out of Christianity. Seventy-five years later, the university’s community members and outside journalists alike are trying to explain why some Yale students are finding their way back into the faith.

Buckley looked at mid-century Yale and saw an institution whose official intellectual culture was becoming secular and collectivist, even while the university retained the architecture, traditions, vocabulary, and overall pretext of Christianity. Where Christianity had once been the “guiding influence of private colleges and universities,” Buckley argued that the faith and its influence had “moved to the periphery of many institutions and, in some cases, disappeared altogether.”

Broadly speaking, Buckley was right in his prediction. Nobody seriously thinks Yale’s institutional purpose today is inculcating Christianity, or even adjacent principles, in Yalies. God and Man at Yale was a canary in the coal mine of the secular trajectory that American higher education would follow.

But while Buckley correctly diagnosed Yale’s secularization, he may have overestimated its reach — or, more precisely, what that secularization could actually accomplish. Undoubtedly, Yale stopped bringing Christianity to its students. That did not prevent its students from going looking for Christianity and the questions surrounding faith and church history for themselves.

In the spring semester of the 2025–2026 academic year, HIST 280: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition was the most popular course offered within Yale College’s History Department. The course grew from a mere 13 students in 2014 to 85 students in the spring, now beating out “such popular, evergreen classes as The Birth of Europe and The Roman Empire.” I took the Catholic Intellectual Tradition — fondly abbreviated CIT by its students — during my time at Yale Divinity School. I came to it through Yale’s small conservative milieu, where Carlos Eire’s course and syllabus are passed down almost like saintly writ from one generation of conservative and Catholic students to the next. In the vastly liberal institution, the class was seen as a “safe space” to ask questions of history and theology that may earn frowns and odd looks in other seminars and lecture halls.

Conservative and Catholic students are, of course, an easy demographic for CIT to attract. But, to put it bluntly, there simply aren’t enough of them to explain 85 registrations. The course, then, is attracting students who are searching not for “apologetics” or “conversion,” but for an intellectual encounter with “the theology, philosophy and tradition of the 2,000-year-old Church.” Some credit surely belongs to Eire and his pedagogy. A scholar who is all animated eyebrows (really, there were lectures during which I feared they would take flight) and tales of fleeing Cuba that would make anyone’s stomach churn, Eire teaches with a humor and intensity that kept me coming back for future courses and helped spawn reading groups and independent studies among CIT alumni.

On other campuses, the number of students flocking to Catholic courses and institutions such as the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) and the Dominican House of Studies’ Thomistic Circles initiative is noteworthy. As Mary Eberstadt observes in the current issue of NR magazine, such interest is a “vibrant repudiation of Gen Z’s reputation for anomie.”

A teaching fellow from CIT’s record-breaking semester, Sergio Infante, offered both a reflection on the course’s importance and a prescription for its future. Yet, their recommendation contains an irony that Buckley might have recognized: Even in their making room for Catholic thought, modern academics expect the course to abide by their intellectual and political sensibilities. . . . History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Infante’s prescription is a compelling one. If growing numbers of young Catholics and Catholic-curious students are looking to faith for intellectual as well as spiritual formation, secular universities should not assume those students need to go elsewhere to find serious engagement with the Catholic tradition. By offering an education in Catholic history and thought capacious enough to engage contemporary questions, in the process Yale would form graduates who are tolerant, intellectually curious, and at home in the wider world of the liberal arts.

And who am I, a beneficiary of and believer in a liberal-arts education, to question any good-faith attempt to revive it in higher education?

Where I part ways with Infante is with his assumption that aiding in this liberal arts revival requires Catholic theology and history to be continually married to contemporary concerns.

There is scholarly purpose in courses on queer history, feminist thought, race, international history, and the other subjects that animate the modern academy. Students should have ample opportunity to pursue them. But a course on Augustine need not become a course on Augustine and the identity politics flavor of the month to justify its existence, any more than queer history must demonstrate its relevance to medieval theology. Catholicism does not need to be stapled to today’s Twitter controversy to deserve a place in the classroom. Pluralism, after all, should mean allowing long-standing intellectual traditions to speak before demanding that they answer every question in the vocabulary of the present.

Nor does making room for Catholic study require discouraging the interdisciplinary work that liberal arts universities do particularly well. A student interested in bringing Catholic theology into conversation with queer, feminist, or international history should be encouraged to do so — through independent studies, senior essays, seminars, and collaboration with faculty across departments. But that kind of synthesis is most intellectually fruitful when students first have the opportunity to encounter the subjects in their fullness, rather than having the synthesis prescribed in advance.

If Yale wants to educate a genuinely broad range of students (and expose those students, in turn, to the genuinely broad range of ideas a liberal arts education promises), it has both an intellectual and an institutional interest in making room for Augustine and Teresa of Ávila alongside “Feminist and Queer Histories of Modern South Asia” or “U.S. Queer History.”

CIT’s popularity does not mean Yale has somehow reversed the secularization Buckley lamented, nor do 85 students in a history course constitute a Catholic revival in New Haven (despite the best efforts of the university chapel and its namesake Saint Thomas More). The more modest development is the more revealing one: Three-quarters of a century after God and Man at Yale, the questions Buckley observed the university abandoning have proved considerably harder to extinguish than he feared. While Yale has long since abandoned delivering God to its students, the curious — and hopeful — thing is that some of them have gone looking for Him anyway.