The Great Communion of Scholars: Evangelical Southerners and the Birth of Modern Intellectual Authority

While the modern university is typically viewed as secular, Joel R.Iliff argues in The Great Communion of Scholars that the Protestant architects of the modern university in both the U.S.South and Germany consciously patterned their creation on the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints.By attempting to counteract the perceived secularization of their societies, a network of Awakened Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to the development of modern institutions of higher education and attendant notions of intellectual and moral authority. Beginning in the 1820s, white southern evangelicals looked abroad and found allies among contemporary religious Awakening movements in Germany.Evangelical southerners and Awakened Germans shared a desire to restore not only intellectual and spiritual order but also social and political order in the wake of the lingering upheavals wrought by the Enlightenment.Eventually, southerners drew analogies between their domestic opponent