Secularization and Required Attendance
But the current Chapel cannot be fully understood without grasping the situation
that faced President John Grier Hibben (1912-1932), under whose direction it was
constructed. Hibben was Princeton’s last President who was also a theologian,
yet he presided over an increasingly secular domain. In 1897 following the
serving of alcohol in the historically Presbyterian town, and President Francis
Patton’s defense of the license, it was said “The college of Dickinson and Edwards
and Witherspoon had yielded to the secularizing influences of the day.” 19 Furthermore,
in 1906 Woodrow Wilson abolished denomination tests for faculty, loosening the
Protestant grip on the curriculum. “Theology,” it was now quite clear, “no
longer served as a unifying factor in the educational offerings at Princeton.” 20
Daily chapel had been required for well over 175 years, a tradition that had
led to both prank and protest, which included bouts of foot scraping, a calf once
tied to the pulpit, and the tarring of the seats of the Old Chapel. The mischievous
tradition culminated in Marquand Chapel in 1914, when the entire class experienced
a corporate bout of “bronchitis,” the coughing fit being almost enough to bring
the service to a halt. 21 As one recent author has remarked,
“During the febrile, skeptical 1920’s, when ‘campuses were generally
not very devout,’ and H.L. Mencken and his American Mercury assailed the old pieties, ‘puritanism,’
and the Bible Belt, required chapel did not call forth the most worshipful behaviour from Princeton
undergraduates”
22The gentle-mannered Hibben took a unique approach to
this dilemma. Perhaps wary of the frictions that strong-handed administration
had led to in Princeton’s past, he abolished daily chapel attendance
in 1915. 23 Five years later when Marquand Chapel burned, so therefore
did the last architectural expression of required daily chapel. In
its place Hibben sought to build a structure capable of compelling
students to enter voluntarily, one that would seek to convince, not
impose, the truths of faith. As he wrote in an appeal letter for the current Chapel,
“The thoughts and feelings of youth are peculiarly
sensitive to their surroundings, and a new meaning will be imparted to their interpretation
of things unseen and eternal as they come by daily association to recognize the new
Princeton Chapel as the University’s protest against the materialistic philosophy
and drift of our age, the symbol of the higher aspirations of man, a refuge for
quiet thought and contemplation, ‘a house of ancient mystery,’ the holy place of God.”
24 The Chapel was built at a cost of two million dollars, prompting student quips about
this “protest against materialism’s” rather hefty expense. In the year of its
dedication, Hibben also initiated “a series of reforms meant to draw student
worshippers.” 25 These included the new office of Dean of the Chapel taking the
place of the President in the pulpit, a position that is the Dean of Religious Life today.
