Secular Opening Exercises? Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water

The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.

As a former Princeton chaplain, I’m eager to respond to Sasha Malena Johnson’s thoughtful Opinion piece urging that Opening Exercises be made secular. While I’m sympathetic to much that she says, my own understanding of Princeton’s religious pluralism leads me to a different conclusion.

Let me begin personally. As I didn’t become a Christian until I was 24 years old, I sat in the University Chapel for Opening Exercises in 1963 with the entirely Christian ceremony falling uncomfortably upon my Jewish ears. Such experiences have impelled me both as a Christian and as a priest to avoid the assumption that everyone believes as I do — or if they don’t, they should. Fortunately, many of Princeton’s faith leaders during the final quarter of the last century and the first quarter of this one have harbored similar sensibilities, and throughout that period, they have overseen an evolution in the nature of Opening Exercises.

In the early 1980s, Dean of the Chapel Frederick Borsch ’57 “de-Christianized” Opening Exercises, welcoming representatives of non-Christian faiths to help lead the ceremony and including a wide variety of spiritual texts. Though the ceremony was still held in the Chapel, he made a point of placing a banner in front of the cross behind the altar, realizing that, sacred though it was to Christians, the cross was a frightening symbol of persecution for many non-Christians and would therefore undermine all of his attempts at inclusivity.

Anyone who was around then will recall the uproar that erupted in the alumni body and the brave and characteristically reflective way Dean Borsch stood up to it, with the full backing of then-University President William Bowen ’58 GS. As chair of the Chapel Advisory Council and later a denominational chaplain, I, too, was in the midst of the fray.

Today’s Princeton, as Johnson rightly observes, is a different place. Pluralistic as we may have begun to be in the 1980s, the University is further along that path today — perhaps not to the extent we hope to be but moving with substantial intention in the right direction. Johnson notes the 2025 Frosh Survey in which over half of the respondents described themselves as “‘not at all’ or ‘not very’ religious.” No surprise there.

However, a 2023 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that roughly half of American agnostics and two-thirds of those with no religious identification nevertheless claim some sense of spirituality. I wonder how many Princeton first-years would have responded favorably had they been asked, “Do you consider yourself at all spiritual?”

Johnson is correct that though Princeton was founded by Presbyterian clergy, it has been nonsectarian from the beginning. That said, I don’t believe the founders thought of Princeton as “secular.” Certainly, the University’s third president, Jonathan Edwards, had nothing secular in mind as he reputedly delivered what was already by then the most famous fire-and-brimstone sermon ever written, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” to a congregation of bleary-eyed students in the Prayer Hall of Nassau Hall at 5:30 in the morning (a story I learned as an Orange Key guide). Princeton has changed, indeed.

The secular makes no room for the spiritual. But while Princeton has never been Presbyterian or even Christian by charter, I would argue that the University has always been spiritual at its core. And what Opening Exercises are meant to convey is the spirit of the institution so that it may be kept alive from generation to generation.

It’s the spirit of intellectual discovery, scientific inquiry, and artistic creativity. It’s the spirit of the personal and communal quest for identity and purpose, the spirit that urges us to lead our lives for the benefit of others, the spirit of friendship and fellowship endemic to Princeton’s residential life, the life-long spiritual bonds that tie us to this place and to one another, indeed the spiritual bond between me and Sasha and with all of our readers — the spirit that makes us, singularly, Princetonians.

Opening Exercises are Princeton’s rite of passage, welcoming the newest Princetonians into a culture that is both grounded and ever-changing, both ancient and new. Spirit is its essence. The message is too important not to communicate it in language that can be universally received, and the service should certainly be accessible to the entire University community. But you can’t remove the spirit, because the spirit is the message.

The Rev. Frank C. Strasburger ’67 was the Episcopal Chaplain at Princeton from 1986 to 1997. He can be reached at fstras[at]gmail.com.