The school began as St. Mary's College. Katharine Drexel, who would later be canonized, visited the monastery and college in 1904 as a benefactor, helping the Benedictines fund construction at a time when the surrounding diocese could not. The present name was adopted in 1913. Originally a college for young men, Belmont Abbey became coeducational in 1972. In 1987, Sacred Heart College for women merged with the Abbey, and its campus became home to a mix of college programs and adult-degree offerings. The Belmont Abbey Historic District went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1993. The college sits inside its own monastic landscape, a campus shaped by the rhythms of a working Benedictine community.

The Abbey Church rises above everything else on campus, finished in 1894 under Abbot Leo Haid's supervision. The structure carries the cruciform plan of a Latin cross, built in Gothic Revival style from brick and granite. Drexel's donations helped finish it. The two front towers carry names: Ora, the taller, meaning prayer, and Labora, the smaller, meaning work, after the Benedictine motto. Ora's bells ring for the Eucharist and for the Liturgy of the Hours. The interior was renovated in the modernist style after the Second Vatican Council to accommodate the era's liturgical reforms. Before the Diocese of Raleigh was erected in 1924, this church was the only Catholic cathedral in North Carolina. In 1998, Pope John Paul II named it a minor basilica.

Inside the basilica stands a baptismal font that the campus speaks about with quiet gravity. It is carved from a stone upon which African American people were once sold at auction on the North Carolina market. The Abbey's earliest history coincides with the post-emancipation South, but the labor that built and sustained this campus in its first decades was the labor of people whose freedom was new, fragile, and economically precarious. To take a stone that had been used to sell human beings and turn it into the vessel that washes a person into a Christian community is a deliberate act of moral reframing. The stone still bears its history. The font now means something different. Visitors are invited to see both at once.

The Crusaders compete in NCAA Division II as members of Conference Carolinas. Al McGuire coached the basketball team here from 1957 to 1964 before moving on to Marquette. In 2009 the baseball team made the Division II World Series, finishing fourth in the nation. The Conference Carolinas has awarded the Abbey the Messick Award for overall sportsmanship five times. In 2023 the Abbey won the inaugural Dr. Alan Patterson Body, Mind, and Soul Award for the combined ranking across athletic performance, graduation rates, and sportsmanship. The college's Catholic identity has produced sharper headlines too: in 2007 it removed coverage for abortion, contraception, and voluntary sterilization from its faculty health plan, prompting complaints from eight faculty members and, in 2011, a federal lawsuit against the contraceptive mandate.

Belmont Abbey is endorsed by The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College, a designation that signals strong adherence to Catholic teaching in mission and curriculum. More than eighty percent of the faculty hold doctorates. The First Year Symposium introduces incoming freshmen to the Rule of St. Benedict and the Catholic intellectual tradition. The Gratitude Bell, dedicated in 2016 and forged in 1915 by the McShane Foundry of Baltimore, sits near the cafeteria. Students ring it between noon and three each day in thanksgiving. At noon, those gathered pray the Angelus. Twenty Benedictine monks still live on campus as of 2020, the rhythm of their day shaping the rhythm of the school. Notable alumni include Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, baseball player Emilio Pagan, Olympic canoeist Michal Smolen, and NASCAR driver Jordan Anderson.