Religion on Campus. (Featured Topic).

DURING THE LAST TEN OR FIFTEEN YEARS, a large number of studies have examined religion in higher education. Largely missing in these studies has been a close, firsthand inspection of religion on campus. In particular, they simply have not supplied answers to basic questions like how, and how widely, do today's American undergraduates practice religion during their college or university years? In what manner do students understand and talk about their religious or nonreligious postures? What opportunities are provided for undergraduates to study religion? What approaches to that study do the teachers of those undergraduates take?

Context of the Study

Religion has long figured importantly in the history of American higher education, but its role has changed as America and its educational in-stitutions have changed. In the colonial period, a number of major colleges were founded primarily for the purpose of educating clergymen.

Until the rise of the modern American university in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the traditional divisions of scholarly study began to be transformed into academic disciplines presided over by specialized professionals, religious and moral instruction permeated the entire curriculum of many colleges. Educators often assumed that religious principles and biblical knowledge were coextensive with science, history, and languages. And they believed that a thorough grounding in religious principles and biblical knowledge supported advances across the educational spectrum. Those assumptions played a significant role in the early development of advanced education for women as well as the ongoing development of higher education for men. Higher education for women was justified because it was presumed to be joined seamlessly with piety. Similar arguments accompanied the founding of Catholic and Jewish centers of advanced learning in the nineteenth century. These institutions distinguished the mselves from Protestant schools in many ways and, in fact, were established partly to protect Catholics and Jews from assimilation to Protestant culture. But they, too, operated on the premise that religious and moral instruction was fundamental to all other forms of learning.

Largely as a result of the establishment of universities influenced by scholarly approaches to a variety of academic fields, many of these earlier efforts to integrate all forms of learning with basic religious principles began to appear simplistic and grandiose. New advances in research proceeded along diverse lines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making the whole enterprise of academic learning, in colleges as well as universities, more heterogeneous than ever before. At the same time, increased understanding and appreciation of the religions of the world challenged the notion that Christianity could be made the foundation of human knowledge, and religiously diverse faculty and students would call into question the possibility--and the desirability--of making one religious perspective a unifying campus principle.

In the 1990s, several studies of religion in American higher education interpreted these intellectual, religious, and educational developments as parts of a steady and certain process of secularization. George Marsden (1992 and 1994), for example, has seen in the developments proof across the university curriculum of what he calls "methodological secularization," or the suspension of religious beliefs in order to attain scientific objectivity. He also has detected an "aggressive pluralistic secularism that provides no check at all on the tendencies of the university to fragment into technical specialties," the elimination of a Christian voice in shaping policy, and, "in the name of equality and the rights of women and minorities," the questioning of all beliefs "as mere social constructions." The result for Marsden is that American universities and the colleges that imitate them have radically marginalized religion: "There is a definite bias against any perceptible religiously informed perspectives getting a hearing in the university classroom." In short, Marsden believes that institutions of higher education have become secular not by abolishing religion but by stripping it of significant influence, confining it to the innocuous realms of voluntary campus groups and religion classrooms where religious convictions are suppressed. As a consequence, "the presence of religion programs in universities is, on balance, not a countervailing force to the secularization of universities."

James Burtchaell (1998) has proposed that colleges and universities that have claimed significant connections with Christian denominations have also been secularized. Those schools, Burtchaell believes, have experienced progressive and largely unintentional alienation from their ecclesiastical fellowships. Burtchaell claims that a considerable amount of self-deception can be uncovered in this development: "The estrangement between colleges and churches was effected by men and women who said and apparently believed that they wanted them to be partners in both the life of the spirit and the life of the mind. But they concealed from themselves and from some of their constituencies the process of alienation as it was under way." The chief source of this self-deceiving secularization of Christian colleges was the emergence of pietism, a religious posture that elevated the emotions over the intellect and the personal over the communal: "Religion's move to the academic periphery was not so much the work of godless i ntellectuals as of pious educators who, since the onset of pietism, had seen religion as embodied so uniquely in the personal profession of faith that it could not be seen to have a stake in social learning."

Intent of the Study

To a large extent, our study was prompted by a desire to test the adequacy of secularization theories as measures of the importance of religion on the contemporary campus. Frankly, we were suspicious about their adequacy from the outset for a number of reasons. First, the theories did not conform to our own experiences in higher education. Second, quite apart from our own experiences, as historians of religion in America, we are convinced that judging the present by the past without the attention to the changing shape of religion can obscure new forms of religious vitality in the present. Boards of trustees and offices of college presidents are no longer dominated by the clergy, and students usually feel little need to confine their spirituality within denominational boundaries. But these changes seem more clearly to add up to the declericalizing, de-de-denominationalizing, and, in some cases, de-Christianizing of campuses than to their secularization or their marginalization of religion.

Third, the changes also may very well reflect the protean flexibility that has characterized American religion as a whole throughout the nation's history. Given the overall tendency of American religion to assume new shapes as social and cultural conditions change, it is reasonable to suspect that religion on our college and university campuses has assumed some new appearances as well, appearances that may have gone unrecognized in the secularization theories.

A fourth reason for wondering about the adequacy of secularization theories is that some prominent sociologists have given up on the theories. Sociologists have been the most avid proponents of secularization, but a number of scholars among their ranks have recently concluded that the assumption governing secularization theories simply does not stand up to empirical fact. Peter Berger (1997), for example, has said: "I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand... . There was some evidence for it. But I think it's basically wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular." Berger thinks that the one exception may be a secularized Western Europe, but he insists that the rest of the world, including the United States, is very religious indeed. Sociologist Rodney Stark (1999) goes even farther than Berger by claiming that there is no evidence of a decline of religi on in Western Europe either. Stark is convinced that the assumption that there was once an Age of Faith does not pass historical muster in Europe, and there is plenty of evidence across the world that individual religiousness is prospering in all kinds of societies. If social scientists are so sure of a widespread religiousness in the world, especially in American culture, one has to suspect that the college campus may not be an exception.

Four Institutions

Fully cognizant that in one study we could not cover the entire range of the nation's colleges and universities, we decided to do an intensive examination of four schools representing diverse points on the educational map. We deliberately chose schools that are quite different in their historical backgrounds, mission statements, regional settings, and perceived relations to religion. (In the interest of obtaining the full and candid cooperation of the representatives of the four schools, we have used pseudonyms for persons, places, and the schools themselves.) We wanted to include a large, public state university. West University served this purpose. Given the current lamentations about the secularization of Christian denominational schools, we thought it important to look at the shape of religion at a Protestant institution (North College, a Lutheran liberal arts college) and a Roman Catholic institution (East University). [Both] publicly avow their particular religious heritages as vital parts of their miss ions and milieus and thus could serve as examples of the connections or disconnections between church and school. The southern university selected for our study represents a different educational universe still. Traditionally committed to the education of African Americans, South University at one time was a denominational institution but now defines itself as a private, non-denominational school with Presbyterian roots.

Our chapters focus on the religious practices of today's undergraduates, student attitudes toward religion, the approaches to the study of religion taken by teachers of undergraduates. Although on occasion we examine the historical backgrounds of the schools and use the results of quantitative surveys, the bulk of our study consists of qualitative analysis. Employing the methods of ethnography, we have sought through interviews, observation, key informants, and extensive field notes to get inside the worlds of the schools and understand them in their own terms.

[A chapter on each institution organizes the presentation of findings under the tides of Ethos, Religious Practice, and Teaching Religion. Those chapters describe the cam pus visits, interviews, and classroom observations that were used to explore the dimensions of religion on the four campuses.--EDITOR]

Findings

If the definition of religion includes spirituality as well as the more traditional, denominationally based forms of religious expression, we can say with utter confidence that opportunities for undergraduates to practice religion were widely available at all four schools. To be sure, religious practice was undertaken by a higher percentage of students at the three schools with religious denominational connections, and religious practice figured more prominently in the ethos of those schools than at the state university. Yet the so-called secular culture of the state university by no means disadvantaged religious practice.

The undergraduates we interviewed, as well as many of the campus professionals who helped us interpret the religion of undergraduates, preferred to use the words "spirituality" and "spiritual" instead of "religion" and "religious" when describing undergraduate attitudes and practices. Numerous students understood "religion" to mean institutions or organizations, whereas [they] took "spirituality" to mean a personal experience of God or ultimate values. Furthermore, more often than not, "spiritual" and "spirituality" connoted a quest, a journey, something not yet completed, whereas "religion" and "religious" signified something completed, fixed, handed down.

Influenced as they have been by the [shifts in American culture and society] described by Wuthnow (1998) and Beaudoin (1998), most of the undergraduates we encountered on the four campuses could be characterized as spiritual seekers rather than religious dwellers, and many of them were constructing their spirituality without much regard to the boundaries dividing religious denominations, traditions, or organizations.

Teaching Religion

We found the academic study of religion to be as vital and appealing to undergraduates as religious practice on all four campuses. The only possible exception was South University, which lacked a religious studies department and a religious studies major. Even there, however, religion courses were offered, they were popular among students, and some fulfilled general education requirements in liberal studies. Furthermore, at South University, as well as the other schools, religion was treated in a wide array of courses across the arts and sciences curricula. Yet one of the most apparent findings of our research is that a religious studies department seems essential if colleges and universities want to make the academic study of religion an important part of academic life on campus. And general education requirements and curricula that include religion provide large numbers of students with exposure to the academic study of religion.

Faculty at church-related institutions have faced an increasing religious pluralism in the student body, a pluralism that reflects U.S. society at large. No longer able to assume that virtually all of their students have been reared in the denominational tradition, faculty have had to rethink the role of religion classes, particularly if they are required of all or most of the students. How does one teach Christian theology to students who are not Christian or to those who have not been nurtured in a religious congregation? Should one? What religion courses should the school require? At both East University and North College, recent additions to the religion or theology faculties have been specialists in Asian religious traditions and Judaism. Hiring a more diverse religion faculty and offering a wider range of religion courses have been key ways in which these church-related institutions have responded to the religious diversity of their students.

The number and popularity of religious studies courses at the public university we studied may seem even more surprising. The religious studies faculty at West University was large and well respected on campus, and it offered a myriad of courses at all levels of instruction. Seventeen of these courses fulfilled some general education requirement, and these popular general education courses attracted some good students to the religious studies major. A significant number of other academic programs and departments across the university either used courses in religious studies to fulfill their requirements or offered their own courses in which religion was a major theme.

The approach to the teaching of religion varied on a continuum from advocacy at one extreme to distanced objectivity at the other. Not surprisingly, the faculty members who explicitly espoused the truth of one religious tradition over all others--who were advocates of a religious tradition or point of view--taught at the church-related and African American schools.

The public and private rhetoric of religious studies professors at West University reinforced, and sometimes insisted on, a relatively objective treatment of all religious traditions and views. Yet, as several of the professors said, "There is fine line between enthusiasm and advocacy." Professor Falk, while adamantly refusing to advocate Judaism, his own religious tradition, did make explicit claims in class about the religious value of the Hebrew Bible. Professor Martin in the philosophy department wanted his students to study Buddhism from the inside, gleaning religious truths from it for their own lives.

On all four campuses, the religious advocacy approach to teaching religion had important limits. We neither saw nor heard of any cases in which students were graded down for expressing religious viewpoints that differed from those of their professors. And although some students (for example, at North College) felt uncomfortable or threatened by the perspectives of their professors, we did not detect any instances in which students were belittled or ostracized for their religious beliefs by the faculty teaching their courses.

At the other extreme of the continuum of approaches to teaching religion was a model we call "distanced objectivity." In this case, professors ruled out-of-bounds any value judgments about the subject matter. This end of the continuum seemed to be more sparsely populated than the opposite extreme. The clearest examples of its proponents were on the religious studies faculty at the state university. West University's Professor Hanson, himself a practicing Christian, insisted that the religious studies classroom was no place for either him or his students to air their own religious beliefs. Rather, the primary goal of religious studies was the objective, dispassionate study of the "other"--those whose religious beliefs and practices differed radically from one's own. The assumption here was that in order to see the other clearly, one must put one's own biases aside. Hanson's dedication to neutrality or objectivity had its limits, however. No instances were observed in which students were chastised or ridiculed for written or oral comments that were subjective.

The teaching of the vast majority of professors at these four schools fell somewhere between the advocacy and objectivist extremes. [We identify] the middle ground as the empathetic/analytic model [which entails] an attitude of respect for religious people and religious traditions of all kinds without advocating one or another. Inherent in this middle-ground model was a commitment on the part of faculty to marshaling acceptable and often diverse scholarly methods to analyze and better understand religious phenomena. Across all four campuses and in several different departments, we observed dedicated teachers who found religion to be an important and worthwhile human enterprise and brought the best critical scholarship to bear on it. As much as some religious studies professors at West University dismissed the advocacy model as inappropriate at a state university, they also rejected a doctrinaire secularism that would dismiss the human appeal and importance of religion altogether.

Students and Religious Studies

The academic methods and intentions of faculty aside, we discovered that for the students the religious studies classroom was often a site and resource for religious meaning and personal transformation. The line between the practice and teaching of religion thus could become blurred. In some instances, the blurring of the boundaries was invited by the faculty themselves. Even at the public university, where the transformation of students' lives was a goal infrequently expressed by those who taught religion, students who were interviewed spoke of the important life issues raised in these courses, the all-night discussions they had about them, and the religious studies major as something undertaken for personal development rather than preparation for a specific career. In short, many students took religious studies courses because the courses forced them "to think" and spoke to their search for meaning.

General Observations

Placing these observations in the context of the history of religion in American higher education, several points emerge that merit particular attention. Religion appeared to be more optional than in the past, when student behavior was much more closely supervised and students could be reprimanded for deviating from religious norms. Until the second half of the twentieth century, attendance at chapel was obligatory at most church-affiliated schools. Even at state schools, students were required to conform to moral standards that were rooted in religious (especially Protestant) principles. In the four schools we visited, this kind of coerced religious activity had disappeared. And with the exception of some religious conservatives at the Catholic university who might have liked to see religious requirements for student behavior reintroduced, most of the people we interviewed would probably recoil at such an idea and view any such requirements as counterproductive to internally motivated religious commitment.

Students at all four schools were free to choose whether or not to practice religion and, if they chose to practice, how deeply to become invested. Not surprisingly, the freedom not to be religious was most widely exercised at the state school. At the state, Lutheran, and Catholic schools, the most intensely religious people on campus could be extremely critical of others who seemed to them to be insufficiently religious.

In addition to being more optional, religion on the four campuses appeared to be more pluralistic than in the past. Throughout much of American history, students at many church-related schools were encouraged to view people who practiced other religions as objects of missionary conversion, and throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of those colleges functioned as nurseries for missionary vocations. But these same institutions also led the way in encouraging respect for other religions and in advancing scholarly understanding of the religions of the world. On many American campuses in the twentieth century, the desire to understand non-Christian religions and the effort to conceptualize religion as a universal human phenomenon rather than something defined by Christianity developed in response to supersessionary, missionary attitudes toward other religions. As our study suggests, this newer commitment to religious understanding could sometimes reshape rather than supplant the older tradi tion of missionary commitment. In all of the schools we visited, many of the most intensely religious people we interviewed were full of missionary zeal. But this zeal tended to be tempered by respect for religions other than their own and by the belief that God was worshiped and served in many different ways.

On all four campuses, respect for religious difference was pervasive at both the academic and the practical levels. Courses in theology were required at both the Catholic and Lutheran schools, and in this respect, studying religion was more mandatory than practicing it. But even in the required courses at these church-related schools, students were exposed to diverse religious forms and approaches to religion. Similarly, opportunities to practice a variety of religions were readily available on all four campuses. Even at the Catholic and Lutheran schools, where Catholicism and Lutheranism were in effect the established religions, students had opportunities to observe and participate in different religious traditions.

At the schools in our study, we found little evidence that the strong tendencies toward religious freedom and religious pluralism led to any lack of religious vitality. At the Catholic school, a number of intensely religious people believed that the quality of religious life suffered because it had become optional--like the Glee Club or aerobics. But our interviews with religious people on all four campuses did not confirm that religious practice was taken less seriously because it was voluntary. If anything, the ethos of religious choice seemed to stimulate religious interest and religious enthusiasm. Of course, this connection between religious volunteerism and religious enthusiasm is a very old American trait.

As for the students who opted not to be religious or those who invested less in religious life than some of their peers, it may well be true that in the past many of them would have been swept up in the more totalizing religious cultures surrounding them. Their incorporation into a religious atmosphere probably would have made them think and behave in ways that conformed, at least to some extent, to established religious standards. The religious requirements of the past certainly implied the importance of religious conformity. But they probably also encouraged passivity with respect to inherited traditions and ignorance and intolerance of other religions.

Summing Up

With regard to the theories discussed in the introduction, that American higher education has undergone a steady process of secularization, on the basis of our empirical study we affirm instead that religion has become more optional and pluralistic. Certainly it is true that church oversight of church-related colleges has declined. The shame involved in not being religious has also declined. But we found both the practice and the study of religion to be vital aspects of the slices of American higher education that we observed. Indeed, we found religion on the four campuses sufficiently vital and inviting to make us wonder if it had ever been more so in the past. It is possible that young people in American culture have never been more enthusiastically engaged in religious practice or with religious ideas. And it is possible that religious practice and education have never been more connected with personal responsibility for society. More clearly, our study reveals that the ethos of decentered, diverse, religi ously tolerant institutions of higher education is a breeding ground for vital religious practice and reaching.

WORKS CITED

Beaudoin, Tim. 1998. Virtual faith: The irreverent spiritual quest of Generation X. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Berger, Peter. 1997. Epistemological modesty: An interview with Peter Berger. Christian Century 114:30, 974.

Burtchaell, James Tunstead. 1998. The dying of the light: The disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Marsden, George M. 1992. The soul of the university. In George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield, eds. The secularization of the academy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marsden, George M. 1994. The soul of the American university. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stark, Rodney. 1999. Secularization, R.I.P. Sociology of Religion, 60:3, 249-73.

Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CONRAD CHERRY is Distinguished Professor of religious studies and founder of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. BETTY A. DE BERG is professor of religion and head of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. AMANDA PORTERFIELD is professor of religious studies at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

From Religion on Campus by Conrad Cherry, Betty A. De Berg, and Amanda Porter field. Copyright [c] 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher and the author.