Majoring in Religion: The revival of belief among students predates September 11

December 3, 2001

Majoring in Religion: The revival of belief among students predates September 11

BY COLLEEN CARROLL

IN THE WEEKS after September 11, religious leaders and media commentators marveled that young Americans were turning to religion in droves. In Manhattan, fewer than two dozen participants were expected at a Rosh Hashana service in TriBeCa; an estimated 400 showed up, most in their 20s and 30s. At Harvard University, overflow crowds packed student Masses, and an interfaith prayer service at the law school drew 300. Officials with Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical ministry on some 850 campuses, reported that from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to the University of California at Berkeley, weekly fellowship meetings were attracting record crowds.

Many observers saw this as a reaction to crisis, the sort of visceral response that subsides when danger fades. But evidence abounds that a growing interest in religion -- especially traditional religion -- among the young antedates September 11 by several years. It seems to be a trend that springs from deeper roots and thus may prove to be enduring. Bob Bordone, 29, who lectures at Harvard Law School, has watched student interest in serious faith commitments rise since he started law school there in 1994. Most campus ministers at Harvard, he thinks, send students the message that they should not be "too outspoken" for their particular faith. Yet the preference for orthodoxy has grown, he says.

"It's been student-initiated," Bordone says. "They're the ones who are looking, and most of the campus ministers tend to be more watered down."

A Catholic, Bordone attributes the trend to "a crisis of meaning" among the young. "We inherited that from the '60s generation," he says, "and we want something real."

Nearly half a continent away, at Washington University in St. Louis, the same interest in strict observance can be seen among Muslim students. When Iqbal Akhtar, 20, a New Orleans native, first attended Friday prayers on campus, fewer than half a dozen students showed up. Four years later, some 40 Muslim students gather for Friday prayer.

"There has been an interest in faith and faith traditions even before September 11," says Akhtar, who belongs to the Muslim Student Association. "It's been a growing trend."

Randy Parks, until recently a campus minister at Columbia University in New York, calls the religious outpouring after the terrorist attacks "an event set within a context of people already searching." At Columbia, working for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, he witnessed an explosive growth of evangelical groups over the last two years. Graduate students in medicine, law, social work, and education formed fellowships that he describes as "grass-roots kinds of things."

Now Parks is associate pastor of Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from where the World Trade Center stood. His Congregationalist church has 10 new members, 7 of them in their 20s or 30s. Several of these told Parks that the attacks had spurred them to follow through on their prior resolutions to join a church.

Campus Crusade for Christ has statistics showing that the boom goes back several years. Mike Tilley, who oversees campus expansion in America, says Campus Crusade participation nearly doubled between 1995 and 2000, rising from 21,000 to 40,000. At 700 of the campuses where it operates, the chapters are organized by students, not Campus Crusade staffers.

It's notable that at most campuses, evangelical groups like InterVarsity and Campus Crusade -- which teach strict moral standards and salvation by faith in Jesus Christ -- are flourishing, while more liberal, mainline Protestant groups struggle to attract members. At Catholic colleges with theologically and politically liberal campus ministry staffs, such as St. Louis University, students have begun to form their own "underground" groups that emphasize fidelity to the pope, traditional devotions, and adherence to Church rules.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, an ethics professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, finds no mystery here. "It's a reaction against some of the strands of the culture," she says. Having seen her own students gravitate toward moral absolutes, she says the quest for religious truth and moral grounding has been percolating for a long time. "The mainstream media weren't paying all that much attention," Elshtain says of the reports that portrayed young adults' turning to religion as a reflexive response to fear. "I think it's much deeper than that. My hunch is that there is considerable staying power."

Colleen Carroll's book The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy is due out next fall from Loyola Press. Her research was made possible by a Phillips Foundation fellowship.