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Overview
The first intensive, close-up investigation of the practice and teaching of religion at American colleges and universities, Religion on Campus is an indispensable resource for all who want to understand what religion really means to today's undergraduates. To explore firsthand how college students understand, practice, and learn about religion, the authors visited four very different U.S. campuses: a Roman Catholic university in the East, a state university in the West, a historically black university in the South, and a Lutheran liberal arts college in the North. They interviewed students, faculty members, and administrators; attended classes; participated in worship services; observed prayer and Bible study groups; and surveyed the general ethos of each campus. The resulting study makes fascinating and important reading for anyone—including students, parents, teachers, administrators, clergy, and scholars—concerned with the future of young Americans. Challenging theories of the secularization of higher education and the decline of religion on campus, this book reveals that both the practice and the study of religion are thriving, nourished by a campus culture of diversity, tolerance, and choice. "A study of religious practice on American campuses that should give pause to anyone proposing that the secularization theory is airtight.—Common Review"[The authors] are observant ethnographers, looking beyond the obvious places such as classroom and chapel to find religion at work in the locker room before the big game, in acts of community volunteerism or in the highly ritualized coronation of a homecoming queen. This important study confirms the vitality of religion on campus while ably challenging widely held theories of secularization.—Publishers WeeklyInvestigating the practice and teaching of religion at American colleges and universities, the authors of this book uncover a surprisingly diverse and vital religious scene on campus. Based on extensive fieldwork at four very different U.S. institutions, the book challenges theories of the secularization of higher education and the decline of religion on campus. It reveals instead that both the practice and the study of religion are thriving, nourished by a campus culture of tolerance, diversity, and choice. Religion on Campus makes fascinating and important reading for all who want to understand what religion really means to today's undergraduates. —>
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807875254 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 01/14/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Lexile: | 1330L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Betty A. DeBerg 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 Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion at Florida State University in Tallahassee and past president of the American Society of Church History.
Read an Excerpt
This book of case studies originated in a desire on the part of its authors to observe closely the current shape of religion on U.S. college and university campuses. During the last ten or fifteen years, a large number of studies have examined religion in higher education. Historical investigations have depicted religion's changing roles in American colleges and universities. Other, more normative works have recommended ways in which religion's presence on the higher-education scene might be improved or transformed. Still others have surveyed the attitudes of faculty who teach religion on our campuses, argued the relative value of "objectivity" or "advocacy" as a pedagogy in the religious studies classroom, or bemoaned the widespread secularization of the contemporary campus. 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? These are the fundamental questions this book attempts to answer with respect to four very different campuses in the United States.
The chapters that follow concentrate on the present and chiefly employ the methods of ethnography to determine the present shape of things. All three authors are historians as well as students of the current scene, however, and thus have been sensitive to the ways in which the contemporary situation has exhibited striking continuities as well as arresting discontinuities with the past. Religion has long figured importantly in the history of American higher education, but its role has changed as America and its educational institutions have changed. In the colonial period, a number of major colleges were founded primarily for the purpose of educating clergymen. Thus Harvard College opened its doors in the seventeenth century in order to teach Puritan ministers how to nurture the burgeoning communities of New England with the milk of the Christian gospel. Disputes over the most appropriate preparation for ministers led to the founding of Yale College at the beginning of the eighteenth century and the later founding of William Tennent's "Log College," which evolved into Princeton. King's College and Philadelphia College, which became Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, were founded with broader purposes in mind, but both had ties to the Anglican Church, and religious education was part of both of their missions.
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. Thus at Mount Holyoke, founded in 1837 as the first publicly endowed institution of higher learning for women in the United States, and other women's colleges that arose in the nineteenth century, 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 themselves 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, 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: "Despite the presence of many religion departments and a few university divinity schools, religion has moved from near the center a century or so ago to the incidental periphery. Apart from voluntary student religious groups, religion in most universities is about as important as the baseball team. Not only has religion become peripheral, but also 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."[1]
In a study with a similar slant, Douglas Sloan has argued that the gradual disappearance from colleges and universities of such things as close relations between church and academy, the appointment of clergy to college and university presidencies, required chapel, and mandatory courses in divinity and moral philosophy is a sure sign of a secularization process. Sloan has even suggested that secularized higher education has become an ersatz religion in twentieth-century America: "In important ways the university itself became a major religious phenomenon of American culture. David Levine, in his study of the American college during the first part of the century, has written that as an avenue for social and occupational status (read salvation?), <'education became the secular religion of twentieth-century American society.'"[2]
James Burtchaell 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 elevates 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 intellectuals 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."[3]
To a large extent, our study was prompted by a desire to test the adequacy of these 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. Among the three of us, we have held full-time teaching positions in religion at a total of five state universities, two private universities with distant connections to religious denominations, and one university with a clear affiliation with a Protestant church body. In only one case was the study of religion weakened in its university setting (and that after two decades of strength), and in none of the cases were religious practices among students at all disadvantaged. Religion as taught and practiced has been alive and well in the institutions of higher education that we have occupied.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | vii | |
| 1 | Introduction | 1 |
| 2 | West University | 11 |
| Ethos | 11 | |
| Religious Practice | 13 | |
| Teaching Religion | 53 | |
| Conclusions | 76 | |
| 3 | South University | 83 |
| Ethos | 83 | |
| Religious Practice | 99 | |
| Teaching Religion | 122 | |
| Conclusions | 140 | |
| 4 | Cast University | 143 |
| Ethos | 143 | |
| Religious Practice | 158 | |
| Teaching Religion | 195 | |
| Conclusions | 214 | |
| 5 | North College | 219 |
| Ethos | 219 | |
| Religious Practice | 229 | |
| Teaching Religion | 244 | |
| Conclusions | 270 | |
| 6 | Conclusion | 275 |
| Religious Practice | 275 | |
| Teaching Religion | 283 | |
| Religion and Campus Ethos | 289 | |
| Appendix A | Research Methods | 297 |
| Appendix B | In-Class Questionnaire | 299 |
| Index | 305 |
What People are Saying About This
[The authors] are observant ethnographers, looking beyond the obvious places such as classroom and chapel to find religion at work in the locker room before the big game, in acts of community volunteerism or in the highly ritualized coronation of a homecoming queen. This important study confirms the vitality of religion on campus while ably challenging widely held theories of secularization.—Publishers Weekly
Professors Cherry, DeBerg, and Porterfield went to the trenches to measure the vitality of religion on America's college campuses. . . . One theme emerges clearly: religion is alive and well on campus.—Publishers Weekly
A good introduction to American understanding of faith. . . . I share [the authors'] appreciation of how religion on campus has changed.—Alan Wolfe, Chronicle of Higher Education
The book . . . does a great service in giving a finely grained snapshot of religion on campus. . . . The authors do a masterful job of capturing the feel of religious life on the disparate campuses that they studied.—Perspectives in Religious Studies
A study of religious practice on American campuses that should give pause to anyone proposing that the secularization theory is airtight.—Common Review
Any church leader who questions the validity of a religious presence on college campuses should read this book.—Christian Century
Succeeds in offering useful glimpses into the spiritual lives of young adults as they seek to live out their religious and/or spiritual convictions in all the contexts of their lives. . . . Highly recommended for professors, campus ministers, and others who would like to know more about the young adults who enter their lives everyday.—Religious Studies Review
A believable and compelling picture of religious life on campus. . . . A pleasure to read and a helpful introduction to people who care about student spirituality.—Congregations
Religion on Campus is an important book for two reasons: it challenges simple views about the secularization of higher education, and it proves once again that careful ethnographic observation reveals a 'lived religious presence' armchair theorists often miss. The book deserves a wide readership.—Wade Clark Roof, author of Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion
Religion on Campus provides striking firsthand information that calls into question the gloomy analyses presented in recent books about the secularization of American higher education. Through careful ethnographic case studies, the authors show us that contemporary students are interested in spirituality and for the most part seem to be finding ways of expressing this interest through coursework and other campus activities. Yet the apparent superficiality of these students' religious understanding is also a lesson that educators will need to ponder seriously.—Robert Wuthnow, author of Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist