It’s All about Jesus!: Faith as an Oppositional Subculture (review)

Popular sentiment concerning the impact of the collegiate experience on students’ religious faith is that it facilitates a decline. However, a recent study of the religious faith of emerging adults ages 18–23 concludes: “The religiously undermining effect of higher education on recent generations of youth has disappeared” (Smith & Snell, 2009, p. 248). What factors then facilitated such changes? Smith and Snell (2009) first identify the “growing influence of campus-based religious and parachurch groups that provide alternative plausibility structures for sustaining religious faith and practice in college” (p. 249).

To understand the significance of these underexplored groups (i.e., Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity, Navigators) Peter Magolda and Kelsey Ebben Gross offer It’s All about Jesus!: Faith as an Oppositional Subculture. This ethnographical study of a robust parachurch group operating on a public university campus in the Midwest provides a charitable assessment of the efforts these groups are making and the commitments that inspire them.

According to Magolda and Ebben Gross, their work “makes the strange familiar for non- Christian readers and the familiar strange for Christian readers” (p. xi). In greater detail, they “offer a contemporary view of collegiate evangelicals by interviewing members; experiencing, discussing, and critiquing organizational programs; and deconstructing intended issues that matter to the organization and its members” (p. xi). In terms of these aspirations, their book is a resounding success.

However, part of what drives this narrative so engagingly is the charitable tension that emerges between the faith commitments of these students and Magolda and Ebben Gross’s personal faith commitments which they discuss forthrightly and at length. Magolda positions himself as once Catholic but now non-Christian. Ebben Gross, once a Catholic, refers to herself as a Protestant (perhaps more descriptively a mainline Protestant or Protestant liberal). In their own ways, both authors question how well they can engage in a two-year ethnographic study of students with different religious views from their own. In the end, this spirit of charity, or a desire to take seriously the depth of convictions of others, provides a model for scholars thinking through the complexities defining comparable divides.

This spirit is evident at almost every turn of the narrative. Magolda and Ebben Gross open their book by allowing these students to speak for themselves as much as possible. The reader thus gets a vivid understanding of, for instance, a Thursday evening “praise and worship” service replete with driving music, personal testimonies, and religious instruction. However, the contrast between these students’ Thursday evening and the events that attracted the attention of other students leads to an immediate comparison: These evangelical students stand as outsiders to the dominant culture of their campus. This tension, some of which they generate and some of which they receive from others, thus defines one of the major threads in this work.

Magolda and Ebben Gross’s work includes details about their research methods and the role of their personal religious convictions. The remaining chapters focus on particular rituals that define this particular parachurch group but also appear to do so in a manner that generally reflects the life cycle of an academic year. For example, Chapter 5 describes the group’s energetic efforts to recruit new members. While the group espouses the idea of outreach to students who may not possess a “personal relationship with Christ,” many of the students who join it are searching for a place explicitly designed to help them grow in their faith during the college years. Magolda and Ebben Gross note that this particular group helps such students “blend the sacred and the secular while providing a supportive home on campus in which to freely explore their faith with others” (p. 73).

In a comparable manner, chapters toward the end of the book explore the effort that this group makes to recruit and train new leaders and to help its seniors make sense of their approaching transitions. For...