Fostering the Pluralism Orientation of College Students through Interfaith Co-curricular Engagement

Innovative approaches aimed at helping students engage with diversity abound in higher education institutions, but an understanding of effective practice in the realm of religious and worldview diversity is limited. Based on data collected from 13,776 college students attending 52 institutions across the country, this study employs multilevel modeling to examine how informal interactions with peers of diverse worldviews and participation in interfaith activities relate to pluralism orientation. The analyses reveal that student characteristics, measures of campus climate, and both formal and informal interfaith engagement relate to pluralism orientation given controls for institution-level differences. Some relationships in the model are conditional on student religion/worldview.