Religion on Campus (review)

Religion on Campus. By Conrad Cherry, Betty A. DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 316 pp. $24.95.

Last year, I taught "Introduction to Christian Theology" to undergraduates at Boston College. My students kept journals recording their personal appropriations of our classroom theologizing. From over one hundred students I noticed some shared sensibilities. First, they did not like too much focus put on the different classic emphases of Catholic and Protestant theologies. They would rather emphasize what these—and all—religious traditions have in common. Second, they referred to such commonalities as "spiritual" qualities, not "religious," and viewed them positively. Third, they wrote about their faith in individual, affective and frequently evangelical language. And fourth, their spirituality was often stimulated by a core constellation of "non-churchy" experiences: community service, exposure to diverse religious traditions, and popular media culture.

In all of these ways, according to Religion on Campus, my students are like many other undergraduates around the United States. This anthropological study of three universities and one college is a travelogue that ranges across the practice and teaching of religion today, attempting to "observe closely the current shape of religion on U.S. college and university campuses" (1). They cloak the real names of the schools under compass points: The West campus is a large secular university; East is Roman Catholic; North is Lutheran; and South is African-American. In this eminently readable report, Conrad Cherry, Betty A. DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield have provided a valuable contemporary map of the spiritual terrain of campus life. This exploration, however, leaves undiscussed some essential problems on which the coherence of the project depends.

The authors show that despite the pronounced differences in these four environments, campus religious practice today bears some striking commonalities. Students repeatedly and confidently distinguish between being spiritual and being religious. Being spiritual—the most popular designation—refers to a personal, affective faith in something beyond the self, often referred to with "journey" language. Being religious refers to setting one's store in an institutional religion and in static doctrine. This study shows that for many students spirituality is spacious enough to include religion, but the reverse is often not the case. The sources for spirituality are seemingly everywhere; it privileges options and choices, the conscious assembling of identity. The sources for religion, by contrast, are the fixed rituals and teachings of institutional authority. This book continually points up evidence that spirituality on campus is far from narcissistic. Indeed, there is a striking degree of consensus on the campuses that spirituality is stimulated by community service. Serving others through volunteer programs has now become a rite of passage in campus life and an essential gateway for spiritual growth. The authors "found more instances of personal spirituality aligning itself with public concerns and responsibilities than . . . retreat into a privatized, atomistic spirituality" (279). Interestingly, these movements in student spiritual life have in turn shaped mainline campus ministries, which the authors found were "directed more toward the cultivation of student spirituality than toward the maintenance of denominational identity" (277).

Religion on Campus also indicates the depth of religious diversity that exists in higher education today. Sometimes that diversity is obvious, as at a secular school like West where no single religious tradition dominates, and many religious shoots spring up to cater to Wiccans and Christian Scientists, Muslims and Catholics. But diversity is also present at a mid-size Catholic school like East, where one finds agnostics, Protestants, and a spectrum of very liberal to quite conservative Catholics. One noteworthy thread that wends its way through this study is that much of contemporary religious diversity can be attributed to the multifarious influence of evangelical Christian groups, from Fellowship of Christian Athletes to Campus Crusade and many more loosely organized groups. This influence is widespread, drawing sharp discomfort from more liberal students, as well as deeply reshaping prayer styles (extempore), religious language ("personal relationship with the Lord"), worship (read...