Colleges as Atheist Factories?

So I took a little bit of a break from writing over the past week, mostly because of changes with our son Theo not taking to his teething too well, which limited my opportunities to research and write. Hopefully that is somewhat behind him and I can be a little bit more consistent.

To start it back up, I want to take a look at a series of articles and consider what is happening with young people as they are moving through youth ministry and going to college, and what impact that might have on the future of Christian faith. I want to do this kind of backwards, starting with a look at Christians in college and work my way backwards. I am going to tread a little lightly in youth ministry, as I have not worked (or even volunteered) in that critical ministry, and it is probably one of the easiest to criticize and hardest to do really well. That said, I do have some general thoughts, and there are some articles I want to analyze.

I think that the passing of Labor Day and the start of the school year (for many kids) is a good time to think about ministry and kids and what is happening. One of my favorite clichés in Christianity is that the faith is only a generation from dying out. If we lose Christianity for a generation or two that will be the end of the church. For that reason, young people truly are the future of the church and of the faith. So how are our institutions treating them?

One of the common stories I come across in my Christian circles is the belief that colleges (or at least non-Christian colleges) have a terrible impact on the faith of students. I remember hearing a statistic that something like 95% of Christians who go to a secular college lose their faith during their time there. The image of the student of faith going into a college classroom, seeing all the things that they have been taught for 18 years being challenged and then having their faith destroyed is a common image. It is a common fear and a common foil in Christian redemption stories (for example, the recent Christian movie “God’s Not Dead” – which I admit I have not seen).

But is this reality? Are colleges factories for churning the faithful into atheists? Do such a large number of faithful Christians go to college and lose their faith?

I was always skeptical of this claim if, for no other reason, than my own personal experience. I came to faith during my time at college, and at a college that is probably among the most secular (and great) in the country.

For those interested, it is a story I cover more here:

http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/07/jesus-perfect-philosopher-personal.html

I always saw college as a time for exploration, and it seemed possible to me that individuals would be as likely to “lose” their faith as they would be to gain it. I also thought there were two other factors potentially at play.

The first is that people might “lose” their faith in college and in the years after because it is such a time of upheaval and transition in general. The stable faith community they had growing up is gone, they are unable to plug into a similar community in college or the years after, they get involved in other things, and faith is put on the backburner for a while. As they get older they eventually return to their faith. It is not so much that college turned them away from faith, but they decided to ignore it for a while, and then returned at a later time.

This brings me to a second point, that perhaps the faith they had grown up with was not all that strong and vigorous to begin with. If they grew up in a Christian bubble, were fed Christianese, and never really engaged it on an intellectual level, perhaps the faith wasn’t that strong to begin with. It is not possible to remain in a Christian bubble for your entire life, at some point faith was going to come into contact with many other thoughts and ideas, and it needs to have some depth to survive. This is a point I will touch on more in my next couple of posts.

All this brings me to an article from The Atlantic, that maybe colleges aren’t atheist factories after all. And this is what I want to focus the rest of the post on.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/the-myth-of-the-godless-university/375950/

The article starts with the common cliché of the person of faith battling the philosophy professor who says there is no God. However, in the third paragraph comes the unlikely thesis, that attending college might make someone more religious.

The article starts by looking at history. In the 1920s and 30s the story of going to college meant you were less religious might have been true, but by the 60s there was no difference between college-educated and non college-educated as to their religious affiliation. And by the 70s, not going to college would make you more likely to be non-religious.

The reasons make some sense, mostly that over the past century there has been a change in the demographic makeup of those who go to college (namely, many more people go). So, in the 20s and 30s, when college was attended by children from elite families, they were less likely to be religious than those who did not attend college. However, but the 60s and 70s, college attenders represented a better sample of the population as a whole, and thus were more religious.

Some reasons for these findings include:

-being non-religious is now more acceptable, so it is likely that the population that doesn’t go to college would be described this way, not just the elite (who originally were the only ones going to college).

-colleges are much less hostile to faith than is assumed. There are college ministries on almost all campuses and are as easy to plug into as any college groups.

There are some problems with the study:

-it does not measure religiosity, only affiliation. So someone could ascribe to a religion but not really have it impact much of their life during their time at college, as I suggested above.

(And that I covered a little bit more here: http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-shift-from-nominal-to-none.html)

-It doesn’t cover millennials, and the issues with religious affiliation we have seen with them.

The general conclusion of the author is that even without measuring religiosity, it is likely that those that affiliate with a faith when they enter college are likely to return to it at some point in their life, and the millennials will ultimately do the same thing, even if data and studies on that issue are currently unclear.

The ultimate reason for why college attendees may become more religiously affiliated is by the nature of what a college degree means. They are “joiners”, more likely to be engaged in some sort of civic institution and volunteerism (if nothing else, the church can provide this). They also engage in social behavior in line with the church, including waiting to have children until after marriage and having much lower levels of divorce compared to non college graduates.

The key, in my mind, is to take this information realize that the myth of college as an atheist factory should be dead, and also to consider what it will take to make true disciples of Christ, not just individuals who remain affiliated to a faith tradition.