Majoring in Religion
CARROLL, COLLEEN
Majoring in Religion The revival of belief among students predates September 11. BY COLLEEN CARROLL IN THE WEEKS after September 11, religious leaders and media commentators marveled that young...
...Louis, the same interest in strict observance can be seen among Muslim students...
...Now Parks is associate pastor of Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from where the World Trade Center stood...
...In Manhattan, fewer than two dozen participants were expected at a Rosh Hashana service in TriBeCa...
...drew 300...
...It's been a growing trend...
...BY COLLEEN CARROLL IN THE WEEKS after September 11, religious leaders and media commentators marveled that young Americans were turning to religion in droves...
...Several of these told Parks that the attacks had spurred them to follow through on their prior resolutions to join a church...
...There has been an interest in faith and faith traditions even before September 11," says Akhtar, who belongs to the Muslim Student Association...
...When Iqbal Akhtar, 20, a New Orleans native, first attended Friday prayers on campus, fewer than half a dozen students showed up...
...We inherited that from the '60s generation," he says, "and we want something real...
...Randy Parks, until recently a campus minister at Columbia University in New York, calls the religious outpouring after the terrorist attacks "an event set within a context of people already searching...
...At Columbia, working for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, he witnessed an explosive growth of evangelical groups over the last two years...
...A Catholic, Bordone attributes the trend to "a crisis of meaning" among the young...
...My hunch is that there is considerable staying power...
...They're the ones who are looking, and most of the campus ministers tend to be more watered down...
...Many observers saw this as a reaction to crisis, the sort of visceral response that subsides when danger fades...
...Yet the preference for orthodoxy has grown, he says...
...Having seen her own students gravitate toward moral absolutes, she says the quest for religious truth and moral grounding has been percolating for a long time...
...Four years later, some 40 Muslim students gather for Friday prayer...
...Her research was made possible by a Phillips Foundation fellowship...
...Bob Bordone, 29, who lectures at Harvard Law School, has watched student interest in serious faith commitments rise since he started law school there in 1994...
...It's been student-initiated," Bordone says...
...Officials with Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical ministry on some 850 campuses, reported that from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to the University of California at Berkeley, weekly fellowship meetings were attracting record crowds...
...It's a reaction against some of the strands of the culture," she says...
...At Catholic colleges with theologically and politically liberal campus ministry staffs, such as St...
...At Harvard University, overflow crowds packed student Masses, and an inter-faith prayer service at the law school Colleen Carroll's book The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy is due out next fall from Loyola Press...
...Graduate students in medicine, law, social work, and education formed fellowships that he describes as "grass-roots kinds of things...
...But evidence abounds that a growing interest in religion—especially traditional religion—among the young antedates September 11 by several years...
...The mainstream media weren't paying all that much attention," Elshtain says of the reports that portrayed young adults' turning to religion as a reflexive response to fear...
...Louis University, students have begun to form their own "underground" groups that emphasize fidelity to the pope, traditional devotions, and adherence to Church rules...
...His Congregationalist church has 10 new members, 7 of them in their 20s or 30s...
...an estimated 400 showed up, most in their 20s and 30s...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain, an ethics professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, finds no mystery here...
...Campus Crusade for Christ has statistics showing that the boom goes back several years...
...At 700 of the campuses where it operates, the chapters are organized by students, not Campus Crusade staffers...
...It's notable that at most campuses, evangelical groups like InterVarsity and Campus Crusade—which teach strict moral standards and salvation by faith in Jesus Christ—are flourishing, while more liberal, mainline Protestant groups struggle to attract members...
...Nearly half a continent away, at Washington University in St...
...Most campus ministers at Harvard, he thinks, send students the message that they should not be "too outspoken" for their particular faith...
...I think it's much deeper than that...
...Mike Tilley, who oversees campus expansion in America, says Campus Crusade participation nearly doubled between 1995 and 2000, rising from 21,000 to 40,000...
...It seems to be a trend that springs from deeper roots and thus may prove to be enduring...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 12
