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"Students Search for Truth"

Source: Sunday Gazette-Mail (WV)
Date: April 4, 2004
Author: Tara Tuckwiller
Editor: James A. Haught


You’ll see them in churches and temples, mosques and synagogues: Newly hatched college freshmen, worshipping the deities their parents taught them to worship. More than half of college freshmen attend religious services frequently.

By junior year, though, almost half of those church-going freshmen will have dropped out of church, according to a study published in November by the University of California-Los Angeles.

It’s apparently so difficult to stay religious in college that religious organizations offer a slew of how-to handbooks, with titles such as “The Survival Guide for Christians on Campus,” “Dorm Room Devotions,” “Staying Jewish and Surviving College” and “Rocking the Goddess: Campus Wicca for the Student Practitioner.”

College is where D.J. Grothe abandoned his faith. Grothe was raised a fundamentalist Christian in Missouri. “I went off to Bible college at age 19 or 20, got a good liberal arts education, and became a skeptic in the process,” said Grothe, now 30 and director of a national organization for nonreligious college students.

“Education sometimes educates you out of your fundamentalism,” he said.

In the UCLA study, one in five college juniors agreed that “believing in supernatural phenomena is foolish.”

That leaves another four who aren’t so sure.

Finding God on TV, at the beach

It’s 10 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the on-campus bar at Wheeling Jesuit University — the “Ratt” — shows no sign of slowing down. Students sip Guinness at the bar, or Mountain Dew at tables strewn about the room. There’s a low din of conversation and clicking billiard balls.

Everyone gets quiet, though, when two young couples take the low stage at one end of the barroom. This is “ThIRST” (Theology in the Ratt Seeking Truth), and this month’s topic is “Finding God in Relationships.”

One couple, Ben and Sarah Beres, have been married for a year. “Jesus is not just our savior, but also lord of our life,” Sarah Beres explains to the small crowd that has assembled around the stage.

“He influences the way we hang out with each other, the way we have sex, everything,” her husband adds.

They talk a little bit about how they met, and so does the other couple, Jennifer Banks and Brian Vickers, who are engaged. “Does anybody have any questions?” Sarah Beres asks.

Silence. Then a couple of students throw the panel some softballs: “How do you know when it’s true love, and that God’s within it?” “Do you think God chose a path for you, or did you make your own path as a couple?”

As the couples answer, a young woman who had been at the bar, ignoring the whole thing, drags her barstool over and sits at the edge of the crowd, sipping her beer, listening. The students who had been playing pool have stopped, and are leaning against the pool table, listening.

The questions get more probing. “What is God’s role in a long-distance relationship?” “Looking back at your previous relationships, how was God working in those?” Banks is a Catholic convert, but Vickers was raised Presbyterian. “Is that problematic?”

By 11 p.m., more than 40 students have gathered. When the program ends, many of them whip out green forms and start filling them out; this program has fulfilled one of the spiritual-wellness requirements they must complete before they graduate.

Private, religious colleges such as WJU, Alderson-Broaddus, Bethany, West Virginia Wesleyan and Appalachian Bible College have institutionalized religion. Together with the University of Charleston, which isn’t affiliated with any religion, those private colleges have turned out 353 religious-studies graduates in the past five years.

At public colleges, students and campus ministers are largely responsible for whatever religion shows up on campus. West Liberty State College just finished up its “Christian Emphasis Week,” with lectures, music and worship services. West Virginia University students put on a similar “Jesus Week” each year.

The groups are getting increasingly creative with making religion fun: WVU’s campus Lutheran ministry sponsors a weekly “Theology on Tap,” where students talk Jesus over imported beers at a local coffeehouse. A campus minister at Fairmont State College started a weekly “Gospel According to the Simpsons” discussion, inviting students to “look at The Book and talk about your reaction and relationship to Homer and the family,” but the idea fizzled.

At West Virginia State College’s student union, religious fliers share bulletin board space with advertisements for “Mardi Gras Nite at Da Hypnotic Lounge.” One flier, for Campus Light Ministries’ regular noontime meetings, promises students “FREE FOOD.” The Baptist campus organization proffers a “beach week retreat.”

The spiritual push-and-pull

Look for students who discovered faith in college, and they’re easy to find. Some say they turned to religion because it gives them a framework for their lives. For some, who are making their own decisions for the first time about sex, work and marriage, religion sets down clear rules they can follow.

Other college students are floundering for a direction in life, or simply friends to hang out with, and religious groups offer both.

“There are strategies” used by religions to attract college students, Grothe said. One religion “trains their kid evangelists to find unpopular, lonely people on campus, spend time with them a couple of times just hanging out, and then invite them to their religious meetings.”

There’s an entire industry devoted to evangelizing college students. Campus Crusade for Christ, the largest of many campus evangelization nonprofits, raised $437 million in 2001 alone. According to its Web site, it has almost 44,000 students spreading Christianity on more than 1,000 college campuses (including 38 in West Virginia, from WVU to Huntington Junior College).

Which is why Grothe says his organization, the Center for Inquiry-On Campus, is needed.

“The truth is that there is a well-organized effort among certain religious folk to take back the universities — their words — from the godless secular humanists,” he said.

The spiritual push-and-pull pierces some college students so deeply, nearly one-third of the students who seek help from campus counseling centers say religious or spiritual problems are distressing them, according to a Penn State study published in October.

But even if they drop out of church, lose their belief in a supreme being, and lose their religious beliefs about good and evil — a 2001 Loyola University study found a decline in all those things during the college years — college students tend to retain the values that their childhood religion instilled in them, the study found.

“At the same time, there’s a need among students to question traditional values,” Grothe said. After all, “that’s the goal of getting a classical liberal arts education — to know why you believe what you believe.”

To contact staff writer Tara Tuckwiller, use e-mail or call 348-5189.

This article was retrieved from www.sundaygazettemail.com/section/News/2004040318
 

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