A college minister recalls an anxious father wanting to talk with him about his daughter, an undergraduate. Anticipating what the man would say to him, the minister surmised that the young woman had lost either her virginity or her religion. He scrambled in his own mind to discover the best way to answer the father’s concerns about these long-familiar problems.
As it turned out, however, the problem was not that the student had lost anything, but rather that she had found something. What she had found was religion. Her father was worried that this new discovery of something that was foreign to him would be harmful to his daughter and he wondered what he could do to protect her.
This anecdote was told last week by Rev. Peter Gomes, for the past twenty-five years the University chaplain at Harvard and a person famous for his preaching. Rev. Gomes used this story to highlight the change of situation among young people in college these days.
He finds widespread interest in the subject among young people at Harvard, among other places. “Levels of practice have significantly increased across the board,” he says. “Virtually all my colleagues in the ministry here would agree.”
These students who are active in the practice of religion form one group. Three other groups are identifiable:
- Those who take courses in the subject. Such courses are now widely subscribed, with many more students than formerly now choosing to major in religion.
- Those who carefully observe fellow students who are religious. These are young people not ready themselves to make a commitment but interested enough to follow what religious people are doing.
- Finally, there are the students who discover religion for the first time. They tend to be sons and daughters of parents who belong to the first thoroughly secularized generation, people who have had no vital contact with religion.
As the beginning anecdote suggests, it can be upsetting for such parents to have their children “get religion,” especially if the parents have long associated religion with brain-washing and other violations of personal freedom. They wonder how this has happened to their children and come to experience the phenomenon – “religion rejected becomes religion intensified.”
For fear mainline churches and other religious centers get overly encouraged by the picture drawn above, some further realities need attention. A recent study supported by the Lilly Foundation found these four traits in the religion of young Americans.
- Many are not so much interested in religion as in spirituality. The extent to which you can separate the two is another subject needing discussion.
- Church attendance among younger people remains low.
- The study of religion is more popular than its practice.
- Spirituality among younger people tends to be connected with service to society.
To get some sense of religion at work among students, I attended last week a special meeting of the Christian Fellowship at Harvard. This session brought together hundreds of young people from the various parts of the university into an auditorium for a service of worship and for celebration with one another. The quality of both impressed me.
These young people showed themselves unabashed in their professions of faith in Jesus. This faith found expression in the singing of Advent hymns, belted out with fervor. Then followed scripture readings from Isaiah and John’s Gospel. The silence of the listeners during these readings had a spiritual quality to it that fixed my attention.
Next came a talk by N.T. Wright, visiting professor of New Testament at Harvard Divinity School. Dr. Wright, an Anglican theologian who works as a canon at Westminster Abbey, spoke fervently about the Resurrection of Jesus.
His announced topic was “Jesus’ Challenge to Postmodern Students.” His main message was that even Christians have not yet come to terms with who Jesus really is. If they did, they would recognize Easter as “the first day of God’s new world.”
Again,the fervor of the congregation was evident. Though diverse in ethnic and religious background, these young people were united in their commitment to Jesus. They gave striking evidence of the rebirth of religion in the academic setting that Rev. Gomes and others have discovered.
Richard Griffin