Campuses Are a Bellwether for Society's Religious Revival
By DIANE WINSTON
While conducting research for a project on work and spirituality, I
asked a recent college graduate what her religious preference was.
"Methodist, Taoist, Native American, Quaker, Russian Orthodox, and Jew,"
she answered with an easy laugh.
Her list sounds contradictory, even confusing, but she is faithful in
her own fashion. She works for world peace, practices yoga and
meditation, attends a Methodist church, regularly participates in
American Indian ceremonies, and shares a group house with others who
combine various spiritual practices.
As Americans become more racially and ethnically diverse -- and more
comfortable with cultural expressions of diversity -- our understanding
of religious pluralism is changing, too. More than 30 years after the
easing of immigration laws, the class lists at our elementary schools
read less like the ship's manifest at Plymouth Rock and more like the
roster at the United Nations. Learning, working, and, increasingly,
living together, Americans of different faiths bump into beliefs and
behaviors that once seemed unusual, even exotic.
Intriguingly, the growth of religious diversity in our society is
paralleled by an increased diversity within individual religious
practices. While some observers debate the value of the kind of
eclecticism my young respondent described, it does exist, especially
among undergraduates. The question facing educators and religious
professionals is whether we can accept those new syntheses as valid
expressions of religious diversity, or will dismiss them as "cotton
candy" spirituality.
In a culture whose ecclesiastic traditions prize creed, consistency, and
communal loyalty, the typical student's lodestar -- personal resonance
-- seems an irritating self-indulgence. As grownups -- parents, faculty
members, or religious professionals -- we are tempted to ignore or
impugn what looks like misguided behavior. Dissed, then dismissed, the
young Methodist-Taoist-Native American-Quaker-Russian Orthodox-Jew is
deemed either overly idealistic or misguided.
The issue is particularly relevant for those working in higher
education, because our campuses define the leading edge in this
phenomenon as in many other cultural trends. Religion -- or, in the more
popular term, "spirituality" -- is thriving among undergraduates, as it
is in the country at large. But because college campuses bring together
such a wide variety of people, when college students probe for meaning,
their conversational partners are as likely to be Jains as Jews, Muslims
as Methodists. Judging from U.S. Census statistics, in 10 or 20 years,
people in all areas of American society will be in frequent contact with
members of many different faiths. The blending of beliefs, mythologies,
and practices from varying traditions is likely to become even more
commonplace than it is now.
A team of researchers at Indiana University is exploring just how
widespread such eclectic practices are, by studying religious expression
at a state university, a small liberal-arts college, a historically
black college, and a Catholic university. Conrad Cherry, a professor of
religious studies and the head of the project, told participants in a
conference last year at Princeton University that he and his colleagues
have discovered a nascent religious revival.
According to Cherry, undergraduates at all four institutions are
interested in spiritual growth and experience. Some follow well-defined
religious practices, while others combine teachings from one tradition
or even from different faiths. At the Catholic institution, masses are
well attended, and at the historically black college, Sunday services
draw on both the stately and the ecstatic strains of the black church.
Some undergraduates develop their own eclectic systems, or, like the
self-described "Jewboos" -- Jews who practice Buddhist meditation --
follow one that already exists. Students are taking courses about
religion, participating in religiously oriented extracurricular
activities, and acting on their faith by volunteering for community
service.
While college chaplains have noticed the explosion of new religious
forms, few scholars have considered how demographic changes in the
culture at large are affecting religious life at colleges and
universities. Helen Rose Ebaugh, a sociologist at the University of
Houston, has paid attention. Describing her current research on
diversity to conference participants, she said that in 1980, her campus
was 80 per cent Anglo, but that by 1995, the figure had dropped to 61
per cent. This year, she said, the student body of 33,000 has a majority
of minority students, including Hispanics, blacks, and Asians.
At the same time, religious options on the Houston campus have exploded.
As at other universities elsewhere, students can find others with whom
to practice Baha'i, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, or
Zoroastrianism. There are groups of students practicing rituals of
American Indian, Wiccan, or Druid traditions -- attending sweat
lodges, celebrating lunar cycles -- while others practice variations
of ethnic Christianity that divide not only along denominational
lines but along regional ones as well.
For most faculty members and administrators, grappling with religious
differences -- whether the "otherness" of non-Western religions or the
eclecticism of young seekers -- is difficult. As a rule, Americans don't
like talking about religion. Religious conviction, even more than sex,
is a taboo subject. Our discomfort results, in part, from an attenuated
notion of religious tolerance. We support people's freedom to do and
believe whatever they want -- until that freedom intrudes on the rights
of others.
But in a complex, interconnected world, what constitutes intrusion? Are
evangelicals intruding when they proselytize in the student union? Are
Muslims and Orthodox Jews intruding when they ask the cafeteria to
accommodate their dietary requirements? Are Wiccans intruding when they
hold a midnight ceremony on the dormitory lawn?
And, most provocatively, is a Methodist-Taoist-Native
American-Quaker-Russian Orthodox-Jew intruding on our notion of
appropriate religiosity?
Those are the questions that confront us as we consider how our campuses
-- and our society -- will cope with religious differences as those
differences multiply in the future. The challenge of multiple, competing
religious absolutes is the Gordian knot of the next century. As the
United States grows more diverse, questions that have always challenged
us will become unavoidable: How do we live with and learn from people
who think, believe, and behave differently from us? How do we teach our
children to respect such differences?
We can start with our words. We no longer live in a Christian nation, or
even a Judeo-Christian one. As The New York Times Magazine
reported in December, the United States is now home to 800,000 Hindus
(compared with 70,000 in 1977) and to as many Muslims as Presbyterians.
The numbers of Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Eastern Orthodox, and Baha'i in
this country are also increasing. But our conceptual framework has not
kept up with our lived experience. Protestant, Catholic, Jew -- the
American trinity posited by the sociologist Will Herberg in the 1950s
-- still defines the way most Americans think about religious diversity.
Scholars of religion also ought to renounce language that demeans
religious difference. "Syncretism," a term for the intermingling of
different beliefs and practices, is frequently applied to third-world
religions. But many Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Asians who are
described as practitioners of syncretism complain that the word has a
distinctly negative cast: After all, it is rarely used to define
Christianity, even though that religion combines elements of Judaism and
paganism with its own teachings. At best, the term "syncretism"
trivializes non-Western religious experiences; at worst, it demonizes
them.
"Cafeteria-style" religion, the contemporary appellation for the
borrowing of symbols and practices in Western traditions -- for example,
Jews putting up Christmas trees -- is equally derogatory. It smacks of
the marketplace, suggesting a spiritual path constructed from whimsical
picking and choosing.
Why bother with semantics? Because the ways in which the next generation
of citizens sees the world and their place in it is being shaped in
today's college classrooms, conversations, and extracurricular
activities. Suggesting how scholars might use language without subtly
derogatory connotations, several participants at the Princeton
conference introduced the term "trans-religiosity" as a neutral, if
somewhat cumbersome, description of distinctive but conjoined spiritual
beliefs and ritual practices. Trans-religiosity, a term used by African
scholars, refers to an individual's participation in different
traditions without feeling any contradictions.
In addition to weighing their words, educators also should be mindful of
the frames of reference, or narrative conventions, they use in the
classroom. Until recently, historians of American religion organized
their stories according to a model that assumed the decreasing
importance of religion in the nation's life. Now, a new generation of
scholars has challenged that assumption, arguing that Protestant
Christianity's privileged status in the culture has given way to a
vibrant cacophony of voices. Likewise, the exclusion of religion from
public life, which sociologists have called "secularization," does not
accurately describe the place of religion in society in the late 20th
century. "Diffusion" may be a better term, signaling the scattering of
religious ideas, beliefs, and behaviors in arenas ranging from medicine
(for example, medical-school courses on spirituality and health) to
computing (the magazine Christian Computing) to cyberspace (chat
rooms and Web sites devoted to religious topics).
Professors also can encourage students to talk about their beliefs and
backgrounds when those are relevant to a discussion. Religious diversity
may spark conversation not just in religion classrooms, but also in
courses in literature, history, anthropology, sociology, journalism, and
area studies.
Like the sexual revolution that swept through campuses beginning in the
late 1960s, the current religious revival won't be stopped by clucking
tongues and disapproving glances. It won't disappear even if we ignore
it. Now, as in the past, young people are exploring new ways of
believing and behaving in their search for a richer, more meaningful way
of being in the world. Rather than dismiss their attempts, we should try
to learn along with them.
Diane Winston is a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of
American Religion at Princeton University.
Copyright (c) 1998
by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com
Date: 01/16/98
Section: Opinion
Page: A60
Page last revised 080499
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