Some people have intense religious experiences. Usually during times of distress, they see visions of Jesus or hear the “voice of God.” Often those people develop what is colloquially termed a fundamentalist form of religiosity. Neuro-psychologists have suggested that there may be a genetic component to that intensity of belief—that human beings have evolved to perceive agency in the world and yearn for tightly structured groups in times of turmoil. Some people are more susceptible than others.
For college students, who spend much of their time stressed out, there is a correlation between the kind of college they attend and their likelihood of developing a radical-conservative religious worldview. Jesus, it seems, does not go to community college. Surprisingly, he doesn’t go to Bible college, either. He attends Oxbridge and the Ivy League.
While conducting research on student evangelical groups, I met a male student whom we’ll call Red. He was raised Pentecostal and had attended a Pentecostal private school before enrolling in a Midwestern Pentecostal Bible college. His story seems counterintuitive, but it is actually quite representative of many students’ experiences at Christian colleges.
Red told me that he had arrived at college with “a burning passion for Jesus.” He found a community where all students were evangelicals and “the whole way the Bible was taught was, ‘Well, this is the truth!’ ... I know a lot of people who went away with more questions than they came with, including me.” As a postdoctoral student in England, however, he found that the situation “was completely different. Christians were a minority, they supported each other like Alcoholics Anonymous or something! And there was no question that they were what we’d have called born again.”
Red’s experience is echoed in detailed surveys by Phillip E. Hammond and James Davison Hunter in the 1980s, which show that Christian students who attend Christian colleges tend to become more liberal during the process of their education. They enroll as fervent evangelicals and leave, in many cases, far less ardent in their faith. The reason is that Bible colleges, unlike many more-prestigious universities, lack a central quality that encourages the formation of fundamentalist student groups and religious experiences.
In his 1969 analysis of the Ndembu of Zambia, the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner described how groups of young men of the tribe were taken away from society as part of a status-raising “ritual of initiation” into adulthood. In the forest, stripped of individuality and violently removed from their sense of place, the “neophytes” were “ground down to be refashioned anew.” This created a strong sense of communitas—a breaking down of social boundaries—during the liminal, or “in between” phase, which helped to forge a strong bond among the young men. Then in 1991, the anthropologist John Eade noticed that during some liminal phases there is strong evidence of “boundary-making procedures,” wherein people form smaller cliques of identity within the group. The new tribesmen’s identities were fundamentally changed by their initiation experience, but afterward they returned to their society, ready to help run it.
Most Bible colleges do not operate that way. They do not challenge students’ identities, because almost all of the students are evangelical Christians. Accordingly, the experience does not place the kind of psychological pressure on them that might lead to a life-changing religious experience, nor does it compel them to seek safety and acceptance in a tight-knit, fundamentalist student group. I found evidence of the same phenomenon in my research at universities in the Netherlands. Because all Dutch universities (as opposed to polytechnic or religious institutions) have about the same prestige, most students go to their local university. Protestants tend to live in the north and Roman Catholics in the south in the Netherlands, so the students are surrounded by others of the same faith; in fact, many live at home. They also have little exposure to students from different social classes because most social interactions happen through “student clubs,” and one must be invited to join the most prestigious clubs.
That homogeneity contributes to a more lenient attitude among Christian students in the Netherlands. The main Christian student group at Leiden University, for example, is relatively liberal. Some members admitted to having premarital sex, getting a bit drunk, and accepting evolution as truth. By contrast, Hammond and Hunter’s survey found that Christian students who attend Ivy League and other respected institutions tend to leave more fervently evangelical than when they began college. Such universities tend to challenge students’ faith, prompting them to create a “fortress of identity” to preserve their sense of who they are.
At the University of Oxford, students from diverse backgrounds are thrown together. Ten percent of British students attend private schools (often single-sex, tuition-charging boarding schools), but such students compose 50 percent of Oxford undergraduates. Therefore students who attended state schools are more likely at Oxford than at less prestigious universities to interact with private-school students, and vice versa. Attendance at the university involves living in a college, often with people from different social and religious backgrounds; formal rituals, including dining in robes to lessen students’ sense of individuality; and stressful exams that cannot be retaken and lead to a high rate of depression and suicide among undergraduates. In fact, attending Oxford is an extremely intense and identity-challenging rite of passage. And its effects on students’ faith are compelling. Non-Christian students are far more likely to become Christian at Oxford than at other universities, especially if they are from a modest background. Oxford and its traditions are entirely new to such students, and most have not experienced a previous rite of passage such as living at school.
Tom is a prime example. Educated at a state school, he found Oxford alienating and was soon drawn to the Christian Union by its various outreach events. “I’d never met people that thought like that before,” remarked Tom, who had considered himself “kind of a vague atheist.” He said, “It just made me think ... am I right? Can I really be arrogant enough to think that I’ve got all the answers?” At one point, Tom collapsed on his bed and “just prayed and prayed and prayed. And that’s when I heard God say, ‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’”
Researchers have found the same pattern at other prestigious institutions that attract students from diverse backgrounds. At Harvard University, Christian evangelicalism is so prevalent that the first “humanist chaplain” was appointed 30 years ago, so overwhelmed do many secular students feel on the campus. In a recent request for financing, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard pointed out that the “evangelical campus outreach organization Campus Crusade for Christ had an annual national budget of nearly $650-million in 2007 alone.”
Those findings challenge many of the assumptions of Christian students and parents. One reason Red wanted to go to a Bible college, rather than study theology at a university, was that he was concerned about the consequences for his faith were he to expose it to non-Christians. In fact, his faith may have remained more intact—or, as he now terms it, immature—had he avoided Bible college.
Of course, with sociological research of this kind, we can talk only in terms of likelihoods. Perhaps as studies of the neuropsychology of religion advance, we will be better able to determine how individuals will respond to various college environments. At the moment, however, we have enough evidence to say that students are most likely to meet Jesus—and stick with him—at the world’s most elite universities.
