USA Today Article about faith on campus

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Is God silenced on college campuses?

Or is the conversation simply changing?

By Tom Krattenmaker

The moment had, on the surface, a Nixon-goes-to-China quality.

Filmmaker Dan Merchant stood before an auditorium of students assembled for the first campus screening of his forthcoming movie, Lord Save Us From Your Followers. Merchant, a Christian, was at Lewis & Clark College, a school in Portland, Ore., deemed by the Princeton Review college guide to be one of the least religious in the USA. Yet one conspicuous reality defied a key premise of the event from the moment the college chaplain brought Merchant to the stage: Students packed the good-sized hall, overflowing into the aisles and entry ways, for a chance to see what most knew was a Christian-themed movie with a Gospel message.

And by the time they had finished watching the film — a humorous and heartfelt examination of the culture wars featuring a Michael Moore-meets-Monty Python style — those students could not wait to talk to Merchant about his movie and his faith.

"What struck me," Merchant said later, "was their openness to this conversation."

Students open to a conversation about Christianity, even on a campus with an ultrasecular reputation? Such is the state of affairs at the nation's colleges and universities, where religion is experiencing something of a renaissance, although not necessarily in the shapes and forms older generations are used to seeing.

Apart from the relatively small number of officially Christian colleges, America's campuses are viewed by many as bastions of liberal secularism, the places where religious faith goes to die.

"Young people entering college often encounter overwhelming temptations while being force-fed with godless philosophies — and the results can be spiritually catastrophic," warns pastor and radio show host John MacArthur. Former attorney general Edwin Meese III, now a Heritage Foundation fellow, says, "For years, our colleges and universities have shown themselves to be hostile to the rights and dignities of religious students."

A string of incidents do lend some credence to these exaggerated critiques. One of the more recent: action by the since-departed president of William & Mary to remove from permanent display a cross adorning the Virginia college's 274-year-old chapel (done, according to then-president Gene Nichol, to make the space more hospitable to religious minorities).

Also contributing to higher education's ultrasecular image are rules at many colleges that prohibit student organizations from excluding other students — a sure source of conflict when it comes to conservative religious groups that do not abide homosexuality. And then there is the academic habit of mind that encourages the questioning of, well, everything.

From the Ivy League to the brainiac liberal arts colleges to the major public universities, God has been silenced — or so conventional wisdom tells us.

The conventional wisdom, as it turns out, is not quite right.

From the pollsters come recent data showing that religion and spirituality are alive and well at colleges and universities. A recent study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA finds that more than half of college juniors say "integrating spirituality" into their lives is very important. Today's juniors also tend to pray (67%, according to the UCLA study) and 41% believe it's important, even essential, to "follow religious teachings" in everyday life....

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