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The Spiritual Life of College Students

I’m really impressed with current research on spirituality in higher education.

The Higher Education Research Institude of UCLA is conducting of a multi-year survey of over 110,000 college students and the role of spirituality on their lives. The results are worth paying attention to.

• Students are spiritually seeking - 75% of the students say they are “searching for meaning/purpose in life” and nearly half report they consider it “essential” or “very important” to seek opportunities that help them grow spiritually.

  Forty-eight percent say it is “essential” or “very important” that college encourage their personal expression of spirituality.

• Students are more religiously tolerant - Not surprising given the increasing sweep of postmodernism, but nearly two-thirds disagree with the proposition that “people who don’t believe in God will be punished.”

• Students care about social justice - More than two-thirds report they are actively engaged in “trying to change things that are unfair in the world.”

My Thoughts

In the wake of this study, I hope colleges pay more attention to developing students’ spiritual lives. Maybe places like the Sacred Space at Northeastern University in Boston will become the norm.

Institutions will need to learn to foster spirituality in a way that is “fair” to all religions. Negotiating this is tricky, especially when you try to draw lines between evangelization and proselytization, or defining a religious movement versus a cult.

How does a state university stay separate from the church? In the near future, I don’t think it can. The postmodern generation will be more spiritual whether anybody likes it or not, and the increasing plurality of peoples living close together will force us to deal with the resulting issues.

Allow me to quote Miroslav Volf, a professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School, who addresses that (especially in America) we will be living with politics and religions of multiple communities.

The state should therefore “be ‘neutral with respect to the religious and other comprehensive perspectives present in society’, and that neutrality should be understood “as requiring impartiality” of the state with respect to all comprehensive perspectives rather than “separation of the state from all of them.”

We should pursue more acts relating to social justice. More than two-thirds are “trying to change things in an unfair world” - that’s a good thing! I feel the Christian faith can offer a sense of final hope, redemption, and justice to those people who truly want to see such things come about.

Religious Doubts?

One concern of mine is how the study creates a dichotomy between “religious interest” and “religious doubts” or reservations. I don’t think the two are necessarily opposed.

I feel that a healthy religious and spiritual life is accompanied by religious doubt and reservation. (Can you tell I’m a little bit postmodern?) One’s spiritual life ought to withstand healthy skepticism, doubt, questions, and being “angry with God.” If it cannot withstand such things, is it a way worth following?

I hope students will welcome challenges to their faith lives and religious assumptions. I want them to “wrestle with God”, so to speak. And in the end, my hope it they become wiser, stronger, and more humble because of their experience, because of their doubts, and because God met them in the midst of it all.

After all: that’s how God’s met me, lately.

Links and Downloads

• The Christian Science Monitor gives an overview of this study in their article, “U.S. Freshmen Reveal Their Spiritual Side.”

• The full report (PDF - 26 pages) entitled “The Spiritual Life of College Students: A National Study of Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose”.

  Don’t worry - it has lots of pretty pictures, graps, tables, and wide margins, so it’s easier to read than you may think.

• An Executive Summary (PDF - 8 pages) of the report.

  (It also has pretty pictures.)