Redefining personal religion

By Maidere Sorhondo

It's the Sunday night before Valentine's Day and Leslie Kincaid is throwing her second-annual cookie decorating party.

Her apartment smells of freshly-baked goods and is bright with tubs of red, white and pink frosting. Eight girls sit around the table exchanging stories about lost virginities, bad boyfriends and funny drunken nights.

The 9 o'clock student Mass has come and gone across campus, and I take a break from cupcake layering to ask Leslie, the smiling hostess, about her life in college as a Christian.

"It's funny," she says, "coming to college was odd for me because none of my friends here are Christian or religious, and I don't think my lifestyle fits Christianity as much as it used to, but I hope it does in some ways."

She keeps a sheet of binder paper Scotch taped to the wall next to her pillow, on which she has written a list of names of family members and friends that she wants to pray for that week.

In Leslie's college life, where finance classes and sorority meetings have replaced Young Life activities and Bible study, she has become very personal with her faith, and praying is what she says is most important in her relationship with God today.

Higher education institutions are based on the mission to promote curiosity and embrace the freedom of individual thought that leads to new personal and intellectual discovery.

This individualism promoted in schools and in today's society as a whole may be influencing young adults' attitudes toward religion. A survey of faculty from 372 colleges nationwide by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008 concluded that there were significant increases in professors' goals to help students develop personal values, self-understanding and moral character.

These goals, along with the increasingly-consumerist culture where we pick and choose anything we want, have increased students' sense of obligation to choose what they value and believe in terms of religion and spirituality.

With increasing time constraints and conflicting social and political values, college students are creating a religion that best fits their schedules, lifestyles and beliefs with a -- so to speak -- "do-it-yourself God."

Perhaps we have reached the point where cafeteria Catholics and a la carte canons are the new unorganized organized religion.

Brigid Kelleher, a history major, grew up in a strict, religious family in Virginia, ending her nights kneeling around her parents' bed to pray with her siblings before bedtime.

She grew up in Catholic schools, attended Mass every Sunday and read supplemental home-school religious workbooks assigned by her proud father, a military man. To Brigid, God was always sort of a "duh." Now, out of the eye of her Navy captain father, Brigid admits that she hasn't gone to church since the first week of her college life -- almost four years ago.

After many years of accepting orders from her parents to attend Mass, Brigid believes church to be somewhat of a chore and can't relate to it as well anymore. "A lot of the homilies that I've heard are just so obnoxious and I'm like, 'You really don't have a grasp on reality at all,'" she says.

Brigid's biggest new-found struggles are the structural issues she finds in the church. "I guess Catholicism is relating to an upper-echelon of morality, but I don't think that's necessarily taking in happiness," she says. "To say you can't get married in the church if you've gotten divorced is so rude. As if God would turn anyone away."

While Brigid thinks she'll probably come back to the church when it's time to raise her family, for now she feels that the church doesn't agree with her social views of things like gay activism and prefers to keep a personal tie to her God through thinking and reflection.

Jeremy Uecker, a sociologist of religion and professor at University of Texas at Austin, has researched the trends and shifts in religiosity among young adults and has come to a conclusion fitting of Brigid's experience in college.

Uecker noted that a 2007 analysis done by the Population Research Center found that only 14 percent of college students disaffiliated from religion and 18 percent of college students reported a drop in religious salience. However, 64 percent attended church less frequently than they did as teenagers. This gap in church participation among young adults is widening as people are choosing to marry and start families much later in life and in turn can be losing their ties to church for a longer period of time, says Bob Mallon, director of the Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of San Jose.

Mallon's office sits in a six-story building on the corner of Homestead and Lafayette Streets, right across the street from the building where Brigid takes her history classes on the Santa Clara campus.

Mallon was brought into the Diocese of San Jose to help solve the problem of the falling participation numbers among young adults within local parishes and Campus Ministry programs.

In his 10 years of experience leading university Campus Ministries, including University of California, Santa Barbara and Notre Dame de Namur University, Mallon has noticed that the demands being put on students have increased tremendously, leaving them with less and less time to devote to engaging with communities connected with their faith. In order to help students with that, he stresses that the church needs to come to students and connect in their lives as much as their personal faith does.

Mallon is working on introducing young adult religious programs that fit better into the lives of college students, including a yoga class and a series of "Theology on Tap" get-togethers, where young adults come and listen to lectures on issues surrounding Catholicism and discuss their ideas with peers at a local bar.

The importance, he says, is to start building relationships between people and to start promoting a community. For college students like Brigid, who think that church activities are a chore, perhaps these programs will help them feel more connected to the Catholic community.

Among Americans aged 18-29, one in four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion, according to a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2007. Many students are finding niche religions less attractive than more customized ones.

Until his freshman year at Saint Mary's College, John Meister was the role model for young Christian males. The tall, dark, blue-eyed Washingtonian calculates that he attended an average of four hours of church services every weekend in high school.

With a Catholic father and Protestant mother, John attended church services for both sides of the family, as well as meetings for youth groups. "Sundays sucked so bad," he says. "We weren't allowed to play with other neighborhood friends on Sundays because it was the Sabbath, so we couldn't do anything but be in our house."

John now reflects upon his religious upbringing as an extreme example, but still remembers the days when dancing wasn't allowed because it would lead to sex and speaking in tongues was an essential way to connect with God.

Ironically, it was religion classes in college that led John to question his faith. "I grew up in a Pentecostal church that was super, super right-wing conservative, like God literally made the world in seven days," he says. "And then I took a class called, 'Introduction to Biblical Literature,' where we looked at the Bible from a symbolic point of view and read the stories as merely messages, and it really just demolished my foundation. I had always had such a black and white view of it all, and I stepped back and thought, 'It's really gray.'"

College also presented Meister with a party life of firsts and fun that he was never allowed to taste before. "It's like you've been told you can't eat a cookie all your life, and then you're here and you can have cookies whenever you want," he smiles.

After four years of questioning, Meister says he still believes in a creator, but for now, he's avoiding the cliquishness he finds with Christian denominations. "It's very exclusive, when in reality, I think the real message of Jesus is about everyone loving each other. And I think religion just kind of messes that up," he says.

Meister found his religious voice at Saint Mary's College -- it's one kind of growth and personal discovery that higher education is attempting to promote.

Ricky Alexander represents another kind of growth and personal discovery. The Santa Clara senior saw college as an opportunity to redefine himself.

After going through Jewish education from kindergarten through seventh grade and proudly having his bar mitzvah at age 13, Ricky was well versed in the teachings of his religion.

Later, Ricky would reflect that the comparative religions class he took freshman year helped him realize that people think in other ways, and that there are other ways to see the world. He realized that he didn't have to confine himself to either a narrow ideology or a narrow definition of self.

When Ricky found himself as a junior in college telling his friends and family that he was gay, he cut the string he'd been tangled in for so long and began embracing his new identity.

This meant a whole new openness to questioning things, which translated over to his religious views. Ricky defines himself as more spiritual than religious at this point.

In addition to Jewish values, his search for truth, definition and answers has included random hours of Buddhist meditation, a splash of transcendentalist ideas and a focus on the "here and now" reality of social justice issues.

"I'm just more deeds over prayer and words. You can profess whatever you believe in, but it's what you do that really defines who you are," he says. "While it was fascinating reciting Hebrew for three-and-a-half hours from the Torah, which tells me I'm an abomination, I thought, 'Let's leave that and spend three- and-a-half hours working at a soup kitchen.'"

Ricky sees the religious part of his identity that was once much more salient replaced with other activities such as the labor rights rally he helped coordinate.

Regardless of what his schedule is filled with, Ricky says it's a daily struggle of searching, changing and reflecting on life. His exploration for answers has not stopped since his early years in the temple.

Professor Jean Molesky-Poz sits next to an old iMac computer and stares out onto the fresh green grass and forest of trees outside of her office window. She explains to me the course she teaches at Santa Clara titled, "Finding Your Own Spirituality."

As a Catholic and an expert on Mayan spiritual traditions, Molesky-Poz emphasizes the connection people have to nature and to each other. "I tell students," she says, "this course will help you find your compass, and help give you tools to travel throughout life. And I think that students are rushed so much, that they don't realize how important it is to bring meaning and slow down and pay attention to this huge interior life that they have."

A good example was the field trip Molesky-Poz coordinated last summer to bring her students to a man-made labyrinth. The intention was to show the class how the labyrinth related to the process of reflecting upon one's journey in life.

But when Molesky-Poz arrived at the labyrinth in the last car, students were already swiftly spinning and running around the maze, nearly done. "I said, 'wait a minute,'" she recalls, "'you've completely missed the purpose of the labyrinth. It's not to see how fast you can make it through the puzzle, but to reflect.'"

Alexander Astin, the founding director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, has done numerous studies on spirituality in higher education and has observed a similar attitude among college students. "The main changes relevant to spirituality among young adults is the very large decline in 'developing a meaningful philosophy of life' as a life goal," Astin remarks. Some students have found it easier to ignore life's bigger questions.

One such student is Paul Arnaudo, an operations and management information systems major.

The dark matter enthusiast and fervent reader of "The Economist" jokingly claims to be a religious follower of the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- referring to "The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster," a satirical book protesting the Kansas Board of Education's requirement that public schools teach intelligent design.

Though he later admitted to being agnostic, he explained, "I just think there's so many more concrete, interesting things to think about today as opposed to the more esoteric."

In fact, Molesky-Poz has noticed that there are many students like Paul who have not taken the time and discipline to look deeper into that ephemeral meaning of life.

"A part of my life is to teach students to start paying attention to their center, to their relationships and to live more carefully," she says. "I think once they've made a connection with their own personal desires and see that as the spirit within them, they're fine. They have found their passion. They've found their hunger. Then they need tools. But it's about that first connection."

Young adults' attitudes toward religion in 2009 are not that much different from those of their parents' generations in the '60s and '70s.

The baby boomer generation before us restructured the American religious landscape into one promoting religious pluralism and personal preference.

Wade Roof, professor of religion and society at UCSB, documented the spiritual journeys of the baby boomer generation in his book, "A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation" and found that baby boomers were being raised in a more secular time of Vietnam and Watergate, where the religious culture that once constituted the core of the American experience had disappeared.

This generation of college students is more frequently emerging from interfaith marriages and blended families which, as Roof argues, will result in new generations of children with weak institutional religious ties.

"I think the younger generations are even less committed to institutional religion, but continue in spiritual quests and are more likely to mix and match elements from many religious sources into their own personal pastiche of belief and practice," he says.

Most agree that this "do-it-yourself" way to God and spirituality inspired by the baby boomer generation is increasingly becoming the norm and standard acceptance of religion among young adults today -- and it looks like it will only become more embedded in the generations to follow.

Contact Maidere Sorhondo at msorhondo@scu.edu.