for Organized Religion on Campuses

Dear Friends,

I think this article is thoughtful and provides much food for thought. On some points I would like to enter into discourse with the author but this in no way detracts from the general tenor of the thoughts expressed.

Blessings and Peace

Brigid Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2000 9:02 PM Organized Religion on Campuses

This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The following message was enclosed: Someone referred me to this article, and I thought it was quite interesting. Does anyone have any coments on it?

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From the issue dated August 18, 2000

Me-First 'Spirituality' Is a Sorry Substitute for Organized Religion on Campuses

By DONNA SCHAPER On most campuses, somewhere off the beaten track, is the office of the predictably part-time campus ministry. The typical Protestant chaplain puts in a so-called 20-hour week, the Moslem adviser perhaps 10; the rabbi and priest are usually borrowed from outside the university and come in when they can. These people report to volunteer boards of directors and spend much of their time raising their own salaries. When they are not so engaged, they handle suicides, drug overdoses, racial incidents in dormitories, the occasional abortion gone wrong, and just about anything else that the purported college ombudsman doesn't have time for.

Indeed, religion on campus has become a form of counseling -- and is just about as effective. What it does not address is the sacred. God. Oddly, religion ignores religion, best defined by the theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich as matters of ultimate concern. That is what is being marginalized, shut off in a corner to be dealt with in leftover time.

The problem is tied to the decline of organized religion on campuses. Of course, organized religion is not the only vehicle for the sacred, but it is an important one. In many instances, American colleges and universities were founded around organized religion to further sacred concerns. From nearly the beginning, however, they began to stray from those purposes, and the pace of decline quickened in the 20th century. Today, the compulsory chapel services of a mere 40 years ago have become optional at many private institutions. A few Southern black colleges maintain them out of obedience to a Sabbath long gone in the rest of higher education. A few Ivies, like Yale and Harvard, keep full-time chaplains and weekly services, but even thosecampus ministries have to fight to hold on to their endowments. Too often, administrators have a tendency to put such money in the general fund.

The change in the role of religion on the campus was made clear when chaplains were removed in the 1970's and 80's from the purview of college presidents. In the 1960's, William Sloane Coffin Jr. and Kingman Brewster Jr. at Yale were the poster pair for what is now an antique collaboration. Today, chaplains are the property of deans of student life.

Some colleges still have official chaplains, but those people are rapidly making their programs ecumenical, with weaker and weaker ties to organized religion. The Mount Holyoke Chapel is emblematic; two years ago, it was decidedly Christian. Today it has portable prayer rugs, crosses, and arks; the student-run chapel council has become the Interfaith Council. The tolerance represented by the ecumenical movement is praiseworthy, but it comes at a cost: Increasingly, chaplains are connected with their own religious views rather than with collective ones.

Only a true paranoid would argue that the decline of institutionalized religion in higher education represents a concerted war on the sacred. The consequences, however, are clear. Because religion doesn't belong quite anywhere, it can show up everywhere -- in conversations about genetics in the physics department, in dorm meetings, in student-volunteer organizations. Because it no longer has offices or programs of any significant size (no matter what the faith), religion has lost a meaningful place on the campus. Because it has become ecumenical, no one really takes "ownership" of it.

The one thing you usually don't hear about at today's colleges and universities is God. In the name of not fettering the sacred to any one religion, God is fettered and the sacred frittered away.

Today, the sacred is strictly optional in liberal-arts education, and most students are illiterate when it comes to religion. That ignorance makes it far too easy for people to don one of religion's many costumes, a ubiquitous "spirituality" that is clogging the Internet and cluttering campus bulletin boards. Unfortunately, the garb of spirituality is a bleached, if companionable, substitute for faith. Amateurish tai chi and yoga, quasi-Buddhist meditation, and New Age prayers are a far cry from the ancient practice of the Sabbath.

Deans need not be afraid. Spirituality has no staff, needs no offices, and writes no letters arguing for or against a particular institutional direction. That is the business of organized religion, which argues for a purpose to life that includes God.

Spirituality is more inner-directed; religion turns outward. Spirituality is a private matter, between a person and God. It needs no institutional framework. Indeed, spirituality rejects interference in the religious experience. Neither religious nor secular, it is a hybrid of the two.

Almost a hundred years ago, the German scholar and theologian Ernst Troeltsch warned that both sects and churches were being replaced by a mystic, or inner, focus. As mysticism continued to ascend as a religious form, he said, ethics would no longer be possible. He was eerily right. Religion links people to others and offers precepts on how to live in harmony with each other; spirituality unlinks them. While the world's religions share a key insistence on selflessness before God, today's spirituality too often promotes an internalized feel-goodism that only infrequently inspires a dedication to some higher good.

Yes, there are marvelous exceptions. But rare is the spiritualist who cares more about justice or other people than about "feelings." Rarely is spirituality invoked to protect people and cultures from ills like the spread of a homogenizing, dehumanizing global economy.

So it's sad that spirituality is often more welcome on the campus today than religion.

Until recently, I worked as an area minister in Amherst, Mass. The campus that I know best is the University of Massachusetts there. At that institution, the chancellor, David K. Scott, has been concerned about increasing fragmentation among people, disciplines, and branches of knowledge, as well as about the separation between work and family life. As part of an effort to create what he calls an "integrative university," he is seeking to promote spirituality on the campus (not what you would expect from a physicist at a public institution). This summer, the university put on a conference, "Going Public with Spirituality in Work and Higher Education," whose program called for exploring "the relationship of spirituality to learningand work." A press release quoted Scott as saying that a movement is under way to transform education,the workplace, and organizations through "integrativeapproaches that overcome fragmentation, specialization, and isolation in life and learning." I spoke with him after the conference, and he told me that he wants to create a university that doesn't exclude spiritual "grounding" in the name of avoiding a bias in favor of any one religion.

I share Scott's concern that the fragmentation of knowledge has broken the ties (intellectual and religious) that bind people. I applaud him for the effort, long past due, to argue for the sacred in the academy. Postmodernism has, indeed, "degenerated into abject cynicism," as he told The Boston Globe last October. But I believe that he is pursuing the right goal in the wrong way.

At first glance, Scott is an ally of religion on the campus. He told me that he approves of the new interfaith councils on his own and other campuses. But putting resources into campus ministries starving for funds would probably do more to promote the sacred.

Some of us don't want to replace religion with spirituality. We don't want a table selling religious equipment in the student union; we want a place at the table. We don't want students just to study religion; we want them to have opportunities to practice religion.

In a world increasingly populated by Zen-leaning Lutherans, or Buddhists turned Catholic, or Jews turned Quaker, it's not surprising to find a highly personal spirituality replacing institutional religion. We are so mired in the self that we are losing sight of the sacred. Religion, and its many imperfect institutions and spiritual expressions, promotes belief through its ancient practices and liturgies. Religion steeps people in its long history of reflection on ethics. At its best, religion offers time and space for spiritual experience. Spirituality gives us a quick fix that fits into our fast-paced, insular lifestyle.

Despite the often-invoked need for the separation of church and state, providing a space for the sacred on the campus is a threat neither to diversity nor to unbelief. I think of the rumored story of Norman O. Brown's jumping to his feet and shaking his fist at Tillich's sneaky definition of religion as that which is our ultimate concern: "Your definition deprives me of my God-given right to be an atheist!" Brown is supposed to have thundered.

What we need is not more calls for spirituality, but more money for chapels and chaplains. Universities cannot support only one religion today. But they can support religions -- and that means working with various organized religious groups in a reinvigorated partnership.

People need a sense of the Spirit. Why not get it from those who have historical and institutional backing? The absence of the Spirit from institutions of higher learning has gone on long enough.

Donna Schaper, formerly area minister for the United Church of Christ in western Massachusetts, is now senior pastor at the Coral Gables Congregational Church, in Miami.