Students drawn to religious studies

By Donna Gehrke-White
Knight Ridder News Service

Religion has become one of the hottest areas of study in campuses across the country.

Since the late 1990s, members of Generation Y have been taking classes to help explain the world as well as find themselves a religion, often by mixing and matching beliefs. Universities are responding by offering more religion classes, from an overview of the world's faiths to concentrated looks at them.

Nathan Katz, chairman of Florida International University's Department of Religious Studies, sees the increased enrollment as a sign of the resurgence of spirituality in the past decade.

"We are the most technically advanced in the world and we are also the most religious, by many measures," he says.

Gen Y'ers — who at about 70 million number almost as many as their Boomer parents — also seek religion classes out of curiosity and a need to understand current events.

In Hawai'i, Chaminade has seen an increase in three indicators from 2000 to 2003: enrollments in religion classes, an increase in classes themselves and a large increase in those declaring religion as their major.

At the University of Hawai'-Manoa, undergraduate religion classes were jammed this year, the largest since professor Helen Baroni joined the faculty 11 years ago.

"We've never had such high numbers for enrollments since I've been here," she said.

And Hawai'i Pacific University is seeing an increase in its comparative religions course, which its instructor attributes, in part, to current world events.

On the Mainland, the numbers are even more pronounced. The University of Miami's enrollment in religious studies classes has almost doubled in less than five years to this fall's 921 students.

The University of Miami had to limit two of its Religion 101 classes this fall to the first 530 who signed up.

"Kids are discovering their faith in college and they are looking for any opportunity that comes their way to find it," says Jeffrey Shoulson, director of the University of Miami's Program of Judaic Studies.

In just three years, from school year 1996-1997 to 1999-2000, the number of students taking a religion class increased 15 percent across the United States and the number of religion majors jumped 25 percent, according to a national survey of 1,156 colleges by the American Academy of Religion.

A Gallup Poll survey of teens' worship attendance showed slightly more were going to services in 1998 — 49 percent — than the 47 percent in 1977.

"There's a different attitude: It's more acceptable, not as contentious" to be religious, says Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina who is directing the National Study of Youth and Religion. "Today's youth are less suspicious, less hostile than Baby Boomers would have been in the '60s and '70s."

Some also have grown up in megachurches without ritual. But young people today like icons, incense and other traditional parts of Christianity so they're taking religion classes to learn more about them, says Richard Flory, a sociology associate professor at Biola University in California who studies trends in religion.

"People are interested in their own roots, in their own traditions, in learning about them," adds Florida International University's Oren Stier, who is an assistant professor of religious studies.

Sometimes, though, students may feel threatened by how religion classes look objectively at religions — even challenging what students think of as infallible beliefs, says Daniel Alvarez, a Florida International University religion instructor.

Many evangelical Christians, for example, are stunned when professors teach that the Bible is open to interpretation and contradicts itself, he says.

"The more traditional have a sense of anxiety," Alvarez says. "They're exposed to historical criticism that they simply aren't familiar with or sympathetic to."

Alvarez tries to be gentle. "My job, I say to them, is to make each of the religions come alive."

Advertiser religion and ethics writer Mary Kaye Ritz contributed the Hawai'i material for this report.