Religion on Campus

Do they feel it still has significance in their lives? Do they actively participate in religious activities? Are they becoming less and less active in religion and more and more secular as each year passes?

Conrad Cherry, Amamda Porterfield, and Betty Deberg selected four colleges to conduct a study about religious attitudes in America today. They chose a Roman Catholic school, a Lutheran school, a Presbyterian school, and a state school for their study. They spent many weeks at each school, going to the events, attending religious services, and conducting interviews with students and religious leaders. The results of their studies were edited and combined together to form this book, "Religion on Campus".

What these three scholars found is that that most students, in spite of the negative news to the contrary, are still active in religion and they still consider it an important part of their lives. They still believe in a higher power and actively debate the role of religion in society. Students also still belive in going to church (although more of them consider themselves spiritual in the broader sense and don't belong to any church)and in the active support of church- related activities.

The authors base these findings on what they saw and heard firsthand during their travels to the different univerisities. However, the fact that they included only four schools makes me a little skeptical. Statistically speaking, one cannot draw any definite conclusions with such a small sample. When you consider the thousands of universities that exist in America, it would be foolish to think that a study of just four of them would be sufficient to declare that American students are more religious than everyone thinks. A larger sample would need to be studied.

Another thing I didn't like about this book is the fact that the authors do not disclose the names of the four colleges in the study. They don't disclose the real names of any of the faculty, students, or administrators either. I can fully understand why individuals might not want to be mentioned by name. But I cannot understand the decision to withhold the names of the schools. As I read, I found myself putting the book down every now and then and trying to figure out what colleges they were talking about. This distracted a little from the book itself. I think disclosing the names would have made for a better read and it would have given a study like this one a little more credibility.

Authors Conrad Cherry, Amanda Porterfield, and Betty DeBerg are three academic scholars who have studied the topic of religion extensively. They have published many articles and presented their own analysis on the topic of religion and its importance to the members of the public. "Religion on Campus" is a respectable effort to study and present the real story behind American students and how they feel about the subject of religion, but it doesn't include enough colleges to represent a viable cross- section of the different types of colleges and the different types of students that attend them. For this reason, I can only give it a two- star rating. It doesn't go in- depth enough to take seriously.