Religious Pluralism and the Hookup Culture at Princeton

But if you walk into a context and your only friends live just a dramatically different lifestyle, it has a powerful impact negatively on your intellectual views, and your intellectual thoughts, and that’s not really understood. But if a person connects socially from the very beginning, that has a network of good Christian friends, then there’s time and context to wrestle with all the intellectual issues. Because if they don’t have that, then just forget it. So that I think Tim and I both would say absolutely is so incredibly important above all else.

But then comes the intellectual, which is important. And Tim, maybe you can comment on that.

I’ve met with prospective students’ families here, and when I tell them about the broader sort of religious and Christian landscape here at Princeton, they’re kind of shocked because they thought it was sort of you know, the fallowed ground where no Christian can be found at any corner of the university. And surely there’s opposition here, and it’s not entirely friendly to the Christian landscape, but there is healthy sort of engagement and community as Matt was saying there, and we’re wrestling through lots of these things. And there’s no need to sort of fear monger, or cast sort of this dark blanket over this context at these strategic influential universities. I really think if parents and pastors did a good job of really being honest with the challenges that are out there, and then providing resources to respond to them, it would set up students so much better as they enter into this really, really pivotal time of life.

And then the second half of what you’re saying that I think is important is introducing students to the issues and the questions they’re going to face and the way they’re going to face them before they get kind of “into the frying pan,” if I can say it that way, so that it doesn’t catch them by surprise. Because some students feel a sense when that happens to them of being betrayed. That what has happened, why didn’t I hear about this at my church? You know, I can see the force of that question. Why didn’t we talk about this when I was in high school? You know, that kind of thing.

The second one is within the religion department, some of the stuff that you’ve interacted with, Dr. Bock, with our students. I think that’s another intellectual hurdle. Princeton doesn’t have a large atheist population. There’s a small crew. They’re loud, but they’re small. The issue is much more on parsing the value of Scripture and then the portion of Christ that it presents. So I would say the engagement of the sexual ethic and then the engagement of the issues of the historical Jesus, the resurrection, are very, very front and center. And therefore are front and center as far as our approach to engaging the campus this year.

But in the last few years, as you know, it’s been taken over by another professor, and there are similar problems. And Tim, you can address…

The problem is students heading into this course have never heard any of these sort of nuances to Canon, or discussions of the Gnostic gospels. The Gnostic representation of Jesus versus the synoptics. The synoptic problem. What is a synoptic problem? Any of these things. These are all raised as it were for the first time for many students, not necessarily for our faculty at all, but for the students their first time hearing about –there’s a problem in the synoptic gospels? They’re giving a different representation of Jesus than John would? John was influenced by the Gnostics in the Gospel of Thomas? The dating? All of these sorts of things. This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about where students hear this for the first time. They’re intimidated because they hear it from a top-notch distinguished scholar who has received this honorary degree, that honorary degree. So they’re very intimidated. They almost don’t stand a chance.

So “faith busters” is a course that we’re very much engaging, and I’m happy to report that our initial levels of engagement last year, which I really believe are just preliminary efforts, just really fact-finding, just gathering something at a grassroots level that we’re giving more energy and resourcing to this year. But even last year’s efforts resulted in I think significant changes and modifications where that course, that “faith busters” course, is now seeing some changes in its curriculum. Where before I would say like Matt was attesting to, that the curriculum, the reading, the bibliography was very, very I would say skewed and asymmetrical, it’s actually finding much more balance where right now you’re starting to find resources like C.E. Hill. You’re starting to find resources like N.T. Wright’s engagement with John Dominic Crossan. Things that you wouldn’t have found five, three, two, even a year ago are now starting to enter into that course syllabi for many of these students.

So we’re engaging in ongoing conversations with that professor, engaging in this particular area so that now what we’re actually hearing is some of the other campus ministers who used to tell their students do not take that class, do whatever you can to avoid it, are actually now telling their students go take that class because you’re going to be trained and equipped and resourced to be able to engage and interact with that professor at a level that’s going to actually build your faith, not break it.

You’re getting the presentation of this stuff, and what you’re getting in the public square oftentimes is very much a reflection of kind of where the “faith busters” course started, which is you’re getting one side of the argument presented in a very organized, crisp, aesthetically pleasing and attractive way that then says – and uses the quote more often than not, many scholars argue or most scholars argue, so who’s going to argue with the scholarship on this? That kind of thing. And you’re off and running. And again, the secret is that people don’t know there’s a whole other half of this debate that they’re not even being exposed to.

What I would say is, however, this is one of those cases where being real honest with questions would be very, very helpful, and has been very, very helpful with students. I would say that if there is an atheist population on campus it probably resides – this may not be surprising at all –resides within the science department, particularly the physics department. And if they do ever have a biblical attack, it’s generally been located with Genesis 1 and like issues.

So what we’ve found is just again, there’s questions about Genesis 1. There’s also different readings of Genesis 1 that they’ve never heard.

One of the things I was going to say before is out of the number of students we have in our ministry approaching 400 right now, 1/6th of the students in our ministries right now came to Princeton as a non-Christian. So if you think about it, by God’s grace that’s quite a manifestation of just how even minds are being changed from those who are – whether they were apathetic or antagonistic, many of whom were antagonistic –are now just finding that Christian belief isn’t as high a jump as they originally thought it was going to be because we’re engaging some of these what they thought were going to be just nonnegotiables. They were never going to be able to breach this. They’re never going to be able to breach Genesis 1 versus modern science. Different readings and different handling of those questions are actually proving the opposite to be true.

The language that arose last year as we were going through a study called sex and spirituality, what we started to ask Princeton students were, particularly those that are in engineering and some of quantitative mindset, we said hey, there is, would you agree, a certain logic and law to the universe as it relates to engineering? You would never think of just originating your own laws of engineering. What you’re trying to do is observe, interpret, and then apply the laws that are in place in order to be fruitful at your studies here and then in life in the future.

Well, similarly there is a sort of relational physics, and we ought to observe what’s there, interpret it, and see if we can understand, apply it, and embrace that. But for some reason there is a disconnect that happens there where students will say “Yes, there is something that we must answer to in the former in order to do engineering or economics, or physics well. But as it relates to relational engineering, or relational physics, or relational economics, we somehow have the right to develop our own universal laws.” And they’re realizing that disconnect, and some actually just caved under the pressure of that and actually became Christians through that course last year. So that is something that we hope to be able to continue and expand upon. Is just examining that disconnect. It feels arbitrary, and I think students are becoming increasingly aware of it.