AWAKENING:

God on the Quad: New England's liberal college campuses have become fertile ground for the evangelical movement, which is attracting students in record numbers. But after they graduate, will they keep the faith? (Neil Swidey, 11/30/2003, Boston Globe Magazine)

When he arrived on campus, Gomes recalls, the evangelicals were "rather beleaguered -- a small group of confessing Christians fighting godless Harvard." The university's push to diversify changed that. "People tend to think of affirmative action as only affecting racial minorities," he says, "but the change in Harvard demographics in the late '70s and early '80s meant that a lot of Midwestern white-bread Protestant Christian evangelicals at whom Harvard would never have looked in the past, and who would have never looked at Harvard, suddenly became members of the university."

Over the last decade, the evangelical scene has itself become more diverse. This brand of Christianity is particularly well suited to campus life, since it is propelled by "parachurch" groups like InterVarsity and Campus Crusade that don't recognize denominational lines. In fact, there is no uniform definition of "evangelical." Some define it merely as a style of expressing beliefs, incorporating a wide range of Protestants and even some Catholics. Others emphasize central building blocks: a conversion experience leading to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, an acceptance of the Bible as the inerrant word of God, and a commitment to save souls by spreading the Word. This elasticity makes it impossible to determine a precise number of American evangelicals, though several surveys have estimated it to be at least a third of the US population.

Whatever the definition, the evangelical presence on campus is a big, rowdy tent. Many students buy into all the tenets of the national parachurches, no matter how incompatible they may be with the ethos of the Eastern liberal arts college. Other students function more like "cafeteria Catholics," picking and choosing the tenets they can get behind.

And somewhere along the way, evangelical Christianity -- which a generation earlier had been a mark of embarrassment, a sign that you had checked your brain at the gate -- became not just tolerated but cool.

You can see this in the throngs of students from around Boston who cram into Harvard's Science Center on Friday nights to sing, "We are hungry for more of You/We are thirsty, oh Jesus." The event is called RealLife Boston, which is Campus Crusade's name for its 500-student Boston-area ministry, and the SRO crowd is made up of well-built athletes, attractive faces, even artsy types with chin hair and trendy black glasses. The emcee is Aaron Byrd, an easygoing junior from Abilene, Texas, who plays safety on the Harvard football team.

How did evangelicals get this hip?

Part of it is marketing. The whole RealLife approach, for instance, came from a marketing firm that Campus Crusade hired in the 1990s to help it expand its footprint in Boston. There are catchy print ads (one features a pair of wedding rings and the message "For the best sex, slip on one of these") and flashy websites (everystudent.com, godsquad.com). The Boston University chapter of Chi Alpha holds regular "The Gospel According to The Simpsons" gatherings.

But a bigger reason for their new coolness involves Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. When students from those religions began arriving on campus in larger numbers and continued to practice their traditions in public, others on campus were intrigued.

"It's very chic to be a believer now," says Gomes. "In a place which is so dispassionate, so rational, and in many ways so conformist intellectually, if you want to break out of the pack, you say your prayers in public. It is the example of religious practice elsewhere that has emboldened American evangelicals to exercise their own practice."

C-SPAN 2 this weekend features a talk by Tom Wolfe (repeat tonight at 6:30pm), which ends with him discussing the current age as one in which America is experiencing the Fifth Freedom: freedom from religion. That is to say that a country whose first freedom was the freedom of the individual to practice his own religion is going through a bout in which the very idea of moral limitations on the individual are viewed as anathema. The danger in this, as he notes, is that American freedom has only been made possible because of the ferocity of religious belief here and the manner in which Americans regulate themselves internally, which lessens the need for external restraints. Those who are attacking those internal restraints are in all likelihood creating the conditions under which greater external restraints are required--a process that's clearly visible in the simultaneous rise of secularism and of the regulatory State over the second half of the 20th Century. If the value of self-restraint can be inculcated in the coming generation of young people--as polling on issues like divorce and abortion suggests is taking place--then reductions in the authority exercised by the State will be possible. This is the conservative challenge and the promise of the current political transformation.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 30, 2003 3:44 PM