God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America

by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Naomi Schaefer

Overview

Religious colleges and universities in America are growing at a breakneck pace. In this startling new book, journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley explores these schools-interviewing administrators, professors, and students-to produce the first popular, accessible, and comprehensive investigation of this phenomenon

Call them the Missionary Generation. By the tens and hundreds of thousands, some of America's brightest and most dedicated teenagers are opting for a different kind of college education. It promises all the rigor of traditional liberal arts schools, but mixed with religious instruction from the Good Book and a mandate from above.

Far removed from the medieval cloisters outsiders imagine, schools like Wheaton, Thomas Aquinas, and Brigham Young are churning out a new generation of smart, worldly, and ethical young professionals whose influence in business, medicine, law, journalism, academia, and government is only beginning to be felt.

In God On The Quad, Riley takes readers to the halls of Brigham Young, where surprisingly with-it young Mormons compete in a raucous marriage market and prepare for careers in public service. To the infamous Bob Jones, post interracial dating ban, where zealous fundamentalists are studying fine art and great literature to help them assimilate into the nation's cultural centers. To Thomas Aquinas College, where graduates homeschool large families and hope to return the American Catholic Church to its former glory. To Yeshiva, Wheaton, Notre Dame, and more than a dozen other schools, big and small, rich and poor, new and old, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Mormon, and even Buddhist, all training grounds for the new Missionary Generation.

With a critical yet sympathetic eye, Riley, a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, studies these campuses and the debates that shape them. In a post-9/11 world where the division between secular and religious has never been sharper, what distinguishes these colleges from their secular counterparts? What does the missionary generation think about political activism, feminism, academic freedom, dating, race relations, homosexuality, and religious tolerance-and what effect will these young men and women have on the United States and the world?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312330453
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	01/06/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.94(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a contributing writer at The American Enterprise and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and National Review. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Weekly Standard, the New York Post, the New York Sun, the New Republic, Commentary, Crisis, the Public Interest, the New Atlantis, and First Things. Ms. Riley is also the editor of In Character, a journal of the John Templeton Foundation, and an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Since graduating from Harvard magna cum laude in 1998, she has worked as assistant editor of Commentary, as well as an editorial intern at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review. She has been the recipient of the Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Journalism Fellowship, the Claremont Institute Publius Fellowship, and the Charles G. Koch Fellowship.

Read an Excerpt

God on the Quad

How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation are Changing America

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By Naomi Schaefer Riley

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2005 Naomi Schaefer Riley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6158-9

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CHAPTER 1

AN OASIS IN THE DESERT: THE APPEAL OF BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

Zee Cramer looks at her boyfriend, Adam, from across the long, barren living room — only two chairs, a couch, a coffee table, and a mini-stereo resting on some milk crates stand between them. Suppressing giggles, Zee and Adam each assume a squatting position. And then, with a couple of friends looking on, the two start lumbering toward each other. One frog leg and then the other with their rear ends almost brushing the ground. They move faster as they get closer, but not so quickly that they lose their balance. Finally, Zee and Adam reach each other, both red from the laughter. They lean in, grab each other's calves, and squeeze affectionately. This elaborate mating ritual, Zee tells me, was dreamed up to accommodate one of her former roommates who became offended when she saw Adam touching Zee's thigh. The girl's rule — that "all leg-touching must be below the knee" — may seem a little extreme, but at Brigham Young University, it's not so far from the norm.

Zee "is on the BYU list of top twenty-five girls to marry," according to her ex-boyfriend, Greg Erekson. And it's easy to see why. Zee is a lovely five foot ten or so, slender, with brown hair that drops past her long neck to just below her shoulders. Though she gave up her dance major a few years ago, the training is evident even in the way she sits. In her vowels, you can detect the remnant of a South African accent — she spent the first ten years of her life there.

I meet Zee on a Saturday night at her house, which she shares with nine other girls. Six live in the main part and the others share the basement. It's not a fancy place. It could use a paint job and the grass out front is far from green (not surprisingly, since BYU is in the middle of the Utah desert). Most of BYU's 35,000 students live off campus in similar arrangements.

I chat with Adam while Zee is getting ready. Blond and thin, Adam looks nothing if not comfortable in his preppy uniform of khaki shorts and two well-worn T-shirts, layered one on top of the other. His combination of black socks and soccer sneakers oddly seem not simply acceptable, but trendy. Like his beat-up brown Saab, which we take to dinner. "Thai, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Tibetan?" they ask if I have a preference. The town has more ethnic restaurants than I would have expected in Utah; they do a booming business off students who return from their two-year missions in foreign countries and crave the foods they left behind. We settle on Indian.

Zee and Adam order appetizers, entrées, and dessert. Either they think I'm picking up the tab or they have more disposable income than most of the college students I know. The latter is certainly possible: BYU is funded almost entirely by tithes from the Mormon Church, so tuition is only about $3,150 per year for students in the Church, and only about 30 percent more for non-Church members. (By comparison, two of the private universities listed closest to BYU in the U.S. News & World Report 2004 ranking — Boston University and Southern Methodist University — charge $28,906 and $23,588 respectively.)

Tuition rates were not a big issue for Adam, who grew up in the well-to-do New York suburb of Norwalk, Connecticut. When I ask him how he came to Provo, he starts at the very beginning. Adam was raised Catholic. His father doesn't practice, but he and his two brothers accompanied their mother to church regularly when they were growing up. He never really "felt connected to God" through the Catholic Church, but having maintained some belief in a divine being, Adam immediately began looking for another faith when he started his freshman year at the University of Denver. After attending a number of different churches, synagogues, and temples, he settled on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Only there, he tells me, did he find the "connection" he wanted. But then, instead of continuing his education in Denver, he was moved to go on a mission.

Having spent two years knocking on doors to spread the Mormon gospel in Korea, Adam knew he couldn't go back to his former school; he wanted to attend Brigham Young. His parents, Adam explains, were hardly thrilled with his conversion to Mormonism or with his decision to attend BYU, but he thinks "they are dealing better with it now, since they see how much it has done for my life." On a trip east to meet his family, Zee recalls, they ran into an old coach of Adam's. The man couldn't believe how Adam looked — "clean-cut and well-dressed." It's a little hard to imagine that Adam was ever a mess, but his new faith and his new school seem to have given him direction. He used to describe himself as an "artsy type" who painted; now he majors in industrial arts and wants to get a job at a major company designing the shapes of products — "maybe cars," he offers.

Even though Mormonism has made him a little more staid, at heart Adam is a guy who grew up near New York City and finds the entertainment offerings in Provo to be lacking. Knowing that their faith prohibits (among other things) drinking, smoking, and seeing any movie with an R rating, I ask what they usually do on Saturday nights. Zee says the parties and the dancing, though not "the usual bump and grind," are fun. Noticing my skepticism perhaps, she jokes that Mormon gatherings tend more often than not to involve board games, Kool-Aid, and ice cream. The last two, she acknowledges, are the staples. Though the school has a very athletic (and outdoorsy) population, students at BYU consume sweets at an alarming rate, often keeping bags of mini candy bars in their backpacks.

As much as Adam enjoys junk food and board games, he says he has more fun when he heads home. His most recent trip included going with some high school buddies to see Madonna in concert at Madison Square Garden. They originally bought "nosebleed" seats, he recounts, but were thrilled when a woman — seeing that they were looking through their binoculars before the show even started — concluded that they must be really big fans and gave them seats on the floor. Though Adam thinks seeing Madonna is an experience you must have "to be part of this generation," Zee doesn't listen to her music. Some of the songs are okay, she acknowledges, "but I gave up a long time ago trying to find the ones that weren't offensive." Zee is pretty picky about movies, too. In the last few months, she has walked out in the middle of Rush Hour 2 and The Fast and the Furious, both rated PG-13. "If I wouldn't watch it in the temple, why would I watch it in a public place with all of these people sitting around me?" Adam, who is three years younger than Zee, quickly agrees. He says he likes the way she puts things.

Zee has had a few years to sort out these questions. When she was twenty-one, she says she went through a "crisis of faith."

"I was sick of the Mormon thing and I just went searching. I wondered if I believed in this stuff just because I had learned it from such a young age." But she later decided that wasn't the case. Her youngest sister (Zee is the fourth of five siblings) is what Mormons call "inactive." Zee says she is bothered not because her sister has strayed from the faith, but because she seems "unhappy" as a result.

"She could have been a good singer," Zee laments, "but now she smokes."

Whatever the decisions of her peers, the woman sitting before me seems content with her faith. She talks about how "comforting" it is "to hear things and know that they are absolutely true, and I can rely on them no matter what." Looking back on her experience as a missionary for eighteen months in Washington state, Zee describes the thrill that people get from learning of the Mormon faith for the first time. "There are prophets of old, and there are prophets today. And people hear this and they can't believe it. But when they hear it, it rings true, and they respond." One of Zee's friends, Lisa, uses similar language to describe the happiness she derives from Mormonism. In the inscription to a Book of Mormon she gives me, Lisa writes, "I have read this book, and by doing so, I know that it is true, and that it is of God. The things contained in this book bring the greatest joy and peace that you can ever have in life."

As devoted as Zee can be to her faith, she does have a sense of humor about it. She told me she once saw an episode of South Park (the only one she has ever watched) that depicted a group of people who had just arrived in hell. A few of them kept raising their hands, telling the devil that there had been a mistake: they had been very good Christians and belonged in heaven. Finally, the devil tells them to gather around him so he can reveal the reason for their eternal damnation: "Okay, here's the deal," he says. "The Mormons were right."

Zee is perfectly hysterical by the time she explains the scene that follows, in which the devil, walking through heaven on his way to a meeting with God, finds himself surrounded by small, irritating Mormons trying to persuade him to join in a game of Scrabble. They also insist on telling the devil all the things in life (and afterlife) they are grateful for. Zee pauses to see if I get the joke, and I do, but only because earlier in the day I made a visit to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, the Mormon equivalent of the Vatican, where the missionaries (mostly from foreign countries) pepper their architectural descriptions and history lessons with sentiments of thankfulness. One of my tour guides was "grateful for prayer" because it helped her get through the time away from her family. The other was grateful that God had reserved a special place for her in heaven. Childlike and earnest in their navy blue jumpers, both were "grateful" that, as the Mormon faith promises, they would live on in heaven with their families, eternally.

After dinner, as I drive back to the hotel, my mind returns to this conversation. I know that Zee and Adam were both missionaries themselves in the not too distant past, but did they ever have to sound like the girls at Temple Square?

* * *

Sunday morning prayers — the sacrament meeting, as it is called — begin at eleven A.M., but when I arrive at Zee's house at quarter till, things are in disarray. The start time apparently isn't late enough for Minji Cho, Zee's freshman roommate. Though the other girls have all jumped up and down on her bed, she doesn't budge. Not hung over, of course, Minji stayed up all night chatting online. We leave a few minutes before eleven without her.

Turnout each Sunday is around 90 percent — not surprising, since in order to enroll at BYU every fall, students must receive a stamp of approval from their local bishops, based partially on their level of attendance at the sacrament meeting. Mormons do not go to their temples for regular services on Sundays (just for ceremonies like marriages and baptisms); they are divided geographically into wards of 150 or 200 people, like voting precincts, which can gather anywhere. At BYU, the student wards meet in classrooms and auditoriums on campus. "It's amazing," one of the school's development officers explains to me, "the way Sunday, BYU transforms itself into a giant church."

We take seats in the third of what look to be about twenty rows. There is no altar per se, just a raised platform in the front of the room, with a few chairs, a podium, and an old upright piano. The students mill around for a few minutes and then Bishop Bailey, a rotund, middle-aged man with silvery hair, steps up to the podium to make some introductory announcements. In the LDS Church, the bishop is a layman, who is "called" by the Church to serve in the role for three to five years. Some of the bishops at BYU are professors or administrators, and others — like Bailey, a lawyer — are local professionals.

The opening hymn is a spirited one, led by a heavily made-up young woman named Melody. She is wearing a long, silk, flowered skirt and a mauve silk blouse, both tight enough to be revealing, putting Melody in violation of BYU's campus dress code. For the sake of modesty, students are prohibited from wearing shorts or skirts that end above their knees, shirts that are sleeveless, or clothing that is "faddish" or "form-fitting." Steve Baker, director of BYU's honor code office, acknowledges that there are students who do not abide by the school's "dressing and grooming" rules. "It's not followed absolutely strictly, but that's not the intent." The idea, Baker emphasizes, is to set a standard, and, "if you look around, [the students] do stick to it pretty darn well."

After the hymn, Bishop Bailey thanks Melody and then moves on to ward business — assigning a "calling" to some of the students in the ward. Usually lasting one semester, a calling can range from teaching Sunday school, to visiting the elderly, to leading the prayer committee. The bishop is supposed to seek divine guidance in deciding who is assigned to which task, no matter how small or mundane. A few days prior to the sacrament meeting, individual students meet with the bishop to discuss their interests and their other time commitments, after which they are nominally given a choice regarding whether to accept the calling or not. Lisa, who receives a calling today, says she has never heard of anybody refusing one.

The number of hours students spend on their callings varies. Andrea Ludlow, the opinion editor of the school's newspaper, tells me that this semester she is the first councilor of the relief society (the women's section of the ward), a ten to twelve hour a week commitment. "No matter how much it takes," Andrea tells me, "you always find the time."

This attitude certainly extends to students' academic pursuits. Damon Linker, a former professor of political science at the school, tells me he immediately noticed a difference in the attitudes of the kids at BYU compared with students elsewhere. "They are bright-eyed, waiting to pounce to get the highest grade." They have a "tremendous respect for authority, which means you don't have the problem you do at other universities where you give a low grade and they threaten to sue you." Instead, he recalls, "The students would come up and say, 'I'm so sorry I disappointed you.'"

Linker's observations held true for the several classes I attended. Students in Zee's environmental history class, for example, had done their reading thoroughly and were paying close attention through a lecture by a not particularly charismatic teacher. Similarly, a class on Church history elicited twenty minutes' worth of questions from students in the auditorium though it was supposed to be a lecture.

Alan Wilkins, the vice president for academic affairs, attributes this enthusiasm not just to the atmosphere the school provides, but also to the kind of the students who choose BYU in the first place. Despite its state-university size population, BYU is a pretty selective institution. With 100,000 Mormon high school graduates each year, BYU can get students with an average ACT score of 27, an SAT score of 1100 or so, and an average GPA of 3.7. About a hundred National Merit Scholars enter in each class and about half of the freshmen have graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Moreover, Wilkins notes, "National surveys say that our students spend more time preparing for class and [paradoxically] feel less prepared for class than students at other schools." Wilkins finds this easy to explain: "Our students are hungry. They're anxious. They are kids who come and hustle. They have fun, but they are not spending as much time in parties." BYU students have "a seriousness of purpose," directly related, Wilkins believes, to their religious beliefs.

"The glory of God is intelligence," explains Wilkins, when I ask how students' faith relates to their secular academic pursuits. It's a statement I hear repeated throughout my week at BYU. Learning anything, from calculus to sociology, is considered a religious pursuit at the school. To drive home this point, Wilkins cites studies of Mormons that were done in the seventies and eighties which — though he acknowledges it may seem "counterintuitive" — showed respondents with higher levels of education felt a stronger commitment to the Church.

Partly to maintain this connection between religious dedication and academic seriousness, BYU ensures that an overwhelming percentage of its faculty is Mormon. That's possible because the Mormons produce a very high number of PhDs per capita, and because the school uses aggressive recruiting techniques — administrators and faculty keep a close eye on Mormons coming up through the academic ranks. In addition, like the students, the faculty is self-selecting. Since all professors, regardless of whether they are Mormon, must sign on to the school's honor code — which includes swearing off alcohol, caffeine, premarital sex, and smoking — many non-Mormons don't bother to apply. With the ones who do, like Linker (who is Catholic), the school is completely up front about its aims. Not only did the department chair explain the honor code during his first phone conversation, including the fact that he would have to shave any facial hair, but Linker also says they were "very explicit that there was almost no chance of this turning into a tenured position."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from God on the Quad by Naomi Schaefer Riley. Copyright © 2005 Naomi Schaefer Riley. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. An Oasis in the Desert: The Appeal of Brigham Young University,
2. The New Fundamentals: The Bob Jones Strategy for Converting New York City,
3. Beyond the Fighting Irish: Notre Dame's Race Question,
4. "There Are No Doubters Here": The Orthodoxy of Thomas Aquinas College,
5. The Hatfields and the McCoys: A Divided Yeshiva,
6. An Integrated Whole: Baylor's Vision for the Future,
7. What Revolution? How Feminism Changed Religious Colleges While They Weren't Looking,
8. Bridging the Race Gap: Can Faith Solve the "Lunch Table Problem"?,
9. Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll: How Student Life Is Different at Religious Colleges,
10. The Underdog: How Members of Minority Religious Groups Are Treated On Campus,
11. The Classroom as Chapel: Can the Integration of Faith and Learning Work?,
12. Where Are the protests? Political Activism at Religious Colleges,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Suggested Readings,
Index,
Praise,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

"America's religious colleges and universities are terra incognita to many liberal and secular readers. Naomi Schaefer Riley offers an insightful, balanced, and respectful guide to this world, one that its own members will find provocative and from which strangers to it will learn a great deal."

- Alan Wolfe, author, One Nation After All and The Transformation of American Religion

"Naomi Schaefer Riley spent a year touring the parallel universe of religious colleges, pen in hand, and brought back a book full of open-minded, sharply observed portraits of a fast-growing corner of America that most of the mass media prefer to caricature or ignore. The results are illuminating—and important."

- Terry Teachout, author, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken

"It is no small feat to provide the in-depth, interesting, and absolutely objective overview that Naomi Schaefer Riley does in her book, God on the Quad. Riley manages to skate the zig-zag line of truth on the thin ice that exists for those trying to explore this topic."

- Coleen Rowley, FBI whistleblower, Time Magazine's 2002 Person of the Year, graduate of the evangelical Wartburg College (speaking in her personal capacity and furnishing her personal endorsement only)

"Naomi Schaefer Riley's God the Quad is an important and refreshing new look at the vitality of a younger generation of well-educated religious people who want to make a difference in the deeply divided and conflicted America they are inheriting."

- Alphonse Vinh, National Public Radio

"A pioneer explorer into the unknown territory of America's religious colleges, Naomi Schaefer Riley reports her findings from twenty campuses with verve and insight. Her writing is as light as conversation, but her thinking goes as deep as the dispute in American education today between reason and revelation. "

- Harvey Mansfield, professor of Government, Harvard University, author, America's Constitutional Soul and The Spirit of Liberalism

"A joy to read, this book is also an arresting picture of a new generation that is poised to change the face of our culture and public life."

- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, professor of history at Emory University

"Inspiring! A sympathetic, moving, insightful, thoroughly and clearly reported account of a phenomenon that, for all its importance, has until now been hardly noticed. Only a rare and gifted journalist can bring to life such diverse places, with their very different cultures."

- David Klinghoffer, author, The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism and The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy

Insightful and challenging, Riley's book shows how religious colleges are transforming America, and vice versa. This work is invaluable for anyone interested in the future of higher education in America-and the future of religion. Riley is a wonderful chronicler of a little-known academic world where faith and reason still intersect, a world that is having a profound impact on our national life.

- David Gibson, author, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism

From the Publisher

A journalist known for her writing on religion and education in the Wall Street Journal and other top periodicals, Riley presents an engrossing survey of the growing world of religious higher education. To the secularly educated reader, this book is a fascinating anthropological glimpse into unfamiliar pockets of religious America. To the religiously affiliated, it cogently synthesizes issues and goals common to many of these colleges regardless of religion. Riley points out that enrollments are rising at these institutions and that a new educated "missionary generation" is bringing faith into the professional world. She argues that if "religious college leaders can navigate between the dangers of secularization and isolation, these schools can more effectively transmit their ideas to a larger American audience" and help build bridges between "red" and "blue" America. Riley's findings are based on visits to 20 different campuses, and she devotes her first six chapters to schools with various affiliations (Mormon, fundamentalist Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox Jewish and Baptist). She spent up to a week on each campus, attended religious services and social events, sat in on classes and conducted interviews. The second half takes on common themes relevant to issues of student life on religious campuses: feminism, race, minority religious groups, lifestyle choices, integration of faith and intellect, and political activism. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Journalist Riley examines some US institutions of higher learning with a religious bent, wondering whether their students will have more social impact in post-collegiate professions than those from worldlier colleges. In a feisty introduction, the author derides secular students' amoral behavior, flabby relativism, and feel-good spirituality that is a sorry reflection of the real thing. Against "those who consider traditional religion a small and sometimes backward part of American life," she poses those who reject a spiritually empty education. Some of her premises seem dubious. When she records that more students at Bob Jones University than at Harvard joined the army after 9/11, she begs the question of whether military service is superior to, say, fashioning an estimable foreign policy. There is considerable room for debate when she pays respect to elected leaders who profess their faith (as opposed to earning our trust), nor does she offer convincing evidence that formal religious education is the only route to an ethical life. It would seem that readers are in for a broadside against public education, but that proves to be not entirely the case. Riley finds an admirable degree of focus and diligence in religious institutions, yet she also finds much to deplore. Bob Jones University contains "everything that was (and is) wrong with the rural South, everything that is racist, backward, and intolerant." Meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas College fosters a disturbing lack of skepticism, Notre Dame a purblind conservatism. The intellectual climate at Yeshiva University is equally incurious. Unsurprisingly, it's when these schools evince a measure of ecumenism and doubt that Riley finds them mostvibrant. It's hard to judge from her account whether religious colleges will succeed in their aim "to give their students the tools to succeed in the secular world and the strength to do so without compromising their faith."Intriguing, though the message is decidedly mixed. Author tour. Agent: Teresa Hartnett

Kirkus Reviews