Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias: Student Christianity in English Universities

Abstract

Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the lives of students. This article discusses findings from the three-year project “Christianity and the University Experience in Contemporary England”, including a nation-wide survey of undergraduate students, in examining how the experience of university shapes on-campus expressions of Christian identity. We argue that a sizeable constituency of undergraduates self-identify as ‘Christian’, but evangelicals emerge not as the dominant majority, but as a vocal minority. The emerging internal complexity is masked by a public discourse that conceives of religion in terms of propositional belief and presents evangelicalism as its pre-eminent form.

Acknowledgements

We are most grateful to all the students who participated in this research and to the universities and stakeholders who supported and assisted us in facilitating this project. We are also grateful to Angie Harvey, for research assistance, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding this study through the Religion and Society Programme. The valuable opportunity to discuss emerging ideas and findings with fellow members of the “Belief as a Cultural Performance” network, funded by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society programme, is also gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. For further information and emerging findings from the project, see www.cueproject.org.uk

2. The primary factors guiding these choices were history, institutional ethos, student demographics, and the character of the immediate locale.

3. There is insufficient space here to discuss how each of these five types of university may foster distinctive opportunities and challenges for Christian students that arise from their institutional character. An extended discussion will appear in Guest et al.

4. The only exception to this rule was Cambridge, where recruitment of respondents was via four participating colleges, which together comprised 1,340 undergraduates (of which 275 responded, i.e. 20.5%).

5. The single exception was a university that only granted us permission to target second-year undergraduate students, on the grounds of protecting students from intrusive e-mails, especially vulnerable freshers and third years focusing on their final examinations.

6. Staff were targeted who were instrumental in each university to the provision and management of student services directly related to religion in general or Christianity in particular, including chaplains, sabbatical officers working for Student Unions, and student welfare or equal opportunities officers.

7. This is not to underestimate the complexities of disentangling the various factors most likely to shape Christian identity among students, including university experience in all its forms, family background, ethnicity, prior church involvement, and so on. This challenge will be addressed in detail in Guest et al.; the primary aims of the present article relate to the distinctive characteristics of the undergraduate Christian constituency, rather than its precise causal relationship with the university experience.

8. See http://www.uccf.org.uk/about-us/doctrinal-basis.htm, access date: . 24 March 2013

9. ‘Reason Weeks’ are assisted by the AHS and occur across UK universities (sometimes called ‘Think Week’, ‘Rationalist Week’, ‘Thought Week’ or ‘Awareness Week’) (see http://www.dur.ac.uk/humanist.society/events/, access date: 24 March 2013).

10. This was the wording used in the 2001 national Census in England.

11. We acknowledge the tendency of questionnaire surveys to privilege propositional forms of data and hence the possible tension between our argument against a propositional model of Christian identity and the evidence used to support it. However, our formulation of survey questions (including their order in the questionnaire) takes this into account, not least in deploying measures of Christian identity that are deliberately not focused on matters of belief, but on belonging or affiliation. Moreover, our issue is not with measures of Christianity that include a propositional dimension per se, but with measures which treat propositional belief as the sole or predominant marker.

12. Figures drawn from www.britsocat.com (access date: 8 August 2011). The BSA survey does not offer figures for Buddhists, presumably including them within the ‘other non-Christian’ category.

13. Benchmark measures for each of these variables have been identified for each participating institution, drawing from data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

14. This is calculated by cross-tabulating economic status (which includes two categories for ‘student’) with self-ascribed ‘religion’. In covering all ‘students’, this figure includes all those in further education viewing themselves in this way as well, although the overall figures are unlikely to be dramatically affected by this. Extracted from Table CT153 on CASWEB (see http://casweb.mimas.ac.uk/, access date: 24 March 2013).

15. See http://www.d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/.../Religion.pdf, access date: 24 March 2013.

16. In our sample, 31.2% of self-identifying Christians see themselves as ‘not religious but spiritual’, 15.4% as neither, and 13% are unsure.

17. Some respondents preferred to affirm denominational specificity (e.g. Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Quaker), while others took the opportunity to distance themselves from institutional categories in favour of a Christian faith centred on a personal relationship with God and/or Jesus.

18. Based on a Higher Education Statistics Agency figure of 1,605,800 total undergraduate students across English universities during the 2010–11 academic year (calculated based on figures generated at http://heidi.hesa.ac.uk, access date: 28 March 2013).

19. See http://www.uccf.org.uk/about-us/our-story.htm, access date: 27 February 2011.

20. Christian students encompassed a broader range of responses to this question than students from any of the other major religious traditions, suggesting that ‘Christianity’ is the least stable as a category of identity.