The March 3, 2008, issue of The Daily Princetonian announced that the dean of religious life, Alison Boden, planned a search for Princeton University’s first Muslim and Hindu chaplains. Princeton’s decision to hire a more diverse group of chaplains, made a few months before the announcement, reflected much that was happening on college campuses in the twenty-first century. Across the board, in elite universities and regional colleges, there was a growing student interest in religion, spirituality, and purpose in life. But the new religious upsurge was not the religious interest of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, when a majority of Christians and a minority of Jews defined what religion meant. In the twenty-first century, religion meant Christianity and Judaism, liberal and conservative, but it also meant Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and none of these, along with a large measure of students who called themselves “spiritual but not religious.” As one graduate student said in a seminar in 2023, “We are the children of parents who had lost all interest in religion. We are interested, and we don’t have any preconceptions.” In the twenty-first century, American colleges may be in the midst of a religious revival quite unlike any seen before in the United States.
The pain that many felt in the aftermath of 9/11 ushered in a new moment in the history of the United States and began a radical transformation of the place of religion on college campuses. Almost immediately after 9/11, there was an upsurge of Islamophobia, and many educators sought ways to stop the blame of all Muslims for the violent radicalism of a few. At the same time, the emergence of a new generation of Americans who were the children of families who had long been discouraged from college attendance, or who had come to the United States after the changes in the immigration laws in the 1960s, brought a much broader mix to the nation’s college student body. There were more African Americans and Hispanic students on campus in the twenty-first century, but there were also more Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist students than ever before.
Janet Cooper Nelson, chaplain at Brown University, noted, “Admissions officers traveled broadly to increase numbers of under-represented minorities and inadvertently increased campus spiritual diversity as well.” While spiritual diversity did not seem to be a goal of the new outreach by admissions officials, it was a result, Nelson noted.
Finally, a new generation of students were sobered by tragedy and war, and deeply dissatisfied with traditional church-based Christianity or synagogue-based Judaism, and also with the secularism and religious indifference of many of their parents. As a result, they sought more opportunities in college to examine their spiritual lives. Whether in religious studies classes, discussions of religion led by college chaplains, or more informal opportunities hosted either by emergent evangelical groups like Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru) or new, non-Western religious communities, or simply by identifying as spiritual-but-not-religious and seeking others with the same identification, students on college campuses by the twenty-first century were actively exploring their options.
On some campuses, religious diversity is expressed in multifaith worship spaces that can be used by many faiths. Today’s religious-life professionals on campus represent more different traditions than ever before. New York University hosts seventy different chaplains, the University of Southern California ninety. In March 2021, historically Methodist Emory University announced that in addition to its current Christian and Muslim chaplains, it was adding Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish chaplains to its interfaith religious-life team. In this world, the college chaplain, though usually appointed as a representative of one faith tradition, needs to understand diversity with a sophistication not required of previous generations.
In the twenty-first century, American colleges may be in the midst of a religious revival quite unlike any seen before in the United States.
While public universities are generally prohibited from financial support for religious professionals, some have found creative ways to support campus ministry. California State University Monterey Bay lists three chaplains—Lutheran, Unitarian, and Episcopal clergy—who are also ministers of, and presumably paid by, local churches but have an office on campus and can be contacted through the university. At Ball State University, a public university in Muncie, Indiana, religious advisors from multiple organizations make themselves available to new college students through a special “Spiritual Life Fair,” as part of the university’s Welcome Week in August, just before the start of the academic year.
The public University of Florida offers a dynamic range of religious life links, either through the University Health Services, which include services of two chaplains, a (presumably) Protestant minister and a Catholic priest, and an Interfaith Chapel that is open for prayer and meditation and holds services including a Catholic Mass, Bahá’i Devotional, and Muslim Friday Prayers. Florida also has a Campus Multi-Faith Cooperative (CMC) as part of its Multicultural and Diversity Affairs program. The CMC is sixty years old. Originally home to Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations, the CMC provided a way for them to come together for joint social justice programs and a day of prayer after the Kent State shootings. The founding groups remain active, but the group has expanded to include Quakers, the Metropolitan Community Church (a Protestant group focused on the LGBTQ community), Mennonites, Hare Krishnas, Seventh-day Adventists, Latter-day Saints (Mormons), as well as African American churches and Islamic, Bahá’i, Unitarian, and other local religious communities. While meeting space and email addresses are independent of the university, the CMC is closely connected to the university and available through institutional channels.
Another aspect of today’s diversity is the fact that more conservative religious groups have also continued to grow, even when unnoticed by others. In 2016–2017, InterVarsity had one thousand campus chapters serving 38,404 students, while Cru had 2,400 campus chapters and 82,000 students, with both reflecting considerable racial diversity. InterVarsity membership was forty percent non-white.
In 2013, Lucy A. Forster-Smith, then finishing her twentieth year as chaplain at Macalester College, in Saint Paul, Minn., edited the book College & University Chaplaincy in the 21st Century. In her book, eleven of the twenty chapter authors were women, and the authors reflected an extraordinary diversity that no chaplain of the 1960s could have imagined. There are the usual mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and Black and white. But they were now joined by an Asian Buddhist, a Middle Eastern Muslim, and a Latino Protestant. Most of all, the mix was joined by women—women ministers and rabbis as well as lay women Catholic chaplains.
In her foreword to Forster-Smith’s book, Brown University’s chaplain, Janet Nelson, noted that the twenty-first-century chaplains stood on the shoulders of now-departed giants like Boston University’s Howard Thurman and Yale’s William Sloane Coffin, who had changed the national conversation in the 1960s and 1970s. But now, “a new, quieter conversation became audible.” She noted, “The vast new work of embracing the previously marginalized embodied much of the prophetic dream of the earlier generation.” Indeed, twenty-first-century students are finding themselves marginalized by “race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, culture, gender, and socioeconomic status.” It was a different day, with different students and different adults working with them.
Ian Oliver, pastor of the University Church at Yale, wrote, “The very fact that a kid from El Paso, Texas—a kid from immigrant and poor Southern roots—now stands in the pulpit at Yale in itself shows how places like Yale—and even chaplaincy itself—have changed.” Oliver adds that while he is a successor to William Sloane Coffin as minister of the Yale chapel, the answer to the “question of whether I now occupy Coffin’s pulpit is ‘no.’” Services are in the same chapel, but the ornate, elevated pulpit is no longer used, except in rare ceremonial occasions. Instead, a simple lectern in the middle of the congregation is preferred. As he notes, “There is still preaching in the Yale chapel, but it is from a different place, to a different student body, and meeting different needs.”
And the services are still relevant. Last July, Oliver told me, “We get about eighty to a hundred people at University Church services on Sundays, about three fourths of whom are students—undergrad, grad and professional. Not bad for students on Sunday morning. I also do a good amount of pastoral care with students, religious or not. It’s an exciting time of rapid change in student religious identities, more complex and interesting than the reigning narratives of simple decline or revival.”
Having sixty to seventy-five Yale students attending Protestant worship on a Sunday morning is a huge increase from the numbers that some Yale alumni remember from around 2000. It is also a tiny fraction of the over fifteen thousand students who attend Yale. During most of the university’s life, until 1926, the entire, much smaller Yale student body was required to attend chapel services. Indeed, today’s numbers may show that religion at American universities has moved from the center of student life, where it once was, to the margins of American universities; but religion and religious diversity is thriving on those margins, far more than it was twenty years ago. Today, Yale has Christian but also Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu chaplains, as well as a senior chaplain who is a Jewish woman. Religious life at Yale, as at many other universities, is very different than it was in 1926 or 2000.