Rick Santorum, candidate for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, has made the statement that of students who enter college with a religious faith, 62% of those students leave college (I think he means when they graduate after four years) without their faith.
Now for the purposes of this article I am going to assume that Santorum put that number out in good faith. It might be that 62% of college students lose their faith while there. To me the percentage doesn’t sound too outlandish to be true, although personally I was never in any danger of losing my religion.
What we would like to know is why that happens. If students lose their faith, why do they? My initial reaction to Santorum’s statement was not to disbelieve it, but to think of something that Bishop John Shelby Spong says in his books: that any God who can be killed should be killed.
Bishop Spong means that any faith that is not rooted in sound logic, Christian education and faithful practice will be threatened by competing ideas or theories. And he thinks that is good and proper, for it is through thought and education that we grow spiritually in sound religion.
But what if your religion is not sound? What if you are deeply enmeshed in primitive religion with its black-and-white thinking and rage? What if your religion is anti-science and then you go to college and have to take the earth science, psychology and geography classes? Will your “young earth” religious dogma stand up to carbon dating?
That is what seems to be at the heart of Rick Santorum’s rage: the idea that his faith is not sound, and that anyone else would dare to claim that their faith is grounded in something besides what he believes. Santorum does not consider it possible to think over a dogma and possibly reject it; he was brought up to obey, and that is what he does. He wants to force the whole nation to practice his version of Catholicism.
The other day Paul Rauschenbusch mentioned something about this in an article he wrote. He quoted: “Senator [John C.] Danforth (an ordained Episcopal priest) reminded me that the language of politics is different than the language of religion -- politics is not religion. The language of religion is based on creedal affirmation, while the language of politics, when it works, is the language of compromise. To confuse politics for religion results in gridlock from the political perspective. To confuse politics for religion from the religious perspective is idolatry.”
This is, of course, exactly why people who preach primitive religion also home-school their children. They want their children to grow up in a world that is shielded from everything the parents do not believe. In the confines of your home they can tell children anything and they will believe it.
The home-schooling movement was not pioneered by the Religious Right, but they took it up under the influence of Francis Schaeffer and the Moral Majority who wanted to seal off their community from outside influences. Any parent who thinks that they can provide an educational experience better than public education—including private and charter schools—is delusional. How they think that they will be able to explain problems in calculus to their children when they don’t understand the textbook is beyond me.
And as grown adults look at political issues and don’t know what to make of them, our children are faced with free thought in the open marketplaces of ideas that we find on college campuses. The children sit in their classes trying to write expository essays and they discover that they don’t know how to make a logical argument. Polemics are fine—remember the high school teacher who had the lapse of judgment to put an anti-gay-adoption in his school paper? The student who wrote it based his argument on the “abomination” of homosexuality and his intellectual foundation was freedom of religion: we don’t like those people and we don’t want them to have the same rights that we have.
So that young man who wrote that essay will arrive in college someday, if he is lucky, and he will find that his Comp 101 professor rejects his arguments. Like the proponents of Proposition 8 in California, the student will be expected to provide objective, quantifiable evidence that the adoption of a child by same-sex partners will be detrimental to the child.
You could very well argue that the exposure of college freshmen to gay students and professors, rigorous standards and a diverse population would shake the foundations of their world. And you could be right, depending upon the “world” that the student came from.
I can remember well how I was always the student waving my hand in the back of the room for the professor’s attention, defending my religious beliefs. But sometimes it is the opposite, and a student whose parents are rigid and inflexible will find that in the sense of persuasion, it’s no more than their word against her parents’ word.
What do you do when you read or hear something that upsets your ideas and threatens your opinions? You do some fact-checking, hopefully; otherwise you could always pack your stuff up and go back home or limit your contacts to people like yourself. But that isn’t easy on a college campus.
And if you don’t believe in fact-checking, you could end up like Santorum, who made news over the weekend with some pretty strong statements about religion. For those who want to think that I would take Santorum out of context in order to soothe their fears, here is the entire article that appeared today on Yahoo Religious News online. I only omitted a discussion in the story about Mitt Romney and his election progress, as noted:
“Santorum says he doesn't believe in separation of church and state
“By Lee-Anne Goodman
"Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday that he doesn't believe in the separation of church and state, adding that he was sickened by John F. Kennedy's assurances to Baptist ministers 52 years ago that he would not impose his Catholic faith on them.
"'I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,' Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in an interview from Michigan on ABC's This Week.
"'The First Amendment means the free exercise of religion and that means bringing people and their faith into the public square.'
"Santorum's latest foray into the hot-button, faith-based issues that so fire up the party's evangelical base comes as his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, begins to pull ahead slightly in the state of Michigan, where he was born and raised...
(Mitt Romney details omitted)
So apparently Santorum’s idea of bringing people and their faith into the public square is that the most powerful religious faction (his) will impose their will on others. This would put America right up there with Spain during the Counter-Reformation, when Jews were forced to convert and eat pork in order to prove that their conversion satisfied the standards of the Church Fathers. Read about this part of history in The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare: at the end the two Jews, Shylock and his daughter Jessica, have agreed to be baptized—happy ending for all!
Santorum, being raised a Catholic, has been told all his life that Catholicism is the biggest denomination on earth and that they can can overwhelm other denominations in world religious politics; God knows they have tried often enough with the Anglican Communion, starting with Bloody Mary. But the American system of government, which we know as democracy, not theocracy, doesn’t allow for powerful religious groups to assume control of the government. In fact, we protect the minorities, at least in principle if not in reality. The article goes on:
"Beyond Michigan, however, Santorum's startling stances on social issues like birth control and religion are getting the most attention countrywide.
"He's been unapologetic about some of his more controversial remarks, even reiterating Sunday his past remarks that Kennedy's 1960 speech in Houston 'made me want to throw up.'
"'To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? What makes me throw up is someone who is now trying to tell people that you will do what the government says,' Santorum said. 'That now we're going to turn around and impose our values from the government on people of faith.'
“America is all about embracing diversity, he added.”
It seems to me that Santorum’s definition of diversity includes democracy and primitive Christianity. He doesn’t leave much room for Arab-Americans, atheists, Jews, etc. in his portrait of Catholicism dictating that you can’t take the Pill because it is against the will of the Magisterium.
However, here we come to a clearer focus on the problem. If you are a Catholic student you can hang out at the Newman Center; if you are Jewish you can go over to the Hillel House, or the Lutheran Center or whatever. I am sure that most mainline denominations have a presence at campuses. But if you come from a splinter group of primitive Christians who don’t approve of anyone but yourselves, you will find yourself alone with your convictions on some campuses. Hence Rick Santorum reports that students lose their faith.
But I ask, paraphrasing Bishop Spong: is it a faith worth keeping? If you are full of shame and guilt, seeking to proselytize by passing your shame and guilt on to other students and playing on their fears to defend your beliefs, you won’t last long in a discussion in the Student Center. At least, I remember some very lively arguments among students at the Student Center of Northern Illinois University when I was there years ago. The discussions were witty and sometimes a professor or two had a coffee with us; sloppy thinking didn’t fare there any better than on a paper I might have handed in.
I am sure that many times a student goes off to college with one faith and comes home with none. But it could also be that the Catholic student might come home with a hankering to convert to evangelical Christianity, or vice versa. Perhaps a Jewish student becomes a Christian, or vice versa. Perhaps a Jewish student becomes a Messianic Jew, confusing everybody.
America has always been a nation in flux. People change their opinions and political parties, they change their religion—rarely in one lifetime, we hope—they move from one community to another. If parents want to nail their children down, bottom line: they shouldn’t leave home in the first place. Which is exactly why Rick Santorum (says that he) home-schools his children. He doesn’t do it the way he says, though, because as you can see by watching television, he isn’t at home doing it. His wife is probably doing that.
And it reminds me of a home-schooling mother who worked with me once. She had just gotten the job and one day she remarked, “Oh, I’ve been so busy since I got this job that all I do is English and Math.”
What a nice home-school education to give her children. She won’t have to worry about them leaving home if she makes it impossible for them to pass college entrance exams like the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
On the other hand, Arizona has a statute that if you are college-bound and you pass the Arizona AIMS test at the Excel level, you will receive a four-year scholarship to Arizona’s state colleges and universities. Your religion will be your responsibility, not the responsibility of the state of Arizona.
Something tells me that Rick Santorum wouldn’t like that.
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