Religious Housing on State Campuses Faces Scrutiny

A recent Wall Street Journal article reports that faith-based residence halls are on the rise throughout United States public college campuses. While such arrangements have existed before at secular universities, they were on a much smaller scale. Now, entire dorms and new housing developments are becoming more common at American schools. Membership is open to everyone, but the housing features facilities and staff willing to nourish the spiritual life of students, especially from the distinct perspective of the sponsoring denomination. Moreover, religious residences enforce extra standards  such as alcohol bans regardless of age. On paper, the concept sounds like a school official’s dream: badly needed housing is provided through private funding, at no cost to the university.

So far, Christians lead the charge in faith-based dormitories. They see it as an opportunity to reach young adults in a sensitive time of life. Many students from Christian households fall away from the faith while attending university. Orthodox Christian beliefs are regularly challenged in the classroom, even at schools with denominational backgrounds. What is more, appointed spiritual counselors and chaplains often find themselves shackled by relativistic multiculturalism or else have to be anemic revisionists to be hired for their posts. Housing and voluntary societies represent some of the few remaining options for Christians to answer important life questions and build some kind of faith community for college students.

Not everyone is pleased. The Freedom From Religion Foundation decried Troy University’s Catholic-based Newman Center. They cited the school’s official statement that “students who maintain an active spiritual lifestyle” would be given preference for religious housing. Troy University has since removed this phrase from its website.

Anthony Seidel, attorney for the Newman Student Housing Fund, retorted, “That’s absurd. You can’t favor religion over nonreligion” at a government-funded college.

Nevertheless, these trends highlight several important issues for American Christians to consider. First, should believers question the state-sponsored secular academy? The university was originally founded and ruled  by the Church. As state funds and control became commonplace, relations remained easy-going for Christians since society was friendly to the religion. Now, post-Enlightenment secularism demands a complete nonsectarianism, which translates in banning all religion (save perhaps nonbelief) from the state-sponsored classroom and curricula. Money always comes with strings.

On the other hand, most American youth attend state schools or some sort of secular academy. In dealing with this unavoidable reality, churches need to be patient but firm with any mistreatment in the coming years. Ministry to collegiate students should be tireless. Ironically, Freedom From Religion and its allies would prefer to set their sights on well-behaved religious dorms as the Animal House-like student housing, Greek life, and debilitating binge parties are given the blind eye. Such ideological tunnel-vision will no doubt abound if these attacks on religious expressions on campus continue. Retreating from conflict will do no good. Committed secularists, a small but powerful group, tend to be relentless in removing any vestige of faith from the public imagination. Even now, the very existence of religious schools is under attack in the United Kingdom.

Finally, and perhaps the most difficult, Christians are going to have to stand up for the rights of other faiths if they want to enjoy freedom for themselves. Again, this results from the way liberty and freedom work in a post-Enlightenment context. For example, a new all-Muslim fraternity has cropped up at the University of Texas. If this group were ever to come under attack by the administration and groups like Freedom From Religion, Christians can be assured that their organizations would also fall under the same list of targets. This is a hard pill for traditional American churches to swallow. Internationally, Islamists are the greatest persecutors of Christians. Why allow Islam a place of solidarity on domestic campuses?

One is reminded of how harsh anti-truancy, mandatory public school laws got passed in the United States as a result of anti-Catholic bias. In hopes of “Protestantizing” immigrant children, they would be separated from parish and family for long stretches of time under a Whiggish curriculum that undermined the traditionalist ethos of Catholic teaching. Not to be fooled, the Roman Church responded with parochial schools that embraced Roman Catholic beliefs.

Protestant Americans, however, left Catholics to suffer and propped up the powerful education apparatus, which had a built-in capacity to undermine parental convictions. When that apparatus came under the control of Darwinists and progressive secularists, many Protestants fled to private schools and homeschooling, only to find harsh 19th century laws blocking their ability to teach their own children. If Protestants had been more worried about the secularizing power of the state rather than their own anti-Catholicism, life may have been easier when the intellectual winds changed.

Similarly, Christians need to be vigilant and willing to ally with other religious groups to preserve their right to be a presence on college campuses. No doubt any battles ahead will be decided on an individual basis and require the commitment of concerned believers on the grassroots level.