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Gods & Man at Yale
A college for Protestants moves to religious pluralism: scenes from the new multifaith university
by Kathrin Day Lassila ’81
May/June 2005
Yale was founded with a religious vocation. The ministers who established the college in 1701 wanted an institution that would produce strict Congregationalists—“Learned and Orthodox men”—for leadership in church and state. The orthodoxy started crumbling fast: by 1754, Anglican students could attend Episcopal services. But the Protestantism lingered. For 250 years and more, remnants of Yale’s original purpose persisted—partly in the genuine religious mission of those who came to Yale (and still do) for religious study in the college and Divinity School; but also in the “Yale man,” that moral and socioeconomic ideal, who was Protestant by definition whether he was religious or not.
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Yale is experiencing an efflorescence of religious life. |
But somewhere along the line—was it when evening prayer service was discontinued? when the unofficial limit on Jewish students was officially abolished?—that brand of Protestant identity started to fray. Methodist bishop William H. Willimon '71MDiv has written that the elite Northeastern academies once embodied “the hegemony of self-satisfied Protestant orthodoxy.” But there is no hegemony of belief any more. Only 150 people, out of 10,000 students and 10,000 faculty and staff, regularly attend Congregationalist services at the official university church, the Church of Christ in Yale.
Does this mean Yale is a difficult place in which to be religious? William F. Buckley Jr. '50 thought so in 1951, when he wrote in God and Man at Yale that the university “addresses itself to the task of persuading [students] to be atheistic socialists.” University Chaplain Frederick Streets says the opposite: that Yale is experiencing an efflorescence of religious life. Six years ago, almost 40 percent of Yale undergraduates belonged to an organized religious group—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim. He thinks the number is higher now. The Slifka Center for Jewish Life holds three services a day, and five on Fridays and Saturdays. The Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel claims standing-room-only services and is building a new student center to accommodate an upsurge of Catholic social and intellectual activities. Buddhism is one of the faster-growing religious practices on campus, and Yale now has a Buddhist chaplain. In 2002, students founded the first Hindu organization at Yale.
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Yale still has a religious vocation: to support students and staff of all faiths. |
Recently, the university convened a panel of religious leaders and scholars from outside Yale for advice on the whole of religious life on campus. The Right Reverend Frederick Borsch, professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and retired Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles, chaired the committee. The report is not public, but Borsch says its members found “excellence"; Yale supports its religious students well. But they made many recommendations for doing still better. Some of these addressed Yale’s historic bond with Protestantism. Among them: the university could reinvigorate Protestant worship on campus by drawing on the Divinity School and the Institute for Sacred Music. It could make the Sunday services of the Church of Christ in Yale more inclusive and hospitable to students by moving from Congregationalism to ecumenical Protestantism, and by focusing more of its pastoral work on students and their religious needs.
The committee also looked beyond Christianity. The most important finding, in Borsch’s eyes, is that Yale still has a religious vocation: to support students and staff of all faiths. “Because it is a preeminent university and in many ways a world university,” he says, “we felt that Yale has a special vocation to be a place of respect for people of different religions and indeed of no religion. A university is a place of inquiry and of respect for different beliefs, a place where people are trying to learn from each other. In the world in which we live today, that’s not always easy to do. It’s a vocation that is to be cherished.”
Can Yale achieve this ideal? Not perfectly; religious life is rarely controversy-free. In 1997, the “Yale Five,” a group of Orthodox Jews, complained that their single-sex dormitory floors were not completely sex-segregated, and eventually sued. In 2003, a group of undergraduates left the words “Muslim bitches” on a note in the room of a sophomore. More prosaically, Yale’s decision to run the Church of Christ in Yale as an ecumenical university church, after it had been affiliated with the national Congregationalist United Church of Christ for four decades, caused disappointment and some bitterness among those in the congregation who liked it how it was.
What saves the university’s goal is that it is utopian with a small “u.” This isn’t an attempt to create an ideal society or a new land—the New Haven—for like-thinking orthodox minds. It should be a more humane, human, humble project: just an attempt to accommodate and respect human difference, in religion as in other areas. Streets resists the suggestion that it is utopian at all. Religious respect, he says, is not only necessary but pragmatic, “not only the better good but the moral imperative of common life.”
Belief System
by Jennifer Kaylin
Muslim Students Association
The year Sara Hashmi joined the MSA, members gathered every evening during Ramadan to share light snacks in the campus prayer space in the basement of Bingham Hall. The next year, they all brought hot dishes on different nights. This year, Yale Dining Services catered dinner every night for MSA members and guests at Yale’s Visitors Center. “Ramadan is very much a time of community, so it was really nice that they agreed to help us,” says Hashmi, a third-year graduate student in engineering.
The MSA, a student group founded in the early 1990s, sponsors study breaks and a barbecue for freshmen, as well as an Islam Awareness Week with speakers, movies, and exhibits. It has an e-mail list of about 200; at least 30 people regularly attend Friday prayer. Hashmi says the MSA is especially important to overseas students who grew up in Islam. “They’re so far away from home and community and family. We’re a little bit of home for them.”
Church of Christ in Yale
When Yale College settled in New Haven in 1716, students were required to attend the First (now Center) Church on the Green. Yale rented pew space for its students, and anyone who worshipped elsewhere was fined 20 shillings. But Yale president Rev. Thomas Clap wasn’t happy with the quality of the sermons, which he called a “watery porridge.” He persuaded the Corporation to withdraw from the First Church, thus paving the way, in 1757, for the creation of Yale’s own church: the Church of Christ in Yale College.
Today, the oldest college church in America has attendance of about 150 during the academic year and 60 in the summer. Although the university has changed radically since the 1700s, its pastor, University Chaplain Rev. Frederick Streets, says it’s still important for Yale to have its own church, “expressing the investment the university has in the spiritual issues of the times.” The Church of Christ in Yale will soon dissolve its official affiliation with the national United Church of Christ so as to offer ecumenical Protestant services and more student-oriented programs. “We’ve evolved as a university church,” Streets says, “but we continue to be a church that speaks to a progressive view of Christianity.”
Episcopal Church at Yale
Nihal de Lanerolle, chaplain of the Episcopal Church at Yale, points out that Elihu Yale was an Anglican (a member of the U.S. Episcopal Church), “and it was an Anglican connection that brought about Mr. Yale’s large donation to the then-small school that was named after him.” Among his donations was a collection of religious books. “The story is that he hoped they would influence the faculty to join the Church of England.” (They did, but those faculty were immediately dismissed.)
The ECY is an independent nonprofit with a membership list of 250 students. About 50 attend weekly services in Dwight Chapel. For the past few years the church has been in a rebuilding phase, but Lanerolle says it is now ready to resume such activities as volunteer work at Columbus House, a New Haven homeless shelter. Plans are underway for students to work in Light and Peace, an after-school program for city youth.
Indigo Blue
When Rita Pin Ahrens '99 was an undergraduate, she asked her dean for an extension on a paper so she could attend a Buddha birthday celebration. “She simply said no,” Ahrens recalls. Ahrens had moved with her family from Cambodia to Idaho when she was four, where practicing Buddhism was “extremely difficult.” She had looked forward to the worldly liberalism she thought she'd find at Yale. Instead, “basically, I confronted the same things I thought I’d left behind.”
After her graduation, Ahrens and Bruce Blair '81, abbot of the New Haven Zen Center, discussed establishing a center for Buddhist life at Yale, with Blair as chaplain. The result is Indigo Blue. A centerpiece of the ministry is Stillness & Light, a nightly meditation at Battell Chapel attended by about 50 students a week. Blair provides pastoral counseling and meditation instruction and hosts Buddhist speakers and activities. Asked how many Yale students are Buddhists, he says, “There are no Buddhists at Yale, only Buddhas—10,000 Buddhas. Students may not always know it, and we may forget, but each is holy. To say 'Buddhas' reminds us to accord each the reverence required so that we can perceive who they are and how we can best serve them.”
Black Church at Yale
“People have said to me, ‘There’s no White Church at Yale. Why do we need a Black Church?’” says the Rev. Joan Burnett, the church’s pastor. She thinks the active membership—about 60—would grow if the church were named “anything else.” Every few years church members discuss changing the name. But they always vote against it “because of the church’s history and culture and the fullness of their experience here.”
Founded 33 years ago, the interdenominational Christian church is student-run and meets in the Afro-American Cultural Center. The church offers pastoral counseling, an open-mike evening, an annual gospel extravaganza, and a mentoring program for inner-city girls. It is open to all; the name, Burnett says, is not meant to limit the congregation but to reflect the fact that services are held in the African American Christian tradition, with a lot of singing, clapping, and piano and drum playing. “It’s a more spirited type of service than you'd find at Battell,” she says. “It’s something you need to experience.”
Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel & Center
When the Rev. Robert L. Beloin became Yale’s Roman Catholic chaplain in 1994, the two Sunday masses were each half full. Today three Masses are celebrated: two are standing room only, and the 10 p.m. “last chance” Mass draws another 100 worshippers. “A decade ago, if a student told his suitemates he was going to church on a Sunday afternoon, they'd laugh at him,” says Beloin. “So he'd say he was going to the library. Today people say, ‘Okay, maybe I’ll go with you.’”
Saint Thomas More has a membership of 1,500. Its chapel and office at 268 Park Street will soon be augmented by a new 30,000-square-foot student center to help accommodate a thriving series of lectures, social action projects, discussion groups, and other programs for Catholic “inquiry and formation.”
Beloin recalls a student saying, at the start of the school year, that faith was a pillar he never questioned. “A month later he was in my office telling me, ‘Father, I’m so confused.’ That’s part of what happens when you go to college. Coming to a mature, adult faith is an important part of a Catholic student’s experience. We’re here to help them sort it through and clarify their values.”
Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale
“Both of them wanted to stay connected to their Judaism.” Amy Aaland, director of the Slifka Center, is talking about a couple who went to Yale. “So he became the treasurer of the Jewish kitchen on Crown Street, and she got involved with Hillel, but they never met” until after graduation. Aaland says the woman was sure the two would have met at the Slifka Center if it had existed when they were undergraduates. “And she was very happy to come back to this place to be married.”
This story is emblematic of the center’s impact on Yale, says Aaland. Before, “Jewish life at Yale was very dispersed. Now, Jewish students feel they have something important to share.” The elegant post-modern building opened its doors at 80 Wall Street in 1995; it has a staff of ten, including Jewish Chaplain James Ponet '68. Friday night dinners draw a crowd of up to 400, which is about 40 percent non-Jewish. Religious services take place three or more times a day. There are speakers, concerts, films, art exhibits, and 20 weekly classes every semester.
One of Aaland’s favorite mementos is a resource list for incoming freshmen that she clipped from the Yale Daily News: “The Slifka Center is mentioned, not as the 'Jewish place,' but just as a great place to go.”
The University Chaplains in Word and Deed
by Donna Schaper
The Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper is pastor of the North Hadley Congregational Church in Massachusetts and the author of 22 books. She served as John Vannorsdall’s Associate Chaplain at Yale.
There was no University Chaplain at Yale until 1927. Before that date, an official chaplaincy would have been redundant. Who needs a chaplain if the whole institution is a fountain for faith—as once was Yale, founded to educate men for “Publick employment in Church and Civil State"? But in 1926 mandatory chapel was abolished, and a chaplain was the logical next step. A chaplain is needed when religion begins to be outsourced.
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Yale was founded to educate men for “Publick employment in Church and Civil State.” |
The Rev. Elmore McKee served, briefly, as Yale’s first chaplain. His grand dream was to build a new chapel across the quadrangle from Sterling Library—to “balance” it—but Yale refused. Each chaplain who followed McKee would understand his dream and his dilemma. All balanced between reason and faith, the ministrations of the pastor and the dynamic action of the prophet, service to the President and service to God. What each chaplain has done is to fit the job just enough to not quite fit: to stay just a little outside the university, an alternative to its mainstream.
“Uncle Sid”—the Rev. Sidney Lovett ’13, chaplain in 1932–1958—is often considered the most pastoral and least prophetic of the group. Pipe smoking, football going, back slapping, “Uncle Sid” remembered names. People knew him, and he knew what it took to know them.
Uncle Sid fit his role and his times smoothly, yet his family model of ministry did not exclude prophetic action. His leadership solidified the Yale-in-China Program, which was a cut above a missionary effort—an early globalism that profoundly changed the lives of many Yale men. Uncle Sid also became a pacifist at a time when pacifism was deeply unpopular. When a man like Sid Lovett moves to pacifism, it matters to many.
In his prayer at the Inaugural luncheon for President A. Bartlett Giamatti ’60, ’64PhD, in 1978 (Sid’s retirement was not very serious), Uncle Sid showed his characteristic humor and his eloquence:
Almighty God, who sendest rain impartially upon the World Series and Mother Yale’s Inaugural Quilting Party, we ask thy Blessing. … Look with continued favor upon our good friend Bart Giamatti, about to don the presidential livery of Mother Yale. Let the wounds made by the recent defeat of the Boston Red Sox be quickly healed. … May there be nothing that he does not dare to doubt, nothing true that is afraid to know, and nothing false he would ever wish to believe.
The Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49, ’56BDiv, chaplain in 1958–1976, was surely the most popular and, for his forceful public opposition to the Vietnam War, by far the best known and most widely debated of the Yale chaplains. While Uncle Sid, from his retirement, undertook in the 1970s to build an endowment for the Church of Christ in Yale, Coffin neglected institutional ministry on behalf of national ministry. Coffin, too, was responding to the call of his times. Had Uncle Sid ministered to the campus in the volatile '60s, no doubt he would have had little time to sit on benches, pipe in hand, and consider with his flock the great meanings of life.
Coffin’s prayer at the Inaugural luncheon of President Kingman Brewster Jr. ’41 in 1964 was representative of his fiery prophetic stance:
In a world in which traditions need to be reshaped and purged as much as protected to support what we already hold … we seek a truth greater than anything we have yet conceived … for the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, too small for anything but love.
Yet Coffin’s ministry was also truly pastoral. His oft-repeated slogan is true of himself as well as good advice for ministers: “If you can be good at the bedside of a sick or hopeless person, they”—the authorities—“will let you get away with anything.” People’s strongest memories of Coffin today are of his many weddings and funerals and personal relationships. The dozens of pastors whom Coffin mentored keep, for aid and readings when they officiate at funerals, a dog-eared copy of his 1983 sermon on his own son’s death. In it, he made it clear that he did not think a young man’s car crash could ever be the will of God. He took on the sentimental cards some well-wishers sent him, suggesting that the tragedy was meant to be. He spoke from deep within his own faith, about life and death, meaning and chaos, and reached, at the end, the search for “consolation in the love which never dies, … peace in the dazzling grace that always is.”
The Rev. Dr. John Vannorsdall, 1976–1985, had the burden and the opportunity of following Coffin. As a young associate chaplain in 1979, I witnessed a most interesting moment of pastoral transition. Uncle Sid died in April, and Vannorsdall, a meticulous man, carefully prepared the funeral service. It was to take place at three in the afternoon. At five minutes to three, Coffin breezed into the Yale Chaplain’s office—fully expecting to perform the service. Vannorsdall elegantly included Coffin in the ceremony, and Coffin proceeded to dominate it brilliantly, yet humbly, with a reading from Uncle Sid’s own hand, “Apologia pro Vita Mea.”
Vannorsdall was known for his prayers. This prayer of invocation for the commencement ceremony of May 24, 1981, carries his hallmarks:
O Lord, we do not pretend to be more than we are, grateful for what we have received, rejoicing this week in one another, and giving thanks for all the turbulence of mind and spirit which is Yale. Our thanks as well for other small and human things, for quiet conversations, the losing and finding of the self, the pleasures of running, visions; poems and play; for morning light and evensong. And since not far from New Haven, the road is lit by the fires of South Bronx burning, the sound of the gun is heard in the land, and great holes appear where there once was treasure, grant that in the years to come we find ways to embrace the world that is with integrity and healing.
Vannorsdall’s prayers have a simplicity that lets small details carry large concepts; a deep thanksgiving; and an even deeper need for forgiveness. Issues of social justice appear too, not as finger wagging so much as a yearning toward possibility. Vannorsdall was the most priestly or liturgical of the Yale chaplains, but he too modeled prophetic action—sticking with the workers of Yale quietly, carefully, and effectively in a time when the national movements had died down and there was little supportive applause.
In the 1983 “Prayer for the 50th Anniversary of the Colleges,” Vannorsdall deftly thanks all the masters, deans, and fellows of Yale’s undergraduate residential colleges, as well as the craftspeople who have worked to make the colleges what they are. This joining of the “big people” and the “small people” is common in his work. In the anniversary prayer, we also hear his characteristic quiet celebration:
O God, Ancient of Days, who was before Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or Yale, who will be when all our splendid spires are down, free us from the burden of first and foremost, and grant us this time of rejoicing for the colleges we have made … these incubators of maturity.
When Vannorsdall left, the Rev. Dr. Harry B. Adams ’48, ’51BDiv, became chaplain and served from 1986 to 1992. The chaplaincy was more than a full-time post for Adams. He was the Professor of Christian Nurture (preaching) at the Divinity School, and for five of his six years as University Chaplain he also served as master of Trumbull College. Adams, who describes himself as a pastoral chaplain, used his six years to consolidate the relationships between the university and the chaplaincy.
Looking back on his pastoral years, Adams remembers the ministry of hospitality that he and his wife sought to offer, and 3 a.m. visits to the hospital. The chaplains have not lived small lives: their management of large and complex schedules, as well as a “parish” of 20,000 people, is a pastoral service as important as any of their individual accomplishments.
The Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Streets ’75MDiv has been at Yale since 1992. Asked to describe a normal day, he speaks of a 70-year-old professor emeritus seeking counseling for a second marriage, an Orthodox student worried about dating a non-Orthodox man, and preparations for what he hopes will be a revitalization of the University Chaplain’s office facilities. The Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel has a new building going up and the new Slifka Center is large and elegant; they make the crowded, active basement of Bingham Hall on the Old Campus look small in comparison.
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Several of the current Ivy League chaplains are black and Baptist. |
As University Chaplain, Streets embodies some significant firsts: the first African American, the first Baptist. (Interestingly, several of the current Ivy League chaplains are black and Baptist.) Streets speaks of the irony that his unique background has allowed him to be “at home” at Yale. Here he strives to be “convicted but not dogmatic” and to offer the gospel as “an offering, not a command.” He believes that chaplains have a “major role as alternative hospitable voice"; his recent book, Preaching in the New Millennium, tells much of the Yale chaplaincy story.
Streets is known as the chaplain who has developed relationships in the wider Yale and the global Yale: he has done pastoral work in Colombia and Bosnia and recently led a service and learning trip of students to Cuba. He serves on the New Haven Board of Police Commissioners and the State Judiciary Selection Commission. And, when comparing his former congregational experiences with his experiences at Yale, Streets enlarges on the theme of the world community: “The sense of community among many members of black congregations is very relational and interpersonal and strongly nuanced by their shared cultural experience and history. The cultural experiences of those who worship here are not as homogeneous, and therefore, their relational styles vary. This variety brings a very rich multidimensional dynamic to the worship and community life of the congregation here. At its best, it could serve as a model demonstrating how different cultural and ethnic sensibilities can make valuable contributions to the life of the church.”
Since 1927, the chaplaincy as an institution has shifted from center to side, from foundational to optional. With Streets, the local, family ministry of Uncle Sid has opened to a wider world. The chaplains have created, each and together, a new kind of center for ministry at Yale, powerfully spoken from what only at first glance looks like the edge of the university.
Keeping the Faith
Devout undergraduates at Yale are outnumbered, they’re challenged by skeptics, and they have to cope with the party scene. Why are they so happy?
by Mark Oppenheimer ’96, ’03PhD
Mark Oppenheimer, editor of the New Haven Advocate, did his doctoral work at Yale in religious studies. He is the author of the new book Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah across America.
James Soza, a senior in Pierson College who grew up in Oklahoma, was baptized Catholic. His father was descended from Americans of Mexican heritage; his mother was a Methodist by faith and an Anglo by birth. By the time James arrived at Yale, neither of his parents' religions suited him.
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“Halfway through my freshman year, I realized I wasn’t on the right path.” |
James went to classes, he studied, he partied. “About halfway through my freshman year, I realized I wasn’t on the right path,” Soza says. “All of the drinking, the party scene—it didn’t seem to be what I was here for. But I was having a lot of amazing conversations with my friend K.C., conversations that got me thinking. He’s a very devout Catholic. So I was thinking a lot about those things, and I was taking an Arabic class. Through a friend in that class, I went to Muslim prayer one night, in the room the Muslim students have in the basement of Bingham Hall.
“The students told me to come back in a few days to meet the imam. I recited shahaada”—the Islamic prayer that effects conversion—“the next time I went back to the Bingham basement. I just knew when I made eye contact with Imam Zaid Shakir as I walked in that I was about to convert.”
In its particulars, James’s story is unusual: a Mexican-American of uncertain faith strikes up a friendship with a Nigerian Catholic, K.C.; he begins to ponder his spiritual life, happens to be studying Arabic, turns to Islam. But talk to enough students and elements of the story become familiar. Ben Breunig, a senior from Dallas and a member of Athletes in Action, a nationwide Christian group, was raised Christian; but, as with James, leaving home and being freer to make his own mistakes changed his religious direction. “Freshman year, I made some bad decisions,” Ben says. But he became a leader in Athletes in Action, and he now leads a weekly Bible study for fellow football players.
I didn’t press the point, but I can imagine, as one who’s not too far from his own undergrad days, that the “bad decisions” Ben and James both moved away from might have had something to do with sex. Nothing illegal, and nothing most students would classify as immoral—just uncomfortable. Just a morning when you wake up next to someone you don’t care about and realize that you’re playing fast and loose with another human being’s feelings. Or maybe the bad decisions involved alcohol: a morning when you wake up and realize you’ve slept through an important exam; then you get an e-mail from your mom, saying how proud she is of her son the Ivy Leaguer.
And, if you’re inclined to a certain kind of reflection, you begin to nurture thoughts about what exactly it all means. Loosed from your parents and your childhood pastor, you feel as if you’re thinking for yourself for the first time.
The conventional wisdom is that college is a time for kids to escape the strictures of religion, but it can easily work the other way around. Students leave home, meet new people, experience new failures and successes, begin to think about God in new ways.
Seniors Erina and Susli Lie sing together in Living Water, a Christian a cappella group. Susli is also active in Yale Students for Christ.
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At Yale, far from home, religion became even more important to Erina and Susli Lie. |
“Our parents are nominally Buddhist,” Susli says. But the sisters attended a Christian school in Indonesia, “just because it was the best school where we lived.” Susli began to consider herself Christian while in junior high; Erina’s faith deepened after she emerged unscathed from the 1998 riots in Jakarta. But at Yale, far from home, their religion became even more important. I asked them what their parents thought of their faith. “They respect our right to our beliefs,” Erina says. “We worry about them,” Susli adds. “They’ve gone to church with us maybe once. We talk to them about our faith.”
Even students who have stayed true to their parents' church find that college has affected their spirituality. Julia Lauper, a junior from California, went to Mormon religious classes at six o'clock every morning before high school for four years. But still, college changed something.
“I like to think I have been dedicated to my religion throughout my life,” Lauper says, “but I certainly feel I have grown spiritually here. I have challenged myself to think more deeply about things here than I ever could have in high school.”
For Rebekah Emanuel, a junior from Chicago, college made it easier to be a more observant Jew.
“Here, I live near services, so I can walk to prayer on Saturday morning,” Emanuel says. “My parents were understanding that I didn’t want to drive at home, and sometimes I would walk the two hours each way. But here, that’s not a problem. Religiously, Yale has given me a great deal more autonomy.”
When I was at Yale, I had ambivalent feelings toward my religious friends. On the one hand, I thought they were a little bit silly—who would want to ghettoize oneself with other Jews or evangelicals or Mormons? And who believes in this stuff anyway? On the other hand, they actually did believe in something. The exhilarating thing about a liberal education—the openness to new ideas—can also seem rather depressing: all these people trying out different notions, debating them back and forth, but not really committed to any one of them in particular.
In such an environment, religious students were something rare and fascinating. Either they were holding to what their parents had taught them, which in the libertine Yale culture took an impressively strong inner core; or they were rejecting their parents' teaching and committing themselves to something new—not dallying with something new, but committing to it. Either way, they managed to transcend the usual Yale student ambitions—sex and good grades—to focus on something weightier.
And few of them were actually ghettoizing themselves. Many religious students evidently want to be part of this heterogeneous, cosmopolitan place. They knew about the multifarious ways of Yale campus life before they arrived, and they came ready to embrace it: Rebekah Emanuel’s roommate is a committed Christian, and Ben Breunig is a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity not well known for its piety. Nothing contradictory, as they see it. Penn and Columbia have more Jews, Georgetown has more Catholics; surely they offer a kind of concentrated religious experience that predominantly secular Yale cannot. But I couldn’t find any students who wished they had gone to such a school.
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It’s not idyllic, being religious at Yale. |
There’s certainly no religion more misunderstood, or more mocked by the liberal intelligentsia, than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—but when I asked Julia Lauper if she ever wished she'd gone to Brigham Young University, she said, “I cannot imagine being anywhere but Yale. I have had so many opportunities here to learn and grow, and I would not trade my friends or experiences for anything. Yale is heaven to me.”
It was not always so. When William F. Buckley Jr. '50 graduated, a certain kind of high-toned Protestantism reigned, and if being Jewish at Yale was hard, being Muslim practically unheard of, then perhaps being a low-church charismatic was most difficult of all: numerous articles describe the alienation felt in college by former attorney general John Ashcroft '64, a Pentecostal who did not drink, cuss, or dance. Even ten years ago, deeply religious students were more closeted. Sang Yun ’93, a campus advisor to Yale Students for Christ, says, “When I was a student, the group had maybe 10 to 15 active members. Now, we have more like 100 members. We have 15 Bible study groups of about four or five students each.”
It’s not idyllic, being religious at Yale. There aren’t so many fellow believers. There is intolerance: James Soza still feels shaken by memories of an anti-Muslim graffito on a student’s door when he was a sophomore. And there’s always temptation, more pervasive than at, say, Bob Jones University. But the trials religious students face at Yale seem to be subservient to the joys. This is a student body that enjoys living among those who believe differently. “I have spent more time studying the Bible partly as a result of the questioning I have received about my faith,” Breunig says.
Of course, where people gain faith through conversation, they can also lose it. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all insist that the best guard against temptation is to avoid it. That is one school of thought. But there’s another, and it seems to be current with Elis, that holds that the mind, like an animal, lives most fully when it’s free. For students who incline toward the disputative way of life, Yale can be just the right place to lose God, or to find Him.  |
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