By Bryant Venosdel
Student Reporter
It is Sunday morning, you just woke up and are ready to spend the day playing, but before you can do that you hear your parents say “get ready for church.”
This is something that has surely been said to most everyone when they were growing up and living with their parents, but now that college students are grown up and for the majority away from home, has that made the majority of students stop going to church in general?
On Northwestern’s campus, it has shown that the majority of students did grow up regularly attending church, but now that they are in college it is seen that they do not regularly attend church anymore, so there must be some reason, what is it?
Looking at Northwestern’s campus, there are some main reasons as to why students are not attending church. One problem that a student was vocal about is that they are not from Alva and don’t feel at ease just popping into any church. “I’m not from this town, so I don’t feel like I’m able to go to any church and feel comfortable with it,” Ashley Sellers said, a senior at NWOSU.
Looking at a survey that was conducted on campus, 65 percent of students said they did grow up regularly attending church. But now it is on the other end of the spectrum, with 60 percent of students not currently attending church.
Dr. Wilson Tyree is a professor at Northwestern and a pastor at the College Hill Church of Christ who has also published books discussing topics about the Bible and religion.
“There is so many other things that grabs a student,” Tyree said. “Take a young couple that’s living together: they’ve got each other to think about, they’ve got jobs to think about and they’ve got class to think about.”
With the juggling of activities that all students do, it seems going to church and expressing their religious beliefs are on the back burner. Most students do not think it is necessary to go to church to have to be religious.
“I grew up with my parents going to church and once I got into college I was into sports and didn’t have much time to go to church,” said Trevor Johnson, a senior at NWOSU. “I’d say I am religious, I have many friends that are very religious.”
Friends have an impact on each other’s lives and the topic of religion can make or break friendships. In the campus wide survey that was conducted, 40 percent of students said their friends are religious and when asked if they think most college kids are religious, only 8 percent said yes.
The numbers reflect that we look at our friends in a light that shows them being religious, but when looking at the college as a whole it is believed the average student is not.
Although the number of college students attending church is dropping it is also the young adult generation as a whole that has been not attending church. “It is not just the college group,” Tyree said. “The young adults attending have dropped off by several percentage points, the longer you don’t go to church the easier it is to not keep going.
Students attending NWOSU are for the majority comfortable expressing their religious beliefs. In the survey, 65 percent of students said they were comfortable being able to express their religious beliefs on campus and just 9 percent said they were not. “We co-exist really well,” Tyree said.
“The ones who are not believers don’t criticize openly the ones who are religious and the ones who are don’t criticize those who aren’t.”
Co-existing is a big part of being in college and interacting with other classmates. According to the Atlantic in an article titled “Why College Students Are Losing Their Religion,” it is seen in a different view. Their take is that college students are starting to realize that perhaps their behavior regarding religion was based on pressure from their communities, parents and friends.
Now that the average college student has moved on into a role in their life, where they are away from all these factors and able to realize what is important to them or what they want to focus on for themselves, religion is not something that seems too important.
The campus life experience for students attending Northwestern Oklahoma State are going to be different than a student who is attending the University of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State University. These colleges are much larger and attract a bigger range of people from different walks of life to attend. With the bigger colleges, you are more likely to see different gatherings and events that are church or religion oriented.
Inside Higher Ed. has published an article discussing religion on campus titled “Declining Exposure to Religious Diversity.” In their article it was discovered that college students will less likely interact with students who have differing religious views as they do.
In the survey conducted, it is seen that students do not feel embarrassed talking about or expressing their religious beliefs on campus, which is a good thing, but students are not actually doing the action of expressing these beliefs, which might in turn make sense to why students are not interacting with students of other beliefs because they are not actually having conversations expressing their own beliefs.
“It is kind of a balance of both,” Johnson said. “You don’t like to hang out with somebody who doesn’t believe in the same religion, because it has a big impact on you.”
The balance being that you must be open minded to people with other beliefs that differ from yours, but at the same time it can be spiritually draining if all the interactions that a student is having is with someone with a differing religious belief.
According to Inside Higher Ed.’s article, they found that “43 percent of students said they had talked about religious or spiritual topics with their teachers before college, but that number dropped by 18 percentage points in their first year on campus.” Students haven’t stopped talking to their teachers they have just stopped talking about religion, which is something Dr. Tyree sees. “Occasionally, not real often, I’ll have a student pull me aside and want to talk to a preacher,” Tyree said.
There are an endless number of reasons that the average college student can come up with for not attending their chosen religions church. Straying from your faith might not seem like a big deal in college, since there are so many other things happening, if a student does want to go it needs to be for themselves and not their family or peers.
As college students are getting ready to prepare themselves to take the next step in life, it will be easier and easier to stray away from religious beliefs. If a student has been veering off the path and not been going to church as often as they think they should, then there is no time better than the present to get back involved.
And if you are not religious then that’s OK too, college is a place for discussions and opening up to new ideas, as Dr. Tyree said, “Jesus didn’t come to build religion, he came to build relationships.”