Possibly the biggest religion news story in this back-to-school season came from the New York Times’ Emma Goldberg who wrote about the installation of Greg Epstein as the president of the Harvard chaplains. There are over thirty chaplains on Harvard’s campus coming from a wide variety of faith traditions including many Christians, but also Buddhists, Mormons, and Hindus. What makes Epstein’s elevation to the presidency so noteworthy is that he is a self-described humanist who rose to fame by writing the bestselling book, “Good Without God.”
Epstein’s job will be to coordinate the chaplain organization’s activities across the Harvard campus, making students feel welcomed and supported as they strive to obtain a degree from the most prestigious university in the world. Goldberg’s article describes Epstein’s unanimous election to the presidency and was focused more on his ability to organize and facilitate cooperation between faith groups, than his ability to guide and develop students’ personal faith tradition. But, it’s obviously noteworthy that Harvard University, which was founded to educate Christian clergy, just elected an atheist to lead their spiritual development division.
For the rising number of U.S. nones—those who identify with “no religious affiliation”—this seems like a seminal moment, but when taking a look at the numbers, it’s unclear if this is an anomaly or a bellwether of college hiring trends. Take the 2015 poll conducted by the Harvard Crimson of their incoming freshman class which found that only 17% of those freshmen identified as atheists, with another 21% indicating that they were agnostic, 17% were Protestants and another 17% were Catholics.
Of course, the kind of students that get admitted to Harvard are not just a random slice of eighteen year olds in the United States. A Harvard student is twice as likely to be an atheist or agnostic compared to the general population of eighteen year olds. So while an atheist chaplain may receive strong support at a place like Harvard, it’s unlikely the same thing will happen in other colleges and universities in the United States...at least not yet.
In the background, however, is the bigger story of American religion. Namely that young people have rapidly shifted their religious affiliation over the last decade. In 2012, half of college-aged respondents said they were Christians. In 2020, that had dropped to just 36%. That’s obviously disheartening for youth pastors and those working with college-aged students.
However, there’s a silver lining because at the same time, the share who said that they were atheists or agnostics actually went down just slightly. The biggest shift was in the share of 18-22 year olds who said that they were “nothing in particular.” It was 21% in 2012, but jumped a full ten points to 31.5% in 2020. As I wrote in my book, The Nones, the group that was the most likely to return to religion over time was the nothing in particulars. In fact, between 2010 and 2014, over 20% of them came back to a Christian tradition. That hardly ever happened among atheists and agnostics.
What does this mean for ministry leaders as we think about shepherding our college students as the school season begins? Here are a few practical ways you can see this trend and apply it to your context:
So while the picture is still emerging on how colleges—and the season of re-evaluation and deconstruction—are shaping our young people, one thing is clear: the potential harvest is plentiful and we can play an important part in our college students’ lives.