Paul Raushenbush

Clergy have a reputation for sticking to the straight and narrow, but Dean Paul Raushenbush refuses to be pigeonholed. Growing up, Associate Dean of Religious Life Rev. Paul Raushenbush never envisioned himself in a clerical collar. Though he majored in religion at Macalester College, he had no plans to enter the church. Instead, after graduation he took off for Europe to become a music producer.

"I got a one-way ticket to Barcelona, Spain, with a little cash in my pocket," he said. Bearded and with an easy belly laugh, Raushenbush--sans clerical collar--looks like a man who would be just as much at home in the music world as in Princeton's soaring Gothic revival chapel. "I lived [in Barcelona] for about two-and-a-half years. We had a store and a distribution network and a record label."

Raushenbush was making his living doing what he loved, but by the age of 25, the excesses of a rock-and-roll lifestyle had caught up with him. Struggling with drug and alcohol abuse, he spent a month in hospital and nearly a year in a halfway house. Once he was healthy again and back in the United States, he said, he felt called to fuse his involvement in music with the "longing for God" he had always experienced.

"I was very interested in the intersections between pop culture and religion," he said. "I pitched [MTV] to do a show on spirituality and music culture. It didn't happen, but it came close enough for me to know that there was something there."

Raushenbush began working on public relations for cultural projects with religious themes. Before long he was writing "Ask Pastor Paul," an advice column for teens, on the interfaith web community Beliefnet. Raushenbush has also written on spirituality for Time Out New York and penned a book, "Teen Spirit: One World, Many Faiths."

At Princeton, Raushenbush said, he focuses on facilitating conversation among people of different faiths and political persuasions.

"People say, 'we've got the religious conservatives over here and the liberals over here and never the twain can talk to one another,' " he said. "And I don't think that's true."

Raushenbush said that spirituality is a source of age-old wisdom compatible with a wide range of political views. A problem only develops when people on either side of the aisle try to "claim" religion for a political cause. He cites the last Presidential election as a low point in the religious polarization of America.

"The reason that the unilateral claiming of Jesus strikes me as so wrong is that it points to the dangerous fact that Christians are using Jesus instead of being used by Jesus," he said in a sermon in the University Chapel last year.

The reputation of the Religious Right as a monolith is exaggerated, Raushenbush said, particularly at Princeton.

"If you look at the evangelical student groups on campus, they're more pluralistic than you'd think," he said. "There's a lot of interesting, nuanced thinkers that are involved in those groups."

In addition to highlighting diversity within conservative religious groups, Raushenbush said he also knows many religious liberals, on campus and elsewhere.

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"For the last 100 years, what would be called liberal religion today was actually the majority," he said. "And it still is. There is a huge amount of people who are not conservative who are religious." Raushenbush added that without religious liberals, "abolition [and] the civil rights movement would never have happened. That's an important heritage."

Particularly in the current political climate, in which it is too easy to reduce religion to an either-or dichotomy, Raushenbush emphasizes the importance of questioning in a student's spiritual life.

"College is a great time to be able to ask the question, 'What do I actually believe now that I'm not forced to believe something that my parents said?" he said. "And also, what do you believe? What does your roommate believe? Four years, you're here with basically the same people. So you can learn to talk about religion in a way that many people do not have the luxury to learn. You can leave Princeton with a fluency in being able to talk about religion."

Ultimately, Raushenbush said, whether or not a Princeton student is religious, what matters in the midst of the intense drive toward academic, extracurricular and social success is finding time for reflection — whether it's sitting quietly alone in the chapel, taking a walk on a sunny day or talking with friends.

"Almost anywhere else my job would be to get people on track, but here it's to get people off track," he laughed. "I really want to encourage students to care for one another in a deep, sustained way." Raushenbush added, "Take your friends seriously. We just need to be there for one another in a very intentional, awake, aware way. Be generous with one another. Love one another."