Inclusive or exclusive: Religious groups on campus

“It’s our hope and goal to ensure that everyone does feel welcome,” said Addie Darling ’12, a member of the Aquinas Institute, a Catholic group on campus. At the same time, she said, campus religious groups struggle with “maintaining that balance with honoring the values and traditions and world view of each chaplaincy.”

For the more than 30 religious groups on campus, group unity stems from shared beliefs that can guide anything from members’ social lives to their political beliefs. And while members of religious groups said they strive to welcome those of different faiths and different degrees of devotion, there may also be a tendency for such groups to alienate religious students who are less active and create intimate, sometimes exclusive social connections among members.

Mark Grobaker ’11, a ministry coordinator at Aquinas, said that while initial interest in the group includes students from across the spectrum of religious involvement, after a few months only the more observant members still remain active. “You’ve lost all the people who maybe just identify as culturally religious,” he said. “Because that’s all been stripped away by now.”

Brian Stephan ’11, another ministry coordinator at Aquinas, explained that those who do not subscribe to all Catholic tenets may not feel welcome. “If you have a deep reservation about the teachings of the Catholic chuch, you’re going to have a deep reservation about Aquinas,” he said.

“Younger students at Princeton who choose to be Catholic really embrace the Catholic identity,” he said of students who choose to join religious organizations at the start of college.

Stephan said that students’ freedom to make their own religious decisions as freshmen ultimately made the choice to join a religious group more meaningful for them.

“It becomes a greater part of you than if you just drift along with the moniker ‘Catholic’ attached to you,” he explained.

As a student who frequents the Center for Jewish Life and is part of a program that provides Jewish advisers to residential colleges, Sammy Schatz ’13 remains committed to his religious faith. He noted that every student on campus eventually falls into a niche, explaining that the CJL is “a niche for a specific group of individuals.”

“We’re a small group of people, but the reason that there’s something like this is that we’re well organized,” he explained. “We go after our own and try to provide a community ... That’s just the way Jews are.”

But the process of creating a community inevitably leaves some people out.

“The problem is that the school can do everything they can, they can throw in as much money as they can to make the CJL as comfortable as they can, but ultimately, a Jew who doesn’t come often will feel uncomfortable walking into the Center for Jewish Life,” Schatz explained.

Dean of Religious Life Alison Boden noted in an e-mail that the active observance of members of many religious groups can be explained by the fact that religious students’ interest in their faith often increases or decreases after arriving in college.

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“Some religious students become significantly more observant, and some non-religious students become active in faith communities for the first time in their lives,” she said. “Other students who have grown up in religious families find that college is a time when they choose not to participate in spiritual activities.”

However, some groups representing religions with fewer followers on campus are forced to restrict their activities to largely cultural ones out of fear of alienating less actively religious members.

“At Princeton the students are so diverse, and with some families they celebrate some festivals and not others,” said Jahnabi Barooah ’11, former head of Princeton Hindu Satsangam, adding that the restriction in potential members made it more difficult for the group to focus on more strictly religious activities.

Similarly, Qin Zhi Lau ’11, who is a member of the Princeton Buddhist Students’ Group, explained that his experience in his small religious community at the University contrasts sharply with his upbringing in a largely Buddhist one.

“It’s different in the sense that you can’t get to monthly celebrations anymore,” he said. “Practice has to be much more personalized.”

He also added that the group he is a part of often felt restricted to focusing on more widely acceptable activities such as meditation, rather than the specifics of the Buddhist faith, in order to not alienate non-Buddhist students on campus.

In the groups that focus on more widely represented religions, however, the broad spectrum of observance on campus can be reduced to a group of members on the more active end of the scale.

Naturally, such a tight-knit community leads to close friendships, and several students said that some of their closest friends belonged to their own religious groups.

“People you share beliefs with — there’s a lot more to talk about, there’s a lot you can share,” Grobaker said of his friend group, which he explained was mostly Catholic. With other people, he explained, “there might be a fundamental disconnect.”

Jeffrey Mensch ’12, who is an active member of the CJL and the orthodox Jewish group Yavneh, said that his social life was largely shaped by the Jewish community.

“I wish it weren’t as much so, but it is,” he said. “I can’t deny it ... It’s not just me. I think a lot of my friends have a lot of their social group surrounded by people in the CJL.”

The connections forged within these groups can also extend to areas outside the traditional religious sphere.

“A lot of my friends in PEF ended up joining Charter, and that was a significant reason why I ended up joining,” said Stephen Pollard ’12, a member of Princeton Evangelical Fellowship.

However, many members of religious student groups also said that they felt their social lives stretched beyond the constraints of their religious communities.

“Personally, my friend groups are very different,” Darling said. “I don’t find myself running with the same crowd all the time. I feel like my social life is relatively diverse.”

But diversity can also exist within a religious group. Carter Greenbaum ’12 noted that the CJL caters to a wide array of Jewish denominations.

“We have all three denominations in one building,” Greenbaum explained, noting that this arrangement is different from those at other campuses. “You choose the service that is right for you [on Friday nights] and then all go eat dinner together.”

Perhaps due to the close connections within religious groups, some students explained that this social affinity and community can spill over into other groups that have a large religious membership but no explicit religious affiliations.

While some may perceive a connection between conservative religious ideals and the Anscombe Society, which weighs in on issues related to sex and sexuality as well as marriage and the family, Anscombe president Shivani Radhakrishnan ’11 said the organization is neither political nor religious at its core.

“The arguments that we put forward are accessible to people of any or no faith: They pertain to the fields of philosophy, politics, medicine, psychology and so on,” she explained.

But, she added, “The fact that we don’t rely on religious arguments doesn’t mean that we regard religion as irrelevant to discussions about chastity and family.” Radhakrishnan is also a member of The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board.

Darling, a member of Princeton Pro-Life, a group that is similarly perceived on campus, said she did not think religion was a determining factor for membership in the group. “As far as the method of getting there, you have people coming from vastly different backgrounds,” she said.

“I’m not going to deny that some people are there because it’s a tenet of their faith,” Darling said of PPL.

Another group with similar ideological overlap is the pro-Israel advocacy group Tigers for Israel.

“It’s not a Jewish issue, and we try not to paint it as a Jewish issue,” Schatz, a member of TFI, said of the group’s message.

However, TFI treasurer Jacob Reses ’13 explained that the group has very close ties with the CJL.

“We’re fortunate to have a very strong relationship with the Center for Jewish Life,” Reses said in an e-mail. “We cosponsor most of our big events with the CJL, and we always welcome its advice when it comes to planning our agenda for the year.” Reses is also a columnist for the ‘Prince.’

Bobby Marsland ’11, a member of Aquinas, also said that religious beliefs may encourage participation in groups that are not offically affiliated with specific religions.

“It does seem to be religious students who are more excited about these cultural issues” addressed by many political or philosophical organizations, he said.

Yet, Marsland added, the overlap in membership between the groups is hardly problematic.

“It’s a positive,” he said. “Religious groups actually care enough about the kinds of social consequences to actually get involved in these kinds of organizations.”

This is the second in a three-part series on religious life on campus. Tomorrow, a look at religion in the classroom.