When Abraham Kielar ’15 first came to the University, he joined a Bible study group at the request of his father.
“I never had done one before,” he said. “I thought it would be enough to go to church.”
Kielar, who identifies as Christian, explained that during his transition from high school to college he sometimes had trouble maintaining his Christian ideals, as he found it challenging to balance his religious upbringing with the independent lifestyle of a college student.
“Joining the track team brought discipline to my life and being more connected to [Princeton Faith in Action] and God just really helped me,” he explained.
In coming to the University, Kielar did not intend to drop his faith, but he explained that during his freshman year he often found himself drifting from the ideals he had grown up with in his Christian household, such as in the relationships he built with other people and the way in which he used his time.
Following a ski safari with PFA during intercession his freshman year, Kielar explained he had the opportunity to rethink the way he approached many decisions in his life, including those made about the Street, girls, his interactions with other people and how he plans for his future.
“I realized my faith is more than just a way to live a moral life style or a nice philosophy, but rather something that makes sense in real life and that has a bearing on everything I do,” he said.
According to the Committee on Background and Opportunity III Report released in fall 2012, Kielar falls into the 53 percent of respondents who identify themselves as either “somewhat” or “very religious.” The remaining survey respondents described themselves as “not at all religious.”
But despite this image of a campus almost evenly split between religious and nonreligious students, 60 percent of respondents identified with one particular religion. The remaining 40 percent either did not identify with any religious identity or described themselves as agnostic, atheist or secular humanists.
According to a poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 21 percent of college graduates nationwide in 2012 said that they had no religious affiliation.
Conducted over the summer of 2011, the COMBO survey asked students about different aspects of student life at the University. The third of its type, the survey was organized by the Undergraduate Student Government and compared students’ reported backgrounds to their lives at the University. Each participant’s background was evaluated using 13 different categories such as race, geographic region, household income and gender. The participants’ life at the University was then measured using 12 categories, like employment, academic life and eating club membership.
The results show that religious students report feeling more stressed about trying to balance multiple commitments, such as academics, social life, and extracurricular activities and feel less comfortable talking to professors. In addition, students who are somewhat religious reported developing more mental health issues after coming to Princeton than their very religious or nonreligious counterparts.
Overall, Roman Catholics are the single largest religious denomination on campus, with 16.5 percent of students self-identifying as such, according to the survey. Non-Catholic Christians make up the largest religious group with exactly a quarter of the student body, followed by Jewish students with 10 percent. Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist students combined make up less than 5 percent of the total.
In total, the report found that a third of University students have participated in religious groups on campus.
Finding a religious home
Psychology professor and department chair Deborah Prentice said she was not surprised by the results of the survey, explaining that non-religious students are more likely to feel comfortable with their professors.
“There’s a widespread belief that professors are very secular,” Prentice said. “Students might very well feel that if they were to talk about their religious beliefs, that that would be frowned upon.”
Prentice added that faculty members are often hesitant to ask students about their religious affiliations out of respect for their students’ privacy.
“It’s kind of the classic case where nobody says anything because nobody knows quite what to say,” Prentice said.
Jackson Dobies ’14, President of PFA, said that, while he has never felt uncomfortable with a professor because of his religious beliefs, he can understand how students of more religious backgrounds may not feel as comfortable when talking to their professors. In particular, Dobies said that students may feel uneasy discussing a long-held religious belief that they may not have thought about in an academic or institutional setting.
Students said that the lack of campus discussion on topics of religion may contribute to the discomfort felt by religiously-affiliated students both inside and out of the classroom.
“We just have to make religion more a fabric of the Princeton identity,” Kujegi Camara ’16 said. “We need to say it’s okay to be religious; it’s okay to have these customs and to have these traditions and beliefs. I don’t know if we’ve done that in the best way possible.”
Camara, who identifies herself as a West African Muslim, said that while she has never felt discriminated against by her classmates or professors, she does feel a tension between her religious and academic pursuits.
“At Princeton, I’m like always scared ... I don’t want to get too caught up in the competitive atmosphere because, for me, I think there’s a bigger meaning to life,” Camara said. “What’s my real meaning here? Getting closer to God.”
Like Kielar, Camara said that her primary involvement on campus is with religiously affiliated groups. Camara, who is a member of the Muslim Students Association and Religious Life Council, said she observes all of the major holidays in Islam, prays five times a day and goes to Murray-Dodge, the location of the Office of Religious Life, on a regular basis.
“My suitemates all make fun of me because I’m never in my room,” Camara said.
Although Camara said she has made close friends with students of other faiths, she feels a unique bond to the Muslim community with whom she shares a “religious commonality.”
“I think I just felt like I needed to find a home,” she said. “Without MSA, I would have felt displaced for a pretty long time.”
Camara and Kielar both said they became more involved in religious life on campus than they had originally anticipated.
“I look forward to Bible study every week,” Kielar said, explaining that PFA allowed him to realign himself and has since played a big role in his time here.
For Kielar, PFA has become one of his top priorities on campus, and he attends weekly lectures hosted by the organization. When he first came to Princeton, Kielar said he drifted from his ideals initially because he wanted to fully experience college life and was on his own for the first time.
“I am definitely not in the same place I was at the beginning of freshman year,” he said.
Other students, like Ricky Silberman ’13, President Emeritus of the Center for Jewish Life, said that their decision to come to the University was largely motivated by the presence of a strong religious community.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like without [the CJL],” Silberman said. “It would just be a very different place — I would kind of have to forge my own path.”
Multiple commitments
Nava Friedman ’13, who identifies as an Orthodox Jew, said that her religious obligations — most notably, her weekly observation of the Sabbath — have influenced the activities she chose to participate in on campus.
Due to her religious obligations, Friedman said she did not become as involved in theater as she would have initially liked to. Although she is happy with her overall experience at the University, Friedman noted that many observant Jews are unable to run for leadership positions that would require them to work or use technology during the Sabbath.
“I don’t think the editor-in-chief of the ‘Prince’ could take a day off every week,” Friedman said.
According to the COMBO survey results, 31 percent of respondents who identified as very religious find balancing multiple academic, extracurricular and personal commitments to be very stressful. Meanwhile, 22 percent of somewhat and non-religious respondents reported similar levels of stress.
COMBO results also show that very religious students are less comfortable with eating clubs than non-religious or somewhat religious students.
“I would definitely say that my awareness of both what I believe and how people perceive me as a Christian out and about has affected the way that I act socially,” Dobies said.
Dobies, who does not drink for religious and personal reasons, used to be a member of Cap & Gown Club until he became a Residential College Adviser and decided that his membership in the club was too much of a time commitment.
Silberman, a member of Tower Club, said that many religious students have to take their dietary restrictions into consideration when bickering a club. While Silberman does not keep strict kosher and can split his meals between Tower and the CJL, he said that some students choose to eat only at the CJL where all the food is kosher.
Kielar, now a member of Cannon Club, explained that while freshman year he did not drink at all, sophomore year he drank a couple times, but very rarely. Kielar said that while his decision not to drink is rooted in personal beliefs, he does believe that, as a member of PFA and as a Christian, drinking and “raging on the Street” would not be the image he would like to portray of himself.
“Whatever you believe, at some point, when you got to stand on your own two feet and the parents and the people you have looked up to most aren’t there anymore, you got to make the decision of whether you want to continue with your faith or drop it and just let it go to neglect,” Kielar said.
The last in a three-part series discussing the results of the most recent COMBO survey.
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