When senior Aaron Phillips was growing up in New Hampshire, he was part of a Catholic family. And while he "liked a lot of the principles of the Roman Catholic Church," he didn't "like the way the particular local organization was run." As a result Phillips "fell out of favor" with his church.
He did not fall out of favor with the values of religion, however. "I was always into the values of compassion and charity and hope and commitment," Phillips said. When Phillips came to Tufts, he discovered Buddhism - and the Tufts Buddhist Sangha.
"I'm not a Buddhist, but [I'm] interested in Buddhism," he said. "It's more of a spiritual thing."
Phillips found that the most helpful part of the religion was its emphasis on meditation. "I find that meditation is a very effective means of developing my mind and dealing with any kind of problems or obstacles in daily life," he said.
Phillips, it turns out, is not alone: while young adults and people of college age are often considered to be "self-absorbed," "apathetic," and "materialistic," they have not abandoned religion or spirituality in mass numbers.
According to the results of a major study released last week by the University of California's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) entitled "The Spiritual Life of College Students," religion and spirituality continue to be an important component of young Americans' lives.
According to the survey of 112,000 first-year students at 236 universities, 80 percent are interested in spirituality, 75 percent say they're searching for meaning or purpose in life, and the same percentage say they have discussed the meaning of life with friends. The incoming freshmen also reported having high expectations that their colleges would help them develop their spirituality.
Additionally, the study said that "most students consider themselves to be on a spiritual quest, that frequent prayer and attendance at religious services are part of the quest, and that many find spiritual expression by drawing from the practices and beliefs of several faiths."
"There indeed seems to be an increase in students preferring to refer to themselves as 'spiritual' versus 'religious,' at least in many of the students I've had in classes I've taught at Tufts," said Lecturer Jessica Gugino, who teaches a course on the psychology of religion.
"Some students I've had describe themselves as agnostic or even atheist, yet will still maintain they hold spiritual beliefs - just not bound by a particular religious tradition," Gugino said. "While the reasons for this are complex, I would say that one factor has to do with how religion is represented and defined in public discourse these days."
According to junior Deepali Maheshwari, who comes from a Hindu family, "Hinduism is not ritualistically rigid, so you can be as spiritual or religious as you like."
"You can be the person who goes to temple every week and performs rituals or you can do a personal prayer every night and use the religion for its morals and values," she said. "It teaches you to be a good person, rather than a good or bad Hindu."
Senior Brian Roiter, co-coordinator of the Tufts Buddhist Sangha, was introduced to the principles of Buddhism as a teenager, and found it to be more satisfying than the Judeo-Christian tradition.
For Roiter, Buddhism held the answers. "The first teaching I heard was the formal truths, which say that life is basically pervaded by suffering, and the cause of this suffering is our unawareness of the basic nature of our mind," he said. "But there's a way the suffering can end, and there's a path that leads to that. And essentially it involves ethics and concentration."
"It was very rational - a lot of other religions seemed to describe some kind of transcendental state but didn't give any indication of how to get there," Roiter said. "[Buddhism] is very psychological. It didn't use language such as 'salvation' or 'sin.' It was all about our minds."
Senior and President of the Protestant Student Fellowship (PSF) Lizzie Goergen followed a similar path with Christianity, discovering a different side of the religion once she arrived at college.
"I grew up in both the Catholic Church and the United Methodist Church, and I was very active in both, and I was very used to the traditions and the rules and the dogma, but when I got here it was more a question of how religion affects your life and the more spiritual side," she said. "There's more of a freedom [in college] for people to really talk about things and really try to apply it to their lives."
When sophomore Stacey Ecott arrived at the University last year, she was not a religious person. Today, however, she is PSF's outreach coordinator. "I grew up without religion, and I just had a lot of questions about people and the world," Ecott said. "And I found those answers in Christianity."
Others have simply "grown" within their religion since coming to college.
"I think people grow in religion and dive into it as they get older, and when you're away from home for the first time and you begin to ask yourself these questions, you're asking them for yourself for the first time rather than copying your parents identity," said junior and PSF Vice President Seth Lancaster.
"You either rebel against your parents if they had a strict religious dogma, you continue with the religious traditions you've been taught, or you form your own," he said.
"My ideas of what I want to do with my role within religion have grown so much since I got to college."
For many of these students, religion has become "too political," making them less interested in being associated with such stereotypes.
"For many college students on liberal arts campuses like Tufts, the stereotype currently circulating in mainstream American discourse often portrays religion as something very conservative or even fundamentalist, as something very rigid and intolerant, and as something very prone to cause or support violence," Gugino said.
"In this kind of atmosphere, I think a lot of students - and adults - may, at least for a while, identify their own views as something different from mainstream definitions of religion - and call their own beliefs and views 'spiritual' instead," she added.
But while some students have been "turned off" by the politics that have become so strongly associated with religion in this country, others have been drawn to it while searching for "spiritual guidance" and "meaning" in life.
"My impression is that, in general, there are a number of students who are actually returning to more traditional forms of religion - more evangelical forms at least compared to when I started teaching in the early '90s," said Associate Professor Joseph Walser, who teaches an introductory class on Buddhism.
These students are, in fact, looking for guidelines and rules by which to live: "I guess there are things that go on in college that make some people uncomfortable, like the typical social atmosphere - the drinking and kids having more freedom to have sex and to do whatever," Goergen said. "And people who are uncomfortable with that might find people who have similar perspectives in a religious community comforting."
Sophomore and PSF Bible study coordinator Tara Espiritu agreed. "Depending on how small of a town you came from, students might not have had to deal with things such as homosexuality in high school," she said. "Religion gives you a good way to look at and understand such things that you might not understand."
