Losing My Religion Essay

We also went on and found different articles, related to schools that have chapel as a requirement. An article we found is "Losing my religion: The social sources of religious decline in early adulthood" by Jeremy E. Uecker, Mark D. Regnerus, and Margaret L. Vaaler. The purpose of this article is to examine different factors that cause young adults to lose interest in their faith/ religion. For their method they used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a panel study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

So has religion been a big ordeal to have within school and outside of school as well? Not only school, but the students who attend these kind of school from a young adult to full adulthood. In this article, Losing my religion: The social sources of religious decline in early adulthood, we found a quote that significantly reflects our topic of research. The question that is being brought to mind is that if the loss of social connection in early adulthood in compared to the decline in religious commitment in young adults. “The young adult years of many Americans are marked by a clear decline in outward religious expression, which is popularly thought to hit

bottom during – and perhaps because of – the college experience. This is not new news. In the early 1980s, nearly 60 percent of young adults reported attending church less frequently than they did during adolescence” (Uecker). This quote we found in the article talks about how the in the 1980s that there was a significant decrease in young adults who attended church. The information from this article is useful to us being that it gave a significant percent as to how many young adult began to go to church less frequently. Which leaves us to question as why this was happening to young adults who attend a religious school. Students at Warner Pacific College are part of this maybe 60 percent of student who do not attend to church less frequently. Or the numbers could have gone up over the years as the students attend the college. The requirements and punishments may have been different from the 1980s leading up to now. Although changes may have been made, the end result of students not wanting to attend church remains the same. What could be done or changed between the relationship of the students and Warner Pacific College or any other religious college? “When adolescents graduate from (or drop out of) high school and move out of their parents’ home, they experience a sudden transition into adulthood . . . they experience life apart from their family and within a new social environment (Hoge, Johnson and Luidens 1993). Typically (but not necessarily) fostered by higher education, this process could cultivate more secularized perspectives on the world – or at least ones at odds with their religious upbringing – which in turn may lead some young adults to cut ties with organized religion. Additionally, greater freedom affords emerging adults the opportunity to cease activities (such as church services)” (Uecker). This quotation of the article gave us more insight as to what other possible reasons for the decline in young adults who chose to attend church less frequently. The reason being that as a student of Warner Pacific College, if the student does not meet the required amount of chapel and volunteer hours, minimum is 5 for both and a sum total of 25 hours, there is a fee of 10 dollars for each hour missed. This information can be found on the Warner Pacific College home website. Having to pay a fine of about 250 dollars or more for not meeting the required hours can spark frustration in some students who do not have actual time to meet the required hours of the school. It then seems to be more about the school making money than to educate religion to students. An article, Religion and higher education: Current knowledge and directions for future research by Damon Mayrl talks about how religion was suppose to aid in education, but instead question students religious faith. “Until very recently, it was generally held that attending college tended to undermine religious faith. Studies from the 1970s and 1980s describe college as “a breeding ground for apostasy” ” (Mayrl). This quote talks about how in the 1970s and 80s studies were conducted and the results showed that students had a decline in religious faith which is similar time frame of the Jeremy Uecker article. The question that we have is the method of study that was taken to obtain these results. Did they speak to only upperclassmen or a mass majority of students from freshmen to seniors?
In the study, Higher Education as Moral Community: Institutional Influences on Religious Participation During College by Jonathan P. Hill the research question that is being asked is whether or not higher education had an affiliation with the religiosity of people. There has been a rise in research in addressing the religious lives of college students in the United States. In one study, it was documented that high levels of interest in spirituality among undergraduates occur then in the next study it focused on the growing campus ministry and parachurch organizations. Another study researched the resurgence of the academic study of religion. In a national survey, nearly three times as many students report becoming more religious during college than becoming less religious. Moreover, work with nationally representative panel data has confirmed that recent college graduates are not secularizing at faster rates than their counterparts who do not attend college. The methods that they used to acquire their results were taken from a survey they conducted. One was from a national dataset called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Their data is a nationally representative panel survey of youth sponsored and directed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, with assistance from the Center for Human Resource Research at the Ohio State University. The second national dataset was from the Integrated Post Secondary Data Service (IPEDS). The IPEDS data are a census of postsecondary educational institutions in the United States. The results from this study was that there are individual factors that play into the results of the religiosity of a person regardless if they went to college or went to a religious college. The data I felt was conducted well but their conclusion was ambiguous on the results because there are many factors that play into the results.
There was not much further research discussed in the study but it does disclaim that social researchers should be looking more towards the influence of social networks and varying institutional arrangements on the changes in individual religious belief and practice instead of family dynamics and intergenerational religious transmission. We found this article to be quite interesting based on their research they were able to identify some factors that plays into young adult’s views about religion. Though, they mostly focused on the Protestant and Catholic religion so the results would not be able to be used universally throughout all religions. We were able to learn that going to a religious affiliated college versus not going to college can help a person have a strong religious view throughout their life but ultimately there are individual factors that need to be taken into consideration about a person’s religious standings. We are confident that these findings are relative to the study of Catholic and Protestant religions for the schools that the study took their information from but we would not take their results and say they are the sole answer. We believe that these findings will help bring to people's attention the idea that there is an emphasise the collective web of religious understanding by supporting the individual religious participation.
In the article, How College Affects Students' Religious Faith and Practice: A Review of Research by Harold V. Hartley III the purpose was to conduct a study to see if going to college affected the religious views of a person and how a school can help further a person’s life through the association of religion on campus. There was an ethnographic study of campus religious life in 2001 that questioned decades of research showing a negative effect of attending college on students' religious beliefs and practice. Through another studies results they suggest that the trend of the decline in religion was due to the "secularization of the academy”. Then another study stated that some collegiate vents actually helped strengthen the religious views of the students. The way that this study conducted their methodology was through a narrative, explanatory synthesis to analyze empirical research findings from studies conducted over the past 15 years that examine the impact of attending college on students' religious faith and practice. The results of this study was that religion and spirituality within the study of culture exerted a more influential force among historically underrepresented or marginalized cultures within the academy. It is discussed that there are multiple limitation within these studies. Such as; the studies are focusing solely on monotheistic religions, there are limited number of studies examining the effect of college on students' spiritual development, and most studies only focus on their own campuses’ results. Additional studies are needed to better understand the diversity of spiritual life on paying particular attention to non-monotheistic religious expression.
We believed that this study was informative about how other studies have conducted their experiments to obtain their results and how we need to better improve or range of methodology.

We learned that the spiritual aspect of human development has not been a major focus of the profession until recently and now that poses as a new factor to this study. The information we found within this study was thoroughly deciphered by the author and blatantly recognized it’s faults in the results which helps the reader understand the reality of the study. We believe that this study will help future researchers conduct more inclusive studies focused on religion and higher education so that the results will have a more holistic

view.
These articles are helpful for our research topic because they talk about the changes in relationship between students and religious faith. Some articles focused more on specific religions while others looked at the impact of the different students and how the religiosity impacted their views on life. Some articles also focus on the impact community service hours have on students. We believe that these articles pertain mostly to the schools that the studies were researching at but the information of their methodology will help guide us through our own research at Warner Pacific