Ten Years in the Wrong Direction

By far the most interesting magazine that regularly crosses my desk is National Review. This, I suppose, says as much about me as about the magazine. I have to “keep up” with the magazines and journals that have to do with my studies. We subscribe to the usual run of magazines in our home, and I manage to keep up on the non-family magazines in the barber shop and on airplanes. (Magazines are enemies to books, and one has to find time for books also.) But National Review is something else. The editor, William F. Buckley, Jr., who is conservative and Roman Catholic, manages to wade through the common media mishmash to come up with remarkably interesting and astringent comments on men and events. One who is interested in keeping a balanced view on things is led to think time and again, “Well, I’d better take another look at this.” And most of what he says is irresistibly convincing. Try it on for size sometime.

In the June 15 issue the editors analyzed, by way of one hundred questions, “Opinion on the Campus.” This followed in most questions other analyses made in 1958 and in 1961–63 and gives us some understanding of the shifts that have taken place. The findings are not encouraging. For example, the students polled would rather be Red than dead. If “all other alternatives were closed save a world war with the Soviet Union or surrender to the Soviet Union,” 54 per cent would prefer surrender and 37 per cent would prefer war. “Surrender has grown in acceptability in all twelve schools. In the earlier poll, over-all, only 25 per cent preferred surrender; 67 per cent would rather fight.” At Brandeis 69 per cent preferred surrender, which raises some interesting questions about persecution of Jews in Russia at the present time.

Every effort was made to get a fair cross-section of educational institutions and to protect statistical integrity. “Private liberal arts, public land-grant and denominational schools were included; admission and academic standards range from average to very high, enrollment from a few hundred to twenty thousand. At each, only students in the three upper classes were surveyed—on the assumption that newly arrived freshmen would not have time to adjust and react to their new surroundings.” The schools sampled are Sarah Lawrence, Williams, Yale, Marquette, Boston University, Indiana, University of South Carolina, Howard, Reed, Davidson, Brandeis, and Stanford. Marquette is Roman Catholic, Brandeis is Jewish, Howard is black. Davidson, the closest to what most of us think of as a church-related college, is described in the article as “a small, private, Presbyterian men’s school in rural North Carolina; an elite institution with high academic standards.”

Early in the article the editors sum up the “spiritual and ideological baggage” that graduates apparently take with them into this confused world: “Three-fifths call themselves political liberals; fully 17 per cent are self-proclaimed radicals. Approximately half can’t identify with either member of our cherished two-party system. Three out of four feel Marxists should be allowed to teach citizenship courses in the public high schools; almost half favor the socialization of all basic industries; seven out of ten want their country unilaterally to suspend atomic weapons development. Forty per cent say American society is ‘sick’; just over half believe that organized religion is harmful or worse. Given the alternatives of war or surrender in a confrontation with the Soviet Union, 54 per cent would have the United States surrender.”

This leads us to what is said on the subject of religion—“just over half believe that organized religion is harmful or worse.” Some of the religious findings are summarized in a section headed “God Is Not Feeling Very Well.” We like to think that the home and the Sunday school and the home church affect our young people, and this hope is sustained. Only a very small fraction of the students interviewed had missed the training of some religious tradition, and 73 per cent of them believed that this early training had “very marked” to “moderate” influence on their lives. What is surprising, however, is that three-quarters of them had reacted to this tradition and that the reaction took place not in college or university but in high school. A comparison of these 1971 findings to those of the earlier surveys makes it quite evident that the reaction against religion is not only “seeping downward into the high schools” but extending “outward into society.”

Yet in the midst of this is an encouraging note: 53 per cent of the students said that after their negative reactions they had experienced a “resurgence of religious faith and interest.” Since the colleges examined are not “church related,” we can rejoice in the efforts of such organizations as Inter-Varsity and Campus Crusade, for this seems to be where they have been measurably effective. A surprising number are not affiliated with any church—about a third generally, and, surprisingly, 16 per cent at Catholic Marquette. By the same token it is interesting to note that at Brandeis 35 per cent consider themselves to be Jews only by “interest in certain cultural features common to Jewish tradition.”

As to orthodoxy of the faith, questions were asked about the Trinity, the Incarnation, God as person, and the like. It was found that “only 17 per cent of our students took the position that God is omniscient, omnipotent, three-personed” whereas the earlier survey showed 30 per cent agreeable to such positions; and at present only 20 per cent agree to the “literal truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” 28 per cent to the “literal truth of the Gospel account of Jesus’ resurrection.” As to the Church itself, less than 1 per cent believed the Church to be “the one sure and infallible foundation of civilization”; at Marquette, where 61 per cent had supported that view eight years ago, only 1 per cent would hold it now.

An odd and somewhat frightful finding is what the “true Believers” do with their religious faith. We expect as evangelicals that properly laid foundations will lead to proper social action. This is not necessarily so. Seven practices that are live and “relevant” in all religious and social discussions are treated in their relation to a man’s beliefs. These practices are birth control, premarital intercourse, extramarital intercourse, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia. It was found that “at only two colleges do more than half the believers in God disapprove of anything because of their religious beliefs.”

This kind of dichotomy in the thinking of students looks like the destruction of the foundations on which such matters could even be discussed with any authority for the believer, and points up what must surely be true: the apparent irrelevance of belief to practice. What must I do to be saved? is not followed by, What ought I to do now that I am saved?

And to sum it all up, the magazines most read by the college students as they make up their minds are: Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times; the magazine least read is apparently National Review!

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