Being Evangelical is Complicated: How Students’ Identities and Experiences Moderate Their Perceptions of Campus Climate

Abstract

Background Evangelical Christian college students navigate campus buoyed by Christian privilege but may encounter silencing or othering tied to their religious beliefs, a feeling of incompatibility with their campus climate, and conflations of their religious and political beliefs that are inaccurate and discouraging. Unsupportive campus climates can discourage evangelical students from having productive exchanges across difference and deepening their own worldview commitments, which is concerning due to their general lack of interfaith participation that challenges stereotypes and unnuanced assumptions. Purpose This study explores how evangelical Christians perceive their campus climates and whether those perceptions are different based on other social identity intersections with gender, race, sexuality, and political affiliation. In addition to individual characteristics, how the campus environment and various curricular and co-curricular experiences moderate evangelical students’ perceptions of the worldview climate is examined. Methods A sample of 1235 evangelical college students was examined via means, standard deviations, and ranges for six campus climate measures, one-way ANOVAs to examine whether those measures differed by different identity dimensions, and then multilevel modeling to better understand the role of campus experiences in evangelicals’ perceptions of their campus climate. Results Evangelical students’ campus climate perceptions were generally positive; more provocative encounters were reported by women than men and evangelical Asian students indicated more divisiveness, more insensitivity, and less space for support than their peers. Political affiliation also revealed several significant differences in perceived campus climate. Interfaith engagement through pre-college activities, formal and informal activities, and friendships were connected to perceptions of campus climate, with those reporting more engagement being more likely to have productive encounters across difference and to report insensitivity or divisiveness. Religious affiliation was the most significant institutional characteristic. Conclusions and Implications This study illuminates how collegiate experiences and campus environments exacerbate or attenuate evangelical Christian students’ perceptions of the campus climate, and the results indicate that effective teaching practices where true interfaith experiences happen and that create inclusive space for evangelical students in the classroom are key to fostering development, especially in light of the social status ambiguity evangelical college students may be experiencing during their college years.

The Evangelical Puzzle Partially Explained: Privileged Prejudice and the Development of Appreciative Attitudes Toward Evangelical Christianity

“…Results from this study provide compelling evidence that appreciation of evangelical Christianity can and does occur over 4 years of college through a mosaic of experiences. When students were provided opportunities to connect with evangelicals through a variety of touchpoints on campus-both curricular and co-curricular-the resulting relationships prompted greater understanding of and empathy toward evangelicals and in some cases softened previously negative attitudes against them (see Rockenbach et al, 2019;Ragins & Ehrhardt. 2020).…”

Perceived Religious Pressures as an Antecedent to Self-Reported Religious/Spiritual Development and Well-Being for Christians

“…Educational literature suggests that conversational interaction among diverse classmates is needed to increase critical consciousness, a form of cognitive complexity, that Christian environments should thus deliberately embed diversity throughout its various structural layers, and that doing so would deepen spirituality (Goerdt, 2011;Luna De La Rosa & Jun, 2019;Paredes-Collins, 2014). Religious literature indicates that Christians would benefit from (a) incorporating more meaningful interactions with individuals of other faith traditions that will challenge their religious-related assumptions and (b) engaging in the difficult spiritual questioning when facing challenging situations like bereavement (Rhoades & Walker, 2021;Riggers-Piehl et al, 2022). Some Christian religious environments, however, encourage a covert form of exclusivity, reinforcing behaviors like "standing strong against the ways of the world" and avoiding the "danger" of doubt about God (Puffer et al, 2008).…”