Religious students tend to hide their faith, stick with coreligionists, study finds

Religion was generally seen in a positive light in U.S. universities, but students at elite American schools today often consider it suspect, according to Ilana Horwitz, assistant professor of Jewish studies and chair of contemporary Jewish life at Tulane University in New Orleans, La.

Religious students’ faith “puts them on the wrong side of the invisible line of what is seen as palatable or not palatable,” the sociologist of religion told JNS. She added that many elite students think that “if you are smart enough to be here, you should have moved past religion.”

Horwitz is lead author of a study about “sacred commitments in secular spaces” that was published last month in Sociology of Religion

She and colleagues at Stanford, Princeton and Cornell Universities interviewed 145 students at an “elite university,” which the researchers didn’t identify, throughout their undergraduate careers from 2017 to 2021.

The scholars found that religious students quickly noticed a social cost to being religious. They addressed that cost with three strategies—all of which Menachem Altein, the Chabad rabbi who directs the Chabad at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told JNS that he sees.

Students “blur” by hiding or moderating their religious identities, “contract” by building their social lives around their coreligionists and “reposition” by removing themselves from their faith to avoid scrutiny, according to the researchers.

Among the examples cited in the study are “Noah,” who opted to keep his kippah in his bag rather than wearing it, and “Naomi,” who became president of the Jewish student organization.

“They’re trying to find spaces where they can just be without having to explain themselves,” Horwitz told JNS, of Naomi’s engagement with the Jewish campus group.

“Dalia,” who is also mentioned in the study, grew increasingly convinced that taking part in Jewish life on campus made other students assume that she supported Israel, which carried a social cost, so she withdrew from Jewish life on campus.

“Being Jewish on campus comes with navigating a whole host of assumptions about what Jews are and what they do in the world,” Horwitz told JNS.

Past sociological studies have probed whether students lose religion in college but didn’t investigate why that change occurred, and tended to assume that students adjust their faith passively, according to Horwitz.

The new study revealed a deeper picture of the forces behind this phenomenon and showed that students changed actively in response to pressure, she told JNS.

Amy Lawton, director of research and special projects in the president’s office at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, told JNS that the findings of the study likely would apply to non-elite colleges as well.

The study makes clear how much Jewish students are “othered,” that is, treated as different, on campus, according to Lawton, a sociologist of American religion. Being treated that way “has always been a major part of the American Jewish experience,” she said.

“Belonging is an essential human need, and it takes work,” she told JNS. “We need to be conscious of who we are asking to do that work.”

The researchers conducted the interviews prior to Oct. 7. Horwitz thinks that the results would be more pronounced for Jewish students after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

“Universities pride themselves on diversity and inclusion but have this blind spot about religion,” she told JNS. “They are very unclear on where Jews fit into the diversity rhetoric.”

“Post-Oct. 7 really bore out that complexity in how poorly diversity offices understood the needs of Jewish students,” she said.

Altein, the Chabad rabbi, said that Jewish students have felt increasingly intimidated on campus since Oct. 7.

Students have told him about peers drawing swastikas on their dorm doors and ripping down posters for Chanukah parties. At the Passover seder that the rabbi held, he asked students to close their eyes and raise their hands if they experienced Jew-hatred on campus.

“Almost the entire room raised their hand,” he told JNS.

Altein has seen Jewish students choose extremes in response to Oct. 7 and its aftermath.

“There’s some kind of invisible line in the sand, and anybody who was on one side became much more involved,” he said. “Our undergrad board has doubled or tripled in size.”

On the other hand, students on the other side of the line withdrew.

“We have a lot more people who are falling through the cracks,” he said. “If I invited a student to come to Shabbat dinner five years ago, maybe. Now, it’s like, ‘I’m not interested.’”

© JNS