Postmodern Religious Views:
A Survey of National Colleges, both Secular and Religious

Allen Ketcham
Martin Brittain
Frank Taylor
Jim Norwine
Christopher Switzer (Graduate Research Assistant)
Texas A&M University-Kingsville

Introduction

     There have always been marked differences in the attitudes and values of college students of different faiths, localities, and races.  Those same students have also had some points of agreement.  The importance of family, for example, has been accepted by large majorities of practically any body of students.  Personal qualities like honesty, courage, and loyalty have generally enjoyed near universal approbation from all groups of students.  This is, undoubtedly, still true.
     There have, also, always been areas of divergence.  Belief in a supreme being and an afterlife, the desirability of various forms of political institutions, and the importance of universal education are only a few of the topics on which sharp differences in group norms from one group of students to the next have been observed.
     Today’s students are the first to be (at least potentially) universally connected.  Via the Internet, students now cooperate with their counterparts on different continents on projects and papers.  They are also aided in their communication by the rise of English as the language of the world.  In India, one hundred percent of college graduates now speak English, and it is estimated that, within ten years, the country with the most English speakers will be China.
     In today’s world, the question is: are the groups coming together or drifting further apart in attitudes?  Is universal communication producing convergence of values, or is universal access to competing value systems producing more diversity?  Is there, in fact, any movement in either direction?

Methodology

     The eight schools in the sample are broken into four groups: Religious, Secular 1, Secular 2, and Special.  The “Religious” group includes a seminary and an evangelical Christian university.  The second group (Secular 1) contains two schools from Colorado.  The third group (Secular 2) consists of two universities from Texas and one from Oklahoma.  The secular institutions were broken into two groups on the basis of geography.  The “Special” group is just one university – Al al-Bayt University or, in English, the House of the Prophet University located in Mafraq, Jordan.   The groups are presented below:

Religious
(1)   Luther Seminary
(2)   John Brown University
Secular 1
(3)   Front Range Community College
(4)   Western State College of Colorado
Secular 2
(5)   Northeastern Oklahoma State University
(6)   Midwestern State University
(7)   Texas A&M University Kingsville
Special
(8)   Al al-Bayt University

     A total of 737 questionnaires were completed at the eight institutions combined.  The table below presents some of the demographic characteristics of the participants:
See Table 1
All of these demographic characteristics are tested for significant statistical relationships with the attitudes and values being studied.  The questionnaire was designed to elicit responses to five primary sets of values, which we identify as:

1. Traditional: Values in a Traditional worldview are associated with God(s) and the worship of the deity(ies). A person’s identity is a consequence of one’s place in the community of kith and kin. Obedience is not just a value, but is a matter of survival.  Traditional values are “handed down” by sacred texts and authorities such as respected elders.  “Family” is a high value, with submission to family and clan being deeply respected.  
2. Modern: The foundation of Modern worldview values is the “objective” evidence of the Enlightenment’s science and reason.  One’s identity is “discovered,” not hereditary, as with the traditionalists.  Faith is located in the scientific method, the nation state, and values like “freedom” and “democracy.”
3. Postmodern: Personal identity is no longer inherited or “discovered,” but is forever shifting inside the massive space of the “in-between.”  Postmodernity, itself, signals Nietzsche’s prophecy in his, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became A Fable: The History of an Error.”  Here Nietzsche announces that the “true” world will disappear – meaning that our Western metaphysical constructs will float off into a shifting meaninglessness.
4. Transmodern: This category represents a “spiritual” response to the perceived “assault” of “radical” postmodernity. Transmodern encompasses such thoughts as “religious diversity makes us better,” and “my faith is true but not for all.”  Such thoughts (including logical fallacies as “my religion is true for me but not for you”) are an attempt to be inclusive by transcending the Postmodern impulse and the era-fication of current thinking.
   Transmodernism critiques both modernism and postmodernism, and yet attempts to draw from the “best of both.”  However, Transmodern does reject the wide-ranging secularization of society that is manifest both in modernism and postmodernism
5. Tolerance: Tolerance is not a category of secular/religious worldviews, as are the above Traditional, Modern, Postmodern and Transmodern.  The authors introduced tolerance to compare and contrast this “core” virtue within the sample.  Tolerance is often associated with the subject of this study, “religious views.”

Super Questions

     All particular questions meant to test an individual’s allegiance to one of the value sets are organized into a grouping of questions or “super question”.   Responses to super questions (which basically ask, “Do you support this value system?”) are summed in the tables below.  The answers to all of the super questions are shown in a series of graphs that visually present the groups’ areas of agreement and disagreement with both the value systems, and with each other.
     A major limitation of the study was its geographic limitation.  All the institutions surveyed were in the U.S. except Al al-Bayt.  This deficiency will have to be rectified by other, better-funded researchers.

See Category One, Two, Three, Four & Five
Super Questions Results

     First, and quite unexpectedly, the shape of the data for all of the super questions in all of the groups was similar.  The answers to the question are extraordinarily parallel.  The researchers expected dissimilar results from the divergent groups, but the groups have similar responses.
     There are, however, two anomalies that need to be pointed out.  First, the distribution of the answers to the Transmodern super question is reverse of what was expected. The strongest rejection of the Transmodern questions is by the seminary and an evangelical Christian university.  The irony is that the Transmodern impetus is fashioned to bring together, to a minor degree, Christianity and postmodernity.
     The other anomaly is that the Muslims embrace the “tolerance” super questions the most, whereas the Christians accept the “tolerance” questions the least.  Both of the secular groups lie in-between the Christians and the Muslims.

A Larger Context on American Religious Attitudes

     The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently published the results of a 35,000-person survey of American religious values.  This extensive study demonstrates that Americans easily move around within their boundaries of religion.  Americans have lost their “brand loyalty” when it comes to religious attitudes.
     America is a competitive culture and phenomena such as Wal-Mart, generic brands, and the Internet have made Americans responsive to cost-conscious comparative shopping.  The old habits of brand loyalty have dissipated.  In the same manner as business, America has a competitive religious marketplace that invites shifting loyalties.  Forty four percent of Americans have switched religions from the ones that they were raised in by their parents.  And, 37% of married Americans are of a religious affiliation different from their spouses.
     The fastest growing religious “group” in America is the unaffiliated.  Seven percent of Americans were unaffiliated as children, but as adults they claim 16% unaffiliated.  Only a quarter of the unaffiliated claim the label atheist or agnostic, therefore unaffiliated does not necessarily mean nonreligious. 
     With the Pew study in mind, we will review two questions from the students’ postmodern religious views study.
     On Question 42, 77% of the students agreed that they chose their own spirituality instead of inheriting it from their parents.  This fits with Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study mentioned above. 

See Table 2

     Question7 also, supporting the findings of the Pew study is the fact that 15.18% of our student sample is not affiliated to any particular religious group. 

See Table 3

     Question 31 states “The Yahweh of Jews, the Allah of Muslims, and the God of the Christians are the same single divinity.”  Here, the fundamentalist university disagrees most and the Muslim university disagrees least.  But, overall, the distribution is flat with no particular position being prominent. This is quite interesting, since first, in the New Testament, Lord is “code” for the word too holy to pronounce, “Yahweh.”  Second, the Pope refers to the believers in the three religions as the “Children of Abraham.”  Finally, in Islam, the believers in the three religions are referred to as the “People of the Book.”

See Table 4

     Question 34 states that “things are getting better and better.”  The two Christian schools agree the least at 9% and the Muslim University disagrees the most at 70%.  Therefore, it seems that the heavily religious schools are the most pessimistic.  However, overall, the entire sample is pessimistic with nearly 50% disagreeing with the statement that things are getting better.

See Table 5

     Question 54 states that, “I am reasonably certain that there is no God.”  Eighty one percent of the sample disagrees with the statement.  With a closer look, it is interesting to note that that the only group that 100% disagrees with the statement is the Muslim students.  Also, 9% of the seminarians agree with the statement – a postmodern impulse – seminarians that don’t believe in God.

See Table 6
An Overview of Some Individual Questions from the Survey

     In our sample, the political conservatives are primarily associated with the “Religious Group,” Luther Seminary and John Brown University.  The most liberal of our sample is Midwestern State in central Texas.  The moderate political identity is claimed by the Hispanics of Texas A&M University in Kingsville, south Texas.  Interestingly, this Hispanic group most disagrees (43%) with the statement, “I believe that America has a special relation with God.”

Conclusion

     In most areas, there is a remarkable degree of convergence in students’ attitudes and values.  However, there are some notable exceptions.  The responses to the statement: “I am reasonably certain there is no God,” produced a range of twenty percentage points of agreement, with Al al-Bayt providing one end of the range at zero and Front Range on the other end with 20.59% in agreement.  The statement, “Things are getting better and better,” elicited an almost 36 point difference.  Again, Al al-Bayt was at one of the extremes with 70% disagreeing, while only 34.4% of Northeastern students disagreed.   In general, on individual questions, Al al-Bayt, and one or more of the secular institutions produced the largest differences.
     On the “super questions” there was much more convergence.  No statistically significant differences among student groups emerged on these questions, although some of the differences were, as noted earlier, in a direction opposite to that expected.  There were large differences in all the groups’ responses to the super questions.  The Modern and Radical Postmodern value systems elicited the most disagreement from all the groups, while Traditional, Transmodern, and Tolerance/Choice value sets had relatively little opposition from any of them.   In short, all of the groups accepted or rejected the same value systems. 

References

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Norwine, Jim. Dueling Weltanschauungen? A Critical/Conservative Reading of Fugitive Values: What Being-in-the-World-is-
       Truly-Like for Contemporary Undergraduates. 28th Annual Faculty Lecture. Texas A&M University – Kingsville, April 17,
       2008.
Economist. Brand Disloyalty. March 1, 2008, pages 34 and 36.

Category One: Traditional
John Brown & Luther Seminary (Christian Religious)

Front Range CC & Western State College of Colorado (Secular I)

Northeastern State, Midwestern State, & TAMUK (Secular II)

Al al-Bayt University (Special I)

Category Two:  Modern
John Brown & Luther Seminary (Christian Religious)

Front Range CC & Western State College of Colorado (Secular I)

Northeastern State, Midwestern State, & TAMUK (Secular II)
 
Al al-Bayt University (Special I)

Category Three:  Radical Postmodern
John Brown & Luther Seminary (Christian Religious)

Front Range CC & Western State College of Colorado (Secular I)

Northeastern State, Midwestern State, & TAMUK (Secular II)

Al al-Bayt University (Special I)

Category Four: Transmodern
John Brown & Luther Seminary (Christian Religious)

Front Range CC & Western State College of Colorado (Secular I)

Northeastern State, Midwestern State, & TAMUK (Secular II)

Al al-Bayt University (Special I)

Category Five:  Tolerance / Choice
John Brown & Luther Seminary (Christian Religious)

Front Range CC & Western State College of Colorado (Secular I)

Northeastern State, Midwestern State, & TAMUK (Secular II)

Al al-Bayt University (Special I)

. 

 Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5

Table 6