More and more college students are becoming atheists
There is a recent trend with college students who leave the Christian lifestyle after leaving home. Because of this, a Christian coalition is coming together to address this problem
The significant loss of students from the Christian faith in their transition from high school to college has put youth and ministry leaders to work to bring a halt to the trend. Major youth groups and college campus ministries are gearing up to strategize for a milestone national campaign that they plan to launch next year.
Before the campaign propels forward, the Youth Transition Network (YTN) is forming a group called the Guiding Coalition to bring together national leaders to help young people transition from high school and still be a vital part of the body of Christ. A second conference to get all the major ministries onboard is being held today.
At my own university, we had a group called Christian Fellowship that met every Thursday, and when I went through a brief born-again Christian phase, I went to a few meetings. They start off every one by handing out new bibles to first-timers, and after some jokes and prayers and whatnot, they’d bring in their visiting speaker for the day.
It had a very cult-like feeling to me, everyone had these plastic grins and it felt incredibly unnatural. On top of this, there was a Christian hierarchy, not much different from any other social clique. The good-looking Christians were the most popular, and there was a certain holier-than-thou contest, not unlike the one portrayed in the movie Saved.
What is most peculiar to me is the new breed of hipster conservative Christians. They dress like either hipsters or hippies, and carry on the general artistic quirkiness of hipsters, and yet…they’re conservative born-again Christians. I think it’s an effective recruiting tool for attracting youths to their group.
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Is it really a problem?
I attend a conservative christian college (evangelical baptist) and I myself am Lutheran, a religion widely considered by my peers to be part of the liberal threat. I too see a lot of that cult-like phenomena occurring on campus, but I also notice that a lot of conservative organizations will mobilise around non-threats, anything at all really, that they perceive as dangerous.
If anything, the evangelical movement owes much of its success in terms of political achievement, growth rates, and fund-raising capabilities to scare-mongering and successfully portraying every seemingly insignificant incident as part of a Twilight-Struggle against the forces of Satan and his followers.
Rolling Stone did an article a while back on the explosion in evangelical organizations on campus.
This claim of atheist-takeover feels awfully similar to big oil’s claim that it is currently “barely scraping by,” when it is reaping record profits.
Do you have any secular sources that would substantiate this so-called “recent trend?”
No, I don’t, it was just an article I came across. I don’t really see it as much of a problem at all, as I am an agnostic, so a decline in Christians makes no difference to me either way.
Christians do tend to over-hype any kind of (real or imagined) fight against Christianity, and I wouldn’t doubt that this might be another case of them overreacting once again. Like I commented, there is a new hipster conservative evangelical Christian, and the last statistics I’ve seen on the matter show that Christianity is alive and well in the US, while in Europe it isn’t doing so hot. I think this evangelical movement is the main cause.
But perhaps it’s because Christians in the US over-hype any threat to them, and this is why Christianity is doing so well here, I dunno.
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