Religion Flourishes Around the Yard

By Alvin Powell

Contributing Writer

Osvaldo Pereira lay on his bed in Canaday E, one of the freshman dormitories, on a Friday afternoon. His first months at Harvard were tougher than he'd expected. He felt alone, disconnected from friends and family.

Through the air vent near his bed that day drifted the Islamic call to prayer. His bedroom shared the vent with the Islamic Society's masjid - place of prayer - in Canaday's basement, where campus Muslims gather to pray.

"It was otherworldly," Pereira, a graduating senior, said of the freshman experience. "When I heard the call to prayer, every hair stood up on my arms. I went down and spoke to the people there."

Today, Pereira is a practicing Muslim. After graduation, he plans to start an investment banking career and to marry his fiancee, who is also Muslim.

Pereira describes a gradual journey to his faith. That initial contact led to an intellectual curiosity about Islam, which gradually deepened into religious conviction.

"I found something in Islam that I didn't find in other faiths," Pereira said.

Like Pereira, some students find faith or reconnect with the faith in which they were raised while at Harvard. Statistics on religious life at Harvard are hard to come by, but campus religious leaders say students' spiritual searches are part of the natural quest for meaning in the college years and part of a long-term, worldwide religious reawakening.

"All the secular ideologies are starting to crumble," said Bernard Steinberg, executive director of Harvard Hillel and a member of the United Ministry at Harvard and Radcliffe. "I think there's a return to some kind of quest for morality anchored in religious tradition. The Jewish community is experiencing that too."

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, said he's seen campus religious life grow steadily since the 1970s.

Increasing diversity has been a part of that growth. The United Ministry at Harvard and Radcliffe was once made up of representatives of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic faiths. Today many world religions are represented in the ministry, including Islam, Hindu, and Buddhism.

Though hard numbers aren't available, anecdotal evidence indicates that nearly half of students perform weekly an activity related to their faith in some way, from attending formal church services to working for a charity, Gomes said.

"It does suggest that there is a very significant percentage of undergraduates for whom religious life in one form or another is an active part of what they do here," Gomes said.

For some students, long-term religious trends have changed college from a place where their parents and grandparents went to forget their religion to a place where the students themselves come to find it. Today's college students were raised by children of the '60s and many grew up in households that did not practice religion. Their natural rebellion against their parents' values can prompt a search for faith.

"Forty years ago, you went to college to lose your faith. Today, if your Mom and Dad are secular, the way you rebel is you go home and say, 'I'm born again,' " said Gomes. "The alliance used to be between the chapel and the parents, today the alliance is between the chapel and the students."

In the American Jewish community, the current reawakening is due to the assimilation and Americanization of parents and grandparents after they immigrated earlier this century, Steinberg said. Their children, Steinberg said, want to reconnect with their Jewish traditions.

Amelia Kaplan, who graduated from Harvard last year and who is doing psychology research at the Medical School, said she grew up in a Jewish family that was not very religious. When she got to Harvard, her roommate said she was the second Jewish person she had ever met. That made Kaplan wonder what being Jewish meant and whether she was a good representative of her community.

The search for those answers took her and some friends to Hillel, where they became involved in the community. In Kaplan's sophomore year, a close friend of hers died and she found herself turning to Hillel.

"I drew on Hillel in a way I never had before," Kaplan said.

Since then, Kaplan said she started a Jewish feminist group with a roommate last summer. She currently attends regular study sessions at Hillel with Steinberg to learn more about Jewish practices and traditions.

The increasing multiculturalism in America and at Harvard may intensify some students' search for meaning, Steinberg said. Students today have choices to make on sexuality, love, work, family, and a host of other issues. Unlike students from earlier generations, they also have decisions to make about which culture and value system to base those choices on.

"I think the dizzying array of choices before students demands that there's a framework for students to make them," Steinberg said. "In a multicultural world, we're now choosing frameworks, not just making choices on things within a single, self-evident framework."

Whatever the reason, Steinberg said attendance at Hillel's programs are up 50 to 60 percent since the organization moved into its new facility on Mount Auburn Street in 1994. While some of that may be due to the new facility's prominence and the programming it allows, that doesn't account for the fact that they served 3,500 Passover meals this year, up from 2,200 last year.

Likewise, Christian fellowships at Harvard College have seen numbers surge in recent years, according to Andrew Crouch, a member of the United Ministry and campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Crouch said the number of students attending Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship and the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship jumped from about 80 to about 160 a few years ago. Crouch said he's not sure what caused the jump.

"I wish I knew - we'd do it again," Crouch said.

Crouch said about half the students in the fellowship come from practicing Christian families while the other half are students who come from nonpracticing homes. Even the students who were raised attending church sometimes say they became a Christian while at college.

"There is something that happens here where people discover the truth of [their faith] in their own context," Crouch said.

In addition to broader societal trends, Crouch said a variety of personal circumstances can cause students to turn to religion, from a family problem to the death of a friend to not being able to perform academically at the level a student is used to.

As with anything as deeply personal as religion, students' experiences are as different as the students themselves. Some say Harvard's intellectually questioning atmosphere can make it difficult for those looking for greater meaning. Some of those same students, however, say the moniker "Godless Harvard" is a gross misperception.

"The church [here] is a place I feel I can depend on unconditionally, as I could depend on my family at home," said Victoria Meng, a sophomore concentrating in visual and environmental studies who is active in the Harvard-Radcliffe and the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowships.

Brian Rosenthal, a sophmore physics concentrator who is Jewish, said Harvard can be a tough place for people who don't find a community.

"In high school, I felt part of a social community, now I feel part of a religious community," Rosenthal said.