Redefining personal religion

It's the Sunday night before Valentine's Day and Leslie Kincaid is throwing her second-annual cookie decorating party.

Her apartment smells of freshly-baked goods and is bright with tubs of red, white and pink frosting. Eight girls sit around the table exchanging stories about lost virginities, bad boyfriends and funny drunken nights.

The 9 o'clock student Mass has come and gone across campus, and I take a break from cupcake layering to ask Leslie, the smiling hostess, about her life in college as a Christian.

"It's funny," she says, "coming to college was odd for me because none of my friends here are Christian or religious, and I don't think my lifestyle fits Christianity as much as it used to, but I hope it does in some ways."

She keeps a sheet of binder paper Scotch taped to the wall next to her pillow, on which she has written a list of names of family members and friends that she wants to pray for that week.

In Leslie's college life, where finance classes and sorority meetings have replaced Young Life activities and Bible study, she has become very personal with her faith, and praying is what she says is most important in her relationship with God today.

Higher education institutions are based on the mission to promote curiosity and embrace the freedom of individual thought that leads to new personal and intellectual discovery.

This individualism promoted in schools and in today's society as a whole may be influencing young adults' attitudes toward religion. A survey of faculty from 372 colleges nationwide by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008 concluded that there were significant increases in professors' goals to help students develop personal values, self-understanding and moral character.

These goals, along with the increasingly-consumerist culture where we pick and choose anything we want, have increased students' sense of obligation to choose what they value and believe in terms of religion and spirituality.

With increasing time constraints and conflicting social and political values, college students are creating a religion that best fits their schedules, lifestyles and beliefs with a -- so to speak -- "do-it-yourself God."

Perhaps we have reached the point where cafeteria Catholics and a la carte canons are the new unorganized organized religion.

Brigid Kelleher, a history major, grew up in a strict, religious family in Virginia, ending her nights kneeling around her parents' bed to pray with her siblings before bedtime.

She grew up in Catholic schools, attended Mass every Sunday and read supplemental home-school religious workbooks assigned by her proud father, a military man. To Brigid, God was always sort of a "duh." Now, out of the eye of her Navy captain father, Brigid admits that she hasn't gone to church since the first week of her college life -- almost four years ago.

After many years of accepting orders from her parents to attend Mass, Brigid believes church to be somewhat of a chore and can't relate to it as well anymore. "A lot of the homilies that I've heard are just so obnoxious and I'm like, 'You really don't have a grasp on reality at all,'" she says.

Brigid's biggest new-found struggles are the structural issues she finds in the church. "I guess Catholicism is relating to an upper-echelon of morality, but I don't think that's necessarily taking in happiness," she says. "To say you can't get married in the church if you've gotten divorced is so rude. As if God would turn anyone away."

While Brigid thinks she'll probably come back to the church when it's time to raise her family, for now she feels that the church doesn't agree with her social views of things like gay activism and prefers to keep a personal tie to her God through thinking and reflection.

Jeremy Uecker, a sociologist of religion and professor at University of Texas at Austin, has researched the trends and shifts in religiosity among young adults and has come to a conclusion fitting of Brigid's experience in college.

Uecker noted that a 2007 analysis done by the Population Research Center found that only 14 percent of college students disaffiliated from religion and 18 percent of college students reported a drop in religious salience. However, 64 percent attended church less frequently than they did as teenagers. This gap in church participation among young adults is widening as people are choosing to marry and start families much later in life and in turn can be losing their ties to church for a longer period of time, says Bob Mallon, director of the Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of San Jose.

Mallon's office sits in a six-story building on the corner of Homestead and Lafayette Streets, right across the street from the building where Brigid takes her history classes on the Santa Clara campus.

Mallon was brought into the Diocese of San Jose to help solve the problem of the falling participation numbers among young adults within local parishes and Campus Ministry programs.

In his 10 years of experience leading university Campus Ministries, including University of California, Santa Barbara and Notre Dame de Namur University, Mallon has noticed that the demands being put on students have increased tremendously, leaving them with less and less time to devote to engaging with communities connected with their faith. In order to help students with that, he stresses that the church needs to come to students and connect in their lives as much as their personal faith does.

Mallon is working on introducing young adult religious programs that fit better into the lives of college students, including a yoga class and a series of "Theology on Tap" get-togethers, where young adults come and listen to lectures on issues surrounding Catholicism and discuss their ideas with peers at a local bar.