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BY DANTE FUOCO and AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published March 26, 2009

Religion professor Mark Wallace remembers a time when students on campus closeted their beliefs, keeping their religious views hidden from their peers.

“Sometimes students would talk about ‘coming out’ as religious,” he said.

Now, however, he thinks that has changed.

Wallace, who has been at the college for 20 years, is just one of several members of the Swarthmore community who believes that the religious landscape is changing.

Though religion has in the past seemed to clash with the college’s liberal and intellectual atmosphere, some say that spiritual life is actually flourishing and expanding, aligning itself with other central college values. Traditional religious labels, however, do not easily define this spirituality, because it is individualized and multivalent.

“In the five years I’ve been here it’s changed a lot … there’s been an increase in interest in spirituality beyond what many people think of as traditional religion,” said Joyce Tompkins, Religious Advisor and Interfaith Coordinator. “Their religious life has oozed out of the confines that have been put upon it.”

Sara Pearlstein-Levy ’11, for example, calls herself a secular Jew. While at home with her family she observes Jewish traditions, but their practices do not focus on their religious origins.

“I guess it’s nice to be part of the Jewish community,” she said. “I find it to be a nice way to have that family time.”

But Pearlstein-Levy stressed that she does not link these positive aspects of her cultural heritage to a god. “I just don’t really buy it,” she said. “I can buy that it’s a part of other people’s philosophy sort of. But it’s not a part of my own.”

Pearlstein-Levy added that she struggles to find labels to identify what she believes. “For me there’s more of an absence of religion than a presence of atheism,” she said.

The Interfaith Center where Tompkins works tries to facilitate dialogue among students like Pearlstein-Levy who find themselves in religious gray and non-traditional areas. “I think there’s a lot of people questioning where they belong,” said Jane Lief Abell ’11, one of this year’s two Interfaith Interns.

Part of their job is to plan Religion and Spirituality Week in early February. This year, interns Abell and Dina Emam ’11 hosted a “speak out” session to provide a safe environment for students to voice beliefs that do not fit into traditional religious conversations. In the same vein, the Interfaith Center may host coffeehouse sessions in the future for students to discuss nontraditional religious experiences.

Abell added, “What goes on in terms of religious life on campus is really divided into each individual faith … The Interfaith Center instituted these interns to bridge these gaps.”

Tompkins said that faith groups on campus have grown. Currently in her fifth year here, she said that she’s seen the school go from having five religious groups to having 12, showing that while an interest in lesser-known spirituality is increasing, so is interest in traditional religions. Newly founded religious groups have formed around religions such as Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Unitarian Universalism.

For those who practice traditional religion on campus, a Scriptural Reasoning group was created this fall. By discussing interpretations of the Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an, the group aims to foster interfaith dialogue in a nonsectarian way.

The Interfaith Center has been receiving increased funds from the administration, demonstrating the college’s support, Tompkins said.

“But it’s more than just the money,” she said. “Whereas at the beginning I felt like we were kind of tolerated … now the administration really does see that supporting student spiritual life is good for students and good for the college.”

Tompkins said that Dean of Students Jim Larimore has “called on [her] a number of times when things have come up on campus.” For example, when Matthew Baldwin ’10 was declared missing a few weeks ago, Tompkins said that Larimore contacted her.

“He didn’t tell me, ‘Oh, do this, do that.’ He just wanted me to know about it,” she said. “A couple years ago that never would have happened.” 

With interest from the student body and support from the administration, Tompkins said she has high hopes for the future.

“What we’re finding is that there are ways to support religious life that are intrinsically connected with the Swarthmore vision, which is about diversity, it’s about ethical intelligence, it’s about values, it’s about service to the community,” she said.

With his 20 years at the college, Wallace also has recently noted concrete changes on campus that he feels never could have happened earlier in his time here.

Wallace added that the college’s appointment of Rebecca Chopp, who has a M. Div. from St. Paul School of Theology, as president is also important. Wallace stressed that though Chopp obviously will not be acting as a theologian when she takes office, “the fact that it’s part of her identity indicates to me that the climate regarding religious faith and religious identity has changed … I don’t know if [her appointment] would have happened 20, 30, 40 years ago.” 

While Wallace noted that certain things are getting better, he also said some students still experience problems. “At Swarthmore in particular I have found indifference and even sometimes a bit of hostility [towards] students who are doing well here but are also coming from a faith tradition,” he said.

Visiting assistant professor of religion Elliot Ratzman said that, from his experience teaching at both Vassar and Swarthmore College, he believes students in elite Northeastern liberal arts colleges often write off religion.

“The problem I have with teaching students at Vassar and Swarthmore is that I often find a demeaning attitude toward people with religion,” he said. “My conscious bias is that I assume that I’m teaching students with liberal sensibilities, and I want to show the conservative position in the best light.”

Wallace agreed. “Many students and many faculty feel that religion and intellectual life … can’t come together,” he said. “That that’s an oxymoron.”

Wallace uses the analogy of potentially having a Marxist student in class to describe how he thinks strong personal beliefs can still exist in an academic setting. He said that he aims to foster a conversation within the classroom without forcing students to reshape their convictions.

“I want that student to bring that Marxist passion to the classroom, but I also want her to be open-minded to counterpoints to Marx,” he said. “I’m not trying to disabuse her of her Marxist conviction. I’m trying to open her up to [a] wider conversation. That’s my attitude toward students.”

Wallace added that he’s had students whose religious backgrounds ranged from traditionally religious to non-existent.

Religion major Virginia Tice ’09 did not come from a religious background when she arrived at Swarthmore. Tice admitted that, before taking any religion classes, she grew up thinking “people of faith are scary, mindless and copping out.”

But Tice began to rethink her personal religious beliefs after taking Wallace’s “New Testament and Early Christianity” and associate religion professor Ellen Ross’s “Jesus in History, Literature and Theology.”

“[Ross’ class] was a mind-blowingly awesome class that completely changed the course of my life … despite the fact that it was meant to deconstruct any sort of notion about Jesus,” she said.

Tice now describes herself as a nondenominational Christian, a transformation whose impetus she attributes to her experiences at school. She also served as an Interfaith Intern.

“Swarthmore has been really good at facilitating a thoughtful spiritual life,” Tice said. “One thing that I really appreciate about the religion department is that they recognize what we’re studying is personally relevant to people. And so even though it is definitely an academic class … they leave space … for some personal reflection.”

Sara Forster ’11, a recently declared religion major, also came to the religion department without prior exposure to religious texts. Although she shares this with Tice, Forster said that she still holds her original non-belief viewpoint.

“I still give my family presents on Christmas, but not much has changed,” she said regarding how she responds to religion, alluding to her identity as a cultural Christian.

Despite her non-belief, Forster said that she enjoys having students like Tice in the classroom — students who, as Wallace said in his analogy, bring some personal conviction or passion to the discussion.

“It’s always good to have that voice because if you didn’t you could lose some perspective,” she said.

Last spring Ratzman decided that he wanted to create dialogue about atheism and religion through a class called “Atheism in Theory and Practice.” He said that his efforts were motivated by what he saw as the resurgence of a “scientistic” atheism, which haughtily “flattens … what it means to be religious or non-practicing.”

While seeing this first on a national scale with the emergence of writers like Richard Dawkins, Ratzman also saw this on campus a few years ago in a letter to The Phoenix. The student author discredited the study and practice of religion, questioning the necessity of the religion department. 
Ratzman aimed in his class to show that there are a variety of complex and rich ways to be critical of religion and still be engaged or disengaged with it.

“I know for sure that there are a number of people … who think what we do in the religion department is [preach] a sermon,” Ratzman said. “I wanted to respond to that attitude.”

Ratzman’s students studied thinkers like Thomas Paine and leaders of the women’s movement to show that there is a “rich history of [religious] critique” that can be healthy and socially progressive.

Nick Gabinet ’11, who came into Ratzman’s class as an atheist, said that he gained a new perspective on religion and atheism.

“It helped me develop a context with which I could look at modern atheism and modern existential practice and sort of see what its failures were and see what its strengths were and see … how belief and non-belief had interacted with each other,” he said. “It made me think a lot more critically — and I mean that in a sort of hostile way — at modern atheism.”

And though this critical approach hasn’t caused Gabinet to turn away from his own atheism, he thinks that Ratzman’s class made him more informed. 

“I don’t think that I can stand by a lot of the criticism [of religion] that I once voiced,” Gabinet said. “[The class] made me a lot more tolerant of people who have religious beliefs.”

Part of what’s wrong with current atheism is that it fails to realize religion is more than just “bad ideas,” said Ratzman. “Religion is not about ‘bad ideas’ rattling around in people’s head,” he said. “Religion is about culture, institutions, social life, practices.”

For Emilia Thurber ’11, a Unitarian Universalist, religion shapes social interaction. Though she doesn’t have an active religious life on campus, she tries to follow her church’s seven broad principles that guide human interaction. “I feel that I can still adhere to what I believe without going to church,” Thurber said.

Ratzman echoed Wallace and Tice in saying that though the religion department doesn’t promote any type of religion or belief, it always encourages students to realize their relevance.

“What we do here in a religion department is study all these phenomena, commonsense or nonsense,” he said. “But we don’t assume what we’re studying is nonsense. We know what we’re studying is crucial for the life of most people on the planet.”

Tompkins and Ratzman both said, in fact, that religious literacy can help lead to positive social change.

“If you’re going to deal with politics, economics, or world food problems … religion is a component of that,” she said.

For Wallace, this connection is actually part of his life and work with the environmental movement. He believes that bringing religious convictions to this global problem can cause positive change.

“I saw that the environmental crisis wasn’t being addressed in a manner that was sustainable,” he said. “Mass movements for social change often have been headed by religious prophets. The environmental movement needs prophets.”

He cited abolitionism, the civil rights movement and the suffragist cause as examples of how religion “can be a liberating, transformative movement for personal change.”

He called this an expression of “healthy religion” because it is informed by “love commandments.” Religion becomes “unhealthy” and perpetuates violence when it moves away from these tenets.

Tompkins, looking at the spiritual atmosphere at Swarthmore, is hopeful that healthy religion will continue to expand.

“Personally, being an optimist, I believe that we’re learning more and more of how to get along and less and less of holding onto our own little flags,” Tompkins said. “And I think your generation is really on the forefront of that.”

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