Being Evangelical is Complicated: How Students’ Identities and Experiences Moderate Their Perceptions of Campus Climate

Abstract

Background

Evangelical Christian college students navigate campus buoyed by Christian privilege but may encounter silencing or othering tied to their religious beliefs, a feeling of incompatibility with their campus climate, and conflations of their religious and political beliefs that are inaccurate and discouraging. Unsupportive campus climates can discourage evangelical students from having productive exchanges across difference and deepening their own worldview commitments, which is concerning due to their general lack of interfaith participation that challenges stereotypes and unnuanced assumptions.

Purpose

This study explores how evangelical Christians perceive their campus climates and whether those perceptions are different based on other social identity intersections with gender, race, sexuality, and political affiliation. In addition to individual characteristics, how the campus environment and various curricular and co-curricular experiences moderate evangelical students’ perceptions of the worldview climate is examined.

Methods

A sample of 1235 evangelical college students was examined via means, standard deviations, and ranges for six campus climate measures, one-way ANOVAs to examine whether those measures differed by different identity dimensions, and then multilevel modeling to better understand the role of campus experiences in evangelicals’ perceptions of their campus climate.

Results

Evangelical students’ campus climate perceptions were generally positive; more provocative encounters were reported by women than men and evangelical Asian students indicated more divisiveness, more insensitivity, and less space for support than their peers. Political affiliation also revealed several significant differences in perceived campus climate. Interfaith engagement through pre-college activities, formal and informal activities, and friendships were connected to perceptions of campus climate, with those reporting more engagement being more likely to have productive encounters across difference and to report insensitivity or divisiveness. Religious affiliation was the most significant institutional characteristic.

Conclusions and Implications

This study illuminates how collegiate experiences and campus environments exacerbate or attenuate evangelical Christian students’ perceptions of the campus climate, and the results indicate that effective teaching practices where true interfaith experiences happen and that create inclusive space for evangelical students in the classroom are key to fostering development, especially in light of the social status ambiguity evangelical college students may be experiencing during their college years.