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.

中文翻译：

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福音派是复杂的：学生的身份和经历如何调节他们对校园气候的看法

背景

福音派基督教大学生在基督教特权的推动下在校园中穿行，但可能会遇到与他们的宗教信仰有关的沉默或其他人、与校园气候不相容的感觉，以及不准确和令人沮丧的宗教和政治信仰的混淆。不支持的校园气候会阻碍福音派学生在差异之间进行富有成效的交流并加深他们自己的世界观承诺，这是令人担忧的，因为他们普遍缺乏挑战刻板印象和无差别假设的跨宗教参与。

目的

这项研究探讨了福音派基督徒如何看待他们的校园气候，以及这些看法是否因其他社会身份与性别、种族、性取向和政治派别的交叉而有所不同。除了个人特征之外，还考察了校园环境和各种课程和课外经历如何调节福音派学生对世界观气候的看法。

方法

通过六种校园气候措施的均值、标准差和范围对 1235 名福音派大学生的样本进行了检查，通过单向方差分析来检查这些措施是否因不同的身份维度而有所不同，然后进行多级建模以更好地了解校园体验的作用福音派人士对其校园气候的看法。

结果

福音派学生对校园气候的看法普遍是积极的；女性比男性更具挑衅性，亚洲福音派学生表明他们比同龄人更容易分裂、更不敏感，支持空间更小。政治派别也揭示了感知校园气候的几个显着差异。通过大学预科活动、正式和非正式活动以及友谊进行的跨信仰参与与对校园气候的看法有关，那些报告更多参与的人更有可能在差异中进行富有成效的接触，并报告麻木不仁或分裂。宗教信仰是最重要的制度特征。

结论和意义

这项研究阐明了大学经历和校园环境如何加剧或削弱福音派基督徒学生对校园气候的看法，结果表明，真正的跨信仰经历发生的有效教学实践以及为福音派学生在课堂上创造包容性空间的关键是培养发展，特别是考虑到福音派大学生在大学期间可能经历的社会地位模糊。