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

  • Original Research
  • Published:
Review of Religious Research

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.

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Notes

  1. Sample item includes: “In general, people in this group make positive contributions to society”; see Mayhew et al. (2017).

  2. Sample items for each dependent measure include: Divisiveness on campus (“There is a great deal of conflict among people of different religious and nonreligious perspectives on this campus” & “Religious and nonreligious differences create a sense of division on this campus”), Space for support and spiritual expression (“This campus is a safe place for me to express my worldview” & “There is a place on this campus where I can express my personal worldview”), Insensitivity on campus (“While you have been enrolled at your college or university, how often have you been mistreated on campus because of your worldview?” & “On this campus, how often have you heard/read insensitive comments about your worldview from friends or peers?”), Coercion on campus (“While … enrolled at your college or university, how often have you felt pressured by others on campus to change your worldview?; …felt pressured to keep your worldview to yourself?”), Provocative encounters with worldview diversity ( “While … enrolled at your college or university, how often have you had class discussions that challenged you to rethink your assumptions about another worldview?, …heard critical comments from others about your worldview that made you question your worldview”); Negative interworldview engagement (“While … enrolled at your college or university, how often have you felt silenced from sharing your own experiences with prejudice and discrimination?, …had tense [or] somewhat hostile interactions?”). These measures are fully described in Online Resource 2.

  3. This approach allows for testing whether all groups differ significantly from the overall sample mean and additionally enables researchers to retain more information in their analytic models given that parameter estimates for each categorical covariate can be offered in the predictive models (Mayhew and Simonoff, 2015).

  4. The continuum for political leaning is represented by smaller values for very conservative and larger values for very liberal.

  5. Full descriptive results including ANOVA test, and Scheffe Post-Hoc test results are available from the authors by request.

  6. As described earlier, the coefficients and significance tests for effect-coded variables indicate the difference between a particular group and the unweighted average value for that construct. Additionally, because the continuous variables are standardized, the HLM coefficients are analogous to standardized regression coefficients.

  7. Detailed HLM results by block for each outcome are available from the authors by request.

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Acknowledgements

The Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) is a national study made possible by funders including The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, and the Julian Grace Foundation. The authors thank the interdisciplinary writing group in the UMKC School of Education for their feedback and support on this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Missouri Kansas City, 342 Education Building, 615 E. 52nd St, Kansas City, MO, 64110, USA

    Tiffani Riggers-Piehl

  2. North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA

    Laura S. Dahl

  3. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    B. Ashley Staples & Matthew J. Mayhew

  4. James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA

    Benjamin S. Selznick

  5. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Alyssa N. Rockenbach

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  1. Tiffani Riggers-Piehl
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  2. Laura S. Dahl
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Correspondence to Tiffani Riggers-Piehl.

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Riggers-Piehl, T., Dahl, L.S., Staples, B.A. et al. Being Evangelical is Complicated: How Students’ Identities and Experiences Moderate Their Perceptions of Campus Climate. Rev Relig Res 64, 199–224 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-021-00472-z

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