Bryant, A. N. 2005. “Evangelicals on Campus: An Exploration of Culture, Faith, and College Life.” Religion and Education 32, 1-30.
This study continues Bryant’s work on evangelical communities on college campuses, which she first explored in her 2004 dissertation (see Bryant 2004). Bryant observed and interviewed members of Sharing the Faith Fellowship (a pseudonym), a conservative evangelical group on the campus of a large university. Her goals were to define the important cultural characteristics of the group; to define the group’s “goals, norms, beliefs, values, truth claims, personalities, and conflicts”; and to understand how “group members perceive and react to the norms, beliefs, values, and truth claims of the university…and other faith traditions represented on campus.” Her analysis suggests that political engagement is a tenuous and conflicting issue for evangelical students. Many of the students she interviewed, for example, possessed both liberal and conservative views simultaneously. While she found consensus among student views on moral conduct (particularly in the areas of drinking, sex, abortion) that was consistent with traditional evangelicalism, some respondents had non-traditional feelings toward the gay and lesbian community. Finally, Bryant’s observations support the idea that as institutions themselves pay less attention to cultivating moral virtue among their students, individual religious groups have assumed the responsibility of teaching their members character formation.
