I came across an article this week detailing the efforts of Shenandoah University’s spiritual-life team to deepen the faith of Christian students by providing, what they call, “church speed-dating.” Basically, the director of church relations has been taking kids on road trips, visiting a different denomination’s church each week, for a ten week span, for the sake of religious exposure and exploration.
And I’m not quite sure what to make of that.
I think that religious education is one of the most important, most undervalued and most unexplored aspects of college. Considering the fact that a majority of people in our country, and the world over, believe in some kind of creator and/or regularly attend religious services, it only makes sense to explore religion and try to understand it. To truly appreciate and respect people’s lifestyles and backgrounds, we have to become familiar with religions other than our own. For so many, faith is an integral part of their day-to-day, week-to-week or year-to year. How could it go ignored in our education?
But I just can’t wrap my head around speed-dating churches for one’s own spiritual growth and development, and not just for the sake of learning. In the article I read, the job of the university’s spiritual life team was described as helping students to find a good religious match. A match-maker for faith? As if faith were a dining room set and the road-trips an interior decorator.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Maybe I’m being judgmental. Maybe providing students with a vehicle, both literally and figuratively, for religious exploration is a good idea. But maybe not. It’s hard for me, as someone who grew up in an fairly religiously observant home, to understand picking a religion like one picks a china pattern. Exploring the options, weighing the pros and cons, and picking the one that best matches your taste. To look at these places of worship like dates, like people you either click with or don’t, and choose to see again or turn away.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned. But it seems to me that a faith that comes and goes, subject to one’s internal swaying, a faith that’s a flavor of the week, an exciting stop among many on a crazy road-trip, well, let’s just say that it’s not something I could believe in.
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December 4th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
speed-dating churches to find a course of observance with which one truly identifies seems like a better choice than blindly following a religion based on indoctrination.
in other words, having grown up in a environment in which i was constantly force fed judaism, i now feel disillusioned, the effect of which is my disassociation from religious life. had i been given the opportunity to choose my own path based on my own priorities (some say speed dating), perhaps i would be more engaged.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
If I can be pretentious for a second and start with a quote:
“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” -George Bernard Shaw
I think this quote is hilarious and scarily true. I think the same applies to religion. You’re Hindu because your parents are Hindu; you’re Christian because your parents are Christian. It doesn’t make your religion any more right. So why not pick and choose? Besides, who says that just because you choose something doesn’t mean you can’t be committed to it? Remember that almost all marriages come out of dating (though, to be fair, half of them end in divorce).