IOP Poll: Students Divided on Faith

Over half of college students across the nation are concerned with the moral direction of the U.S., and only 33 percent approve of the job President Bush is doing—down from 41 percent last fall—according to poll results released by the Institute of Politics (IOP) yesterday.

The semiannual survey that polls different aspects of college students’ political attitudes found that students deem religion and morality to be a key part of their lives. Seventy percent of students surveyed said that religion is “important” or “very important” to them, and significant percentages characterized many leading political issues today as “question[s] of morality.”

But 60 percent of students said that they “somewhat disagree” or “strongly disagree” that religious values should play a more important role in government.

THE POLITICS OF GOD

“What we’re finding is that this is an incredibly religious generation,” said Caitlin W. Monahan ’06, who co-chaired the group conducting the survey. “But at the same time they’re saying that a separation of church and state is necessary.”

The poll surveyed 1,200 college students selected at random from a national database of 5.1 million college students and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8.

Amanda L. Shapiro ’08, president of the Harvard Secular Society, said she approved of this apparent trend.

“Increased secularism with increased morality is not paradoxical in any way,” she said. “Morality does not have to be a matter of religiosity.”

Jacob L. Bryant ’07, a Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship executive team member, said he did not find it surprising that students considered high-profile policy issues to be questions of morality.

“I was surprised that more people didn’t see those as moral issues,” he said. “To some extent every issue is a moral issue, and to say it’s not is dangerous.”

But President of the Harvard Republican Club Stephen E. Dewey ’07 commented that “the fact that people consider two different issues to be ‘moral issues’ does not imply that they think about those different issues in the same way.”

“Public policy is often debated in the language of rights and justice, so it is not surprising that people attribute a moral character to political issues,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The survey also found that students’ party affiliations strongly influenced their views on the influence of religion on American life.

A majority of college Republicans replied that the influence of religion was decreasing, seven out of eight of whom said that this was a “bad thing.” Over half of college Democrats, in direct contrast, said religious influence was increasing, two thirds of whom answered that this trend was negative.

THE ‘WE’ GENERATION

IOP Director Jeanne Shaheen noted “the extent to which college students see the world internationally and support a multilateral approach” as one of the most interesting results of the survey.

“They tend to be more liberal and democratic than the generation before them,” she said. “Unlike the generation X, the ‘me’ generation, this is the ‘we’ generation. It’s very encouraging, although of course we don’t know how many of these attitudes they will carry into their later lives.”

Last spring, IOP members were surprised when a survey found that 74 percent of students thought the U. N. “should take the lead in solving international crises and conflicts,” said survey co-chair Krister B. Anderson ’07. Based on those results, this year’s survey group inquired deeper into student attitudes towards multilateralism and foreign policy.

A majority of students, the survey found, said they had faith in the U.N. “because of its role in the world and not because they don’t trust the U.S.,” according to Anderson.

“This generation grew up in the context of 9/11 and the Iraq war. These are two formative events, and I think we’re going to see a generation that’s more multilateral in terms of foreign affairs.”

Shaheen said that politicians ought to pay more attention to this younger generation, citing the 47 percent voting rate of 18- to 24-year-olds in the last election, “the biggest increase over the 2000 election of any demographic in the electorate.”

“College students are very engaged and now with things like facebook and myspace, they are very reachable,” she said.

NEW ALLIANCES

The researchers concluded from the poll results that “traditional party identification labels of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are antiquated, and don’t fully represent students.” Instead, the conductors of the study argue that a new typology combining religious-secular identifications with conservative-liberal ones is more effective.

Dewey said he disagreed with the IOP’s proposed model.

“Obviously the concept of a left-right gradient doesn’t fully reflect the complexity of politics in this country,” he said. “But I am not convinced that religion is the second gradient that can best complement it. I have always been more convinced by the combination of left-right and statist-libertarian gradients.”

“I think what you’ll need to see is the parties adapting to the new issues people find salient,” said Eric P. Lesser ’07, president of the Harvard College Democrats. “There is a hesitance from people to see a specific religion invoked but a desire for policies to be grounded in broader moral values.”

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.