College students with no faith are more likely to want to shut down speech
By Samuel J. Abrams, Washington Examiner, 9/21/22
The American religious landscape has been changing rapidly with church membership recently declining to below a majority of Americans for the first time along with shrinking numbers believing in God and a significant rise in agnostics and atheists most notably among younger Gen Z Americans . These changes in faith-based institutions are noteworthy as these institutions have historically helped anchor civil society and have been instrumental in forging ethical norms and social ideals for generations. Yet, they may be disappearing.
One major consequence that has emerged from these shifts involves free expression. Nearly four in ten (38%) students on collegiate campuses today are either atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular. These students have notably less supportive views toward open inquiry and free speech than their faith-identifying peers.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) just released its study of almost 45,000 voices of currently enrolled students at over 200 colleges and universities around the nation, investigating attitudes toward speech and one’s religious leaning. While the study does not ask about religious practice or attitudes, it does measure religious identification and captures the significant number of students who do not identify as a member of traditional faith. Even without deep data on faith outlook and practice, real cleavages emerge suggesting that faith is deeply tied up with how students think about civility and discourse.
Consider the fact that schools regularly bring in a variety of speakers to campus and there has been a recent rise in attempts to prevent or shut down these events . When asked about the acceptability of shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus, 57% of students with a faith identification believe that there are times when shouting down a speaker could be acceptable. A much higher 71% of no-faith students feel the same way. As for blocking other students from attending a campus event, 34% of religious students maintain that there are times when this behavior is acceptable compared to a higher number of non-faith students at 43%. These figures are too high, but it is very clear that even with fairly crude measures of faith, those of no faith, atheist or agnostic are far more open to trying to stop expression.
At the same time, religious students feel pressured to remain silent given their environment on campus. Fifty-nine percent of students identifying with a traditional faith report self-censoring occasionally or more often while the number declines to 48% of those with no faith whatsoever. These numbers highlight how students of faith experience higher education differently than those of no faith. Those who do not identify with any faith are far more willing to express themselves than their religiously identifying counterparts, but they are more open to silencing dissent and ideas which they may find objectionable.
The findings in the FIRE data run into opposition from important research by Professor Ilana Horwitz who spent years looking at thousands of American teenagers in the early 2000s. Horwitz found that “religion fosters traits that are helpful in a school system that relies on authority figures and rewards people who follow the rules.” This may help explain why students with a religious identity are less likely to try to shut down speech.
Horwitz argues that “rather than being motivated to please God by being well behaved, atheists tend to be intrinsically motivated to pursue knowledge, think critically and be open to new experiences. These dispositions are also linked with better academic performance.” While better performance in high school may be the case, the FIRE data suggests that these students are far more likely to be part of the progressive cancel culture wave that is silencing students on campuses nationwide; this is the antithesis of critical thinking, viewpoint diversity, and being open to new ideas. Clearly, more work needs to be done to better understand this growing, areligious group of students.
While the FIRE data does not probe into the nuance of religious behavior, the data does capture the behavior of atheists, agnostics, and students of no faith, and these students are not nearly as open-minded as their faith-identifying counterparts. Students who identify with a faith are more open to hearing difficult or disagreeable views, report self-censorship, and are experiencing a collegiate life that is notably dissimilar from their non-religion identifying counterparts. The non-religious are not only far more likely to express themselves, but concurrently silence others in the process; a model of hypocrisy today.