Quantifying and Qualifying the Religious Habitus: Substantiating Post-Secularism on a Liberal Arts College Campus

For most of the 20th century, sociologists widely believed that religion and its influence were declining. The latter half of the 1990s, followed by 9/11, however, marked a turning point in which social scientists came to understand that religion was resurging and increasingly influencing various areas of human affairs. This new era is categorized as a “post-secular” society (Jacobsen & Jacobsen 2008). Previously, institutions of higher education were seen as secularizing machines; however, today, colleges and universities are studied as societal microcosms contributing to religion’s revival (Cherry, DeBerg & Porterfield 2001; Bryant 2007). Granted that today’s college students are the leaders of tomorrow, I conducted a study to substantiate the claim that we are indeed living in a post-secular society with the goal of acquiring insights into how religion may impact human affairs in the future. Notably, I studied how religion influences today’s college students. Using Bourdieu’s (1979) habitus as a theoretical framework, I analyze how religion influences college students’ beliefs, preferences, and overall orientations to the social world. Through surveys and interviews, I study the effect of being raised with or without a religion as well as participating or not participating in religion on campus. My goal is to draw quantifiable and qualifiable conclusions about the influences of religion on subjects’ and respondents’ habituses. My results show that religion remains influential on the habituses of the college students who attend a diverse, multicultural, secular, and multi-religious institution. The significance of religion on different aspects of the habitus, however, varies across religious groups and levels of participation.