A Comparative Analysis of Worldview Development and Religious Commitment Between Apostolic College Students Attending Apostolic Christian and Secular Colleges

Among young people of college age in the United States a growing number who come from Christian homes are embracing a humanist/socialist worldview. The prominent purpose of a Christian education is to mold students into biblical thinking, or a biblical worldview as part of developing spiritually. The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to examine the difference between worldviews and religious commitment of students who attend an Apostolic Christian college and Apostolic students who attend secular college, and to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in the two groups. The PEERS instrument was used to measure biblical worldview, and religious commitment was measured using the Religious Commitment Inventory-10 (RCI-10). Results from an independent samples t-test showed that Apostolic Christian college students and Apostolic students who attend secular college did not significantly differ on biblical worldview. Descriptive analyses showed that scores on the RCI-10 were skewed, with college students having high levels of religious commitment. Due to this skewness, a chi-square test of independence was conducted and determined that the percentage of Apostolic Christian college students with high religious commitment was significantly higher than the percentage of secular college students of Apostolic faith with high religious commitment. Implications of this study are discussed