REGIONAL SPOTLIGHT: Is faith at odds with education?

People lose their faith while they're in college. Or so former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum contends. Santorum, who is challenging Mitt Romney in the Keystone State's Republican presidential primary this month, has claimed that "62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it."

Surveys do show that young people increasingly claim no religious affiliation, although they also show weakened faith among a greater share of those who don't go to college. Nevertheless, if Santorum's comment was meant to show sympathy for religious parents whose children stop going to church and forsake their traditional values, he surely connected.

The conservative candidate connects because there's a familiar story here: Kid grows up going to church with parents; parents pay dearly for kid to go off to high-priced college; kid returns with a troubling disregard for what parents hold sacred. I'd be angry, too, if I shelled out nearly $200,000 for my son or daughter to spend four years on a neatly manicured campus, only to then endure his or her smirks when the family says grace.

But is it helpful to blame liberal professors or imply that the godless academy undermines religious values? I would argue that college is not only a place where young people lose faith; it's also a place where they find it.

Maybe the real problem is that the newfound, college-influenced faith of the young often looks a little different from what their parents expect. And that's a familiar story for at least one reason: It's mine.

The product of 12 years of Catholic schooling, I was eager to attend Stanford, one of the world's finest universities. I was admitted into a program called Structured Liberal Education, built around the "great books" and presided over by a Marxist scholar who awed me and my classmates. Many of the professors who taught us were, if not openly hostile to religion, noticeably skeptical of it, communicating a tone and attitude I have seen among many of my colleagues at various universities.

It wasn't easy to have my beliefs questioned, debated, and dissected. But the experience was purifying.

Place of faith

Did Stanford induce the first faith crisis of my life? No. I had had many doubts, even radical ones, during my years of Catholic education. I had questions that neither catechisms nor priests were able to answer. Ironically, though, it was during my first year at Stanford that I heard God's clear call to become a Jesuit.

While I was at home attending the Easter Vigil, the presider announced that a popular teacher had died after a yearlong battle with hepatitis. She was only in her thirties, and when her death was announced, it seemed as if all the air was suddenly vacuumed out of the room. The presider faced the terrible challenge of proclaiming Jesus' resurrection even as we grieved the death of a beloved member of the community. We were at the awkward intersection of belief and disbelief, where no easy piety or standard wisdom could console.

This is the place of faith - tense, uncertain, and strange. This is where I wanted to be my whole life. I left Stanford later that spring to enter the Jesuit order.

Rooted in hope

I have since come to know people whose faith I trust. If their souls were paintings, we would see in them a chiaroscuro, where the lines between belief and unbelief are not always clear. These people lead lives predicated on hope, not possession.

And at its best, that's what faith is: a gift rooted in hope, not a possession.

A few years ago, I met a distant cousin in Ireland, where the Catholic Church has been embroiled in painful scandal. When my cousin learned that I was both a priest and a professor at a Catholic school, he said he could not imagine a more difficult job. "How do you make them listen to you?" he asked.

And that's where he and Santorum have missed the point. You can't make young people listen to you. If you want them to listen to you, you must first listen to them - listen to their doubts, fears, and pain.

You cannot impose on young people either an antireligious, militantly secular point of view or an anti-secular, rigidly religious point of view. You must respect their freedom, trusting they have been created in God's image. Then you must trust that image to emerge freely. And soon you find yourself with them in that strange chiaroscuro of faith.

I have been teaching for nearly 20 years. Despite my cousin's worried questions, it's not that hard. What students want above all is people they can trust, who are capacious enough to allow them to ask questions without fearing the answers will be shoved down their throats. They thirst for guidance from people of intelligence and sensitivity who have asked the hard questions themselves. And often, it is there that they find faith not imposed, but discovered freely.

I appreciate Santorum's lament that young people don't find that place of faith often enough. But that is not because higher education is somehow antithetical to faith. It may be because students find no one to consider their questions faithfully. Or it may be that our concept of faith is simply too brittle to begin with.

Michael C. McCarthy is a professor and the executive director of the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education at Santa Clara University in California. A longer version of this essay appeared on the website of the Jesuit Post.