Secularism and tradition collide at Yale

By Molly Ball

"Yale is a secular institution," Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg says. "It's not affiliated with any church. It's a very simple distinction."

JULIA TIERNAN/YH University Chaplain Rev. Frederick J. Streets, Jr., DIV '75, sees his role as that of a supporter of religion in general.

But is it really all that simple? Most Yale students aren't secular in their outlook. In 1995, sociology professor Michele Dillon surveyed 312 Yale undergraduates. Only 14 percent said they didn't believe in God. In addition, 26 percent reported weekly attendance at religious services of some sort, while Dillon estimates the national average among college students to be about 15 percent. "There's a special vibrancy to religious life at Yale," Dillon said. "I think the Administration is committed to making religion visible despite the tensions that that brings up."

Religion does indeed raise tensions. Earlier this year, the Society of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics mounted a campaign against the hymns currently sung at the Freshman Assembly and Commencement ceremonies, claiming they had no place in a "secular" institution. Meanwhile, smaller religious groups at Yale wish the Administration would do more to support religion. Is Yale doing too much or not enough? Is a perfect balance attainable?

Searching for a place

"[The organization] has been trying to get a room for the Muslim Students' Association (MSA) for the last three years," MSA president Syeeda Amin, JE '01, said. "We need a permanent room to pray in, to meet in, to use as an office. We've met extensively with the Dean's Office, but they say there are barely enough rooms for classes. We went looking for empty rooms ourselves and gave them a list of suggestions. It didn't work."

The MSA, which has been at Yale for eight years, squeezes its 25 or so regular members into the tiny Interdenominational Chapel in the basement of Bingham Hall. "We used to meet in SSS, but it didn't feel right to try to worship in a room with desks and a chalkboard," Amin related. Muslims pray five times a day, and the nearest mosque is on George Street. "It's a bad area, and it's kind of a walk," Amin said.

Before students begin their freshman year, the Chaplain's Office sends them a "religious preference card" to fill out. This year, 556 freshmen--about half the class--returned the survey. Only five students identified themselves as Muslim, although Islam is the world's largest religion. "Yale doesn't have a reputation for having a strong MSA," Amin said. "I have a lot of friends who got into Yale but went to the University of Michigan or the University of Chicago instead because having a strong Muslim community was what they needed."

Similarly, devout Hindu Maruti Racherla, PC '01, tells a similar story, "When I looked at colleges, I was definitely surprised and disappointed not to find a Hindu organization at Yale," she said. A Hindu prayer group was started last year by Ajay Maker, MED '01, and is currently trying to register as an undergraduate organization. "Minority religious groups could really benefit from more involvement, support, and financing on the part of the Administration," Racherla said. "We're working with so little to begin with."

For all religions, from Buddhists (who have a loose campus organization for meditation) to Wiccans (who have a new, as yet unnamed society for pagan religions), community is integral. For Yalies, trying to practice their religion without a community of fellow believers can be difficult and discouraging. "There are several churches on campus, but [Muslims] don't have that," Amin said. "We don't have a Slifka Center."

Rising from the dust

Everyone wants a Slifka Center. But, until four years ago, there was no Slifka Center. In fact, until 1960, no more than 10 percent of the Yale population could even be Jewish. When the quota was lifted, the numbers rose rapidly, and Yale is now about 25 percent Jewish. "When I came to Yale as an undergraduate in 1964, Jews were invisible," Rabbi James Ponet, TD '68, said. Ponet is Yale's Jewish Chaplain and director of Yale Hillel. "Your Jewishness wasn't a part of who you were as a student. It was marginal," he said.

Now, though, "To be a Jew at Yale is to be a part of something that Yale is about," Ponet said--and the creation of the Joseph B. Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale on Wall Street was the turning point. Until then, Hillel had a tiny basement office in Bingham, the rabbi lived on the property of what is now the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house, and the only ko-sher dining room was located in the basement of 305 Crown St. "Jewish life happened in basements, hidden from view," Ponet explained.

Four years later, the transformation is remarkable. Home to the Kosher Kitchen, Yale Friends of Israel (an Orthodox group), and Yale Hillel, the Center epitomizes Jewish life at Yale: visible and active. E-mail for students and community members interested in Hillel, which encompasses 16 different groups, goes out to a list of over 800 people, and the Kitchen is always packed at dinnertime. "We needed a place that was 100 percent Yale and also 100 percent Jewish, and this is it," Ponet said.

Yale's Jews have come a long way, and they've done it on their own. As Ponet put it, "We busted our tootsies to create the Slifka Center. Yale didn't stop us, nor did they help us." Slifka was funded completely by independent contributions, mostly from alumni, and Hillel pays Ponet's salary. "Look at the map," Ponet said. "There's Battell Chapel, there's the Divinity School, there's St. Thomas More Chapel. Now there's the Slifka Center." For smaller religious groups without wealthy and committed alums, putting themselves on the Yale map is just a dream.

Ponet says Slifka originated as a glimmer in the eye of his predecessor, Dick Israel, who envisioned something like the grandiose St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel on Park Street. Now, ironically enough, the situation is reversed: the Catholics want what the Jews have. "We've begun a capital campaign whereby we hope to reconfigure the Catholic Chapel and Center, adding space for meetings, offices, and meditation," Sister Jo-Ann Veillette, More House Associate Chaplain, said. "There's a lot of excitement here."

Ponet attributed Slifka's enviable success to its integration of all the functions of religion under one roof. "[Israel] basically wanted a synagogue, but I said, `Put the synagogue upstairs! Get it out of the way!' It's not about prayer--[Slifka Center] is a dining room, a meeting place, a social and cultural and educational center. It encompasses a total vision of Jewish life," Ponet said.

For the Christians who make up two-thirds of Yale's religious population (of which about half are Protestant and half are Catholic), no such total vision exists. "There's not one place or organization where Christians all get together," Brian McDonald, PC '01, a student leader of the Yale Christian Fellowship, said. Of the 25 religious groups the University Chaplain oversees through the Yale Religious Ministry, 17 are Christian.

Nonetheless, no single body, building, or person orchestrates them. "I would like for there to be more unity [among Yale's Christian community]," McDonald said. "I don't mean that there's discord, but I would like to see more contact and cooperation." Most Christian students pick a church or a group "based on where their friends are," according to Jenny Bottomly, BK '99, a student leader of the Campus Crusade for Christ who attends religious services at the New Haven Christian Church in Hamden. This somewhat decentralized nature of Christianity at Yale is a relatively new phenomenon

Three centuries of change

Once, Yale's Christian population was totally unified--the school began as a seminary for Congregationalist ministers. When Yale turns 300 in 2001, it will have spent at least two-thirds of its history as a religious college. The change from religious to secular has been slow and subtle. Until 1899, the University President was always a Congregationalist minister. From 1899 to 1929, the Chaplaincy was held by various faculty members, until it was established as a permanent, separate position.

In 1926, students were no longer required to attend daily chapel. Around 1960, the quota on Jewish students was lifted. "The last President to say publicly that Yale is a Christian institution was Charles Seymour, Class of 1916, who was President from 1937 to 1950," Yale historian Gaddis Smith, PC '54, GRD '61, noted.

Current University Chaplain Rev. Frederick J. Streets, DIV '75, was appointed in 1992 and is the sixth to hold the position. Over the years, University Chaplains have all been Protestant clergymen, though then Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti, SY '60, GRD '64, declared in 1985 that the office could be held by a religious leader of any group. "As an office, [the Chaplaincy tries] to do three things," Streets said. "We assist in helping Yale to always have a hospitable attitude and environment for religious diversity; we foster appreciation for religious beliefs and practices as intellectual as well as experiential quests; and we provide support in the form of pastoral and non-pastoral counseling to faculty, staff, and students." The Yale University Chaplain is also, by statute, the minister of the Congregationalist congregation which meets Sundays in Battell Chapel.

By all accounts, the Chaplain's Office is a wonderful resource for student religious groups. "They've been very helpful; they've said we can use the chapel in Bingham whenever we want it, and got us a permanent voice-mail box so students can always reach us--they even paid for the mailbox for the first year," Amin said. Though it does not fund religious groups, the Chaplain's office supports them and helps out with small expenses.

But is the Chaplain's Office too helpful? "Religious organizations should be treated like any other organization," Meghan Smith, MC '01, Society of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics (SHAA) vice president, said. The University Chaplain is paid by Yale, but the many other "chaplains"--the Jewish chaplain, the Catholic chaplain, the Baptist chaplain, etc.--are honorary titles for local clergy who also serve Yale students.

At a state institution, the use of University funds to support the Chaplain's Office would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. And, as the SHAA has pointed out, the events that bookend a Yale undergraduate education--the Freshperson Assembly and Commencement--feature Christian hymns. "The fact that these assemblies are mandatory, and the fact that [Yale doesn't] tell you ahead of time that there's religion in them, offends a lot of people," SHAA Co-President Dan Farkas, MC '00, said.

"Speaking personally as someone who's been [at Yale] since 1950, those hymns mean much more to me in Yale terms than in religious terms," Gaddis Smith countered. Farkas had a ready reply to the argument that the hyms represent tradition, however: "So many other traditions have gone away by now that [tradition is] not a justification. The president of Yale is Jewish--if that can happen, other traditions can go, too."

"Yale still has a vestigial religious self-understanding," Ponet said. Maybe Yale has, for the most part, dissociated itself from a particular religion, but it still operates as a religious community. Dillon's study found that 38 percent of the undergraduates surveyed were actively involved in some kind of organized religion (compared to a national norm of 34 percent). "Yale encourages religious activity by facilitating it, by the diversity of active religious outlets that are available," Dillon said. Streets admits this spiritual atmosphere can be "a little imposing" for non-religious students. It's little wonder, then, that the SHAA is gathering signatures for a "Bill of Rights for Nonbelievers."

Our daily bread

Central to the philosophy of Secular Humanism, according to SHAA Co-President Chris Mooney, SM '99, are three principles: human beings are fully in control of their fate, science and reason are the best way to find the answers to life's problems, and ethics is a secular discipline.

But, according to former Yale Chaplain Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., TD '49, DIV '56, "You can doubt the quality of the bread, but you can't kid yourself that you're not hungry." In other words, you can question existing institutions of religion, but you can't pretend not to need spiritual fulfillment. Coffin, who is now retired, served as Chaplain from 1959 to 1975. In the 1960s, he served as the University's conscience, publicly supporting civil rights and condemning the Vietnam War. He earned fame, notoriety, and even a police record for his actions.

"There's a lack of appreciation that the tree of knowledge is rooted in mystery," Coffin said. "The mind can defend religious truths, but it can't discover them. It deadens life not to recognize that."

Dillon added, "A lot of academics have difficulty talking about religion. People who would never admit that they know nothing about art, or nothing about wine, will freely profess to know nothing about religion--not because they don't know anything, but because they're afraid to discuss it."

Besides, "[Yale] is not Disneyland," Streets said. "People are celebrating, struggling, changing, having their lives shaped. Religion helps people to come to an understanding of their values and how to treat their neighbor. It's an integral part of what it means to be at Yale."

As an institution that strives to be everything to everyone, Yale has to satisfy every religion within its walls. It has to please the godly and godless alike. It has to tiptoe through the minefield of political correctness and maintain its intellectual integrity.

"Is there some way to get the secular and spiritual into closer proximity?" Coffin asked. "There seems to be growing recognition that that is a concern in [higher] education. The university has had enough of the little Puritan inquisitors who broke with the deadening hand of the Church. Now the deadening hand is the secular University that doesn't want to make room for spiritual expression."

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