Meeting Jesus at University: A Review

Dutton, Edward. Meeting Jesus at University: Rites of Passage and Student Evangelicals. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008.

Evangelical student ministries have been around for decades, yet for the most part they have remained under the radar of critical and scientific work. Dutton’s essay, partly based on a doctoral dissertation in Anthropology of Religion presented at Aberdeen University (Scotland), is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on religion and higher education.

Dutton’s thesis is that university is a rite of passage, a corridor between two stages of life (hence the use of the term liminal, from the Latin limen, corridor). University is “a time when young people have their identities challenged, remoulded and even fundamentally changed as they become adults” (ix). These challenges and changes present an opportunity to mix with people of other social groups but also to join a structured and structuring movement like a Christian Union. The book “will examine the relationship between universities, the intensity to which they are a Rite of Passage, and the evangelical student groups within them.” (ix).

Though he is aware of its limitations, Dutton nevertheless follows a rather wide definition of “evangelical” that somewhat equates evangelicalism with fundamentalism in the sense that it “involves a retreat from the contemporary culture into a strongly differentiated counter-culture which usually aims to evangelise.” In the more liminal universities, those that are more strongly differentiated with life before, evangelical groups tend to focus more on conversion than in less liminal ones, though Dutton does recognize the speculative part of such a conclusion (13). After having detailed his approach and given some background on his own personal experience at Durham University (UK) in the first chapter, Dutton tests his thesis in six different settings that go from more to less liminal: Oxford University, Aberdeen University, the Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies, several Universities in the USA, Leiden University (Netherlands), and Oulu University (Finland).

Each chapter opens with a brief section on the relevant historical, religious, and educational background of the country where the university under study is located. In each case Dutton examines how differentiation is manifested in structure, clothing, language, drinking, the executive committee of the student movement, etc.

Dutton concludes with a final chapter that revisits the concepts presented in the introduction as tested by the material surveyed. One of his main conclusions is that the more a university is differentiated from the life contexts of the students, the more conservative the students become and the riper for conversions the environment is, and vice versa.

Though this book does not deal with “applied anthropology,” Dutton thinks that it would be of interest to evaluate its consequences for shaping student ministries and evangelism. Though all might not agree that student ministries should be conceived with the structure of the university in mind, according to Dutton, there is much to say to defend that as Paul made himself all things to all people (1 Cor 9.22), so might student ministries consider being shaped around university structures.

Dutton’s book is a fitting reminder of the obvious but often neglected point that more mundane or trivial constraints than “spiritual issues” also play a part in the operation of religious organisations, in this case the structure of the university and the education system. The fate and shape of student ministries is related to the culture and university systems in which they operate. I find this so obvious that it is hard to think that it needs to be justified. Yet, the full implications of this are rarely taken into account.

But Dutton’s book also shows the limitations of studying religion from a purely socio-anthropological perspective and with a thesis that needs to be proven. Here and there one has the impression that the data is read through the thesis and that liminality is found even where it really may not be an important factor. Liminality has become an übertheory that leads to a monocausalistic interpretation of a very complicated and multi-faceted reality. It is hard to shed the feeling that sometimes this is socio-anthropology from above, from the perspective of the observer and his theoretical framework and that the reading of the data is tainted by the glasses of the theory.

Yet, all in all, Dutton’s book brings up issues that people involved in students ministries do not always seem to pay attention to. Student ministries do after all work with people who live in some specific sociological conditions and a specific university system. For anyone who is able to access Dutton’s book and is involved in student ministry or a student of such work, I would definitely recommend this book.