6B
Tuesday, May 3. 1994
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
RELIGION
For Chi Duong, Tulsa sophomore, all religions boll down to the same thing.
"I'm sure there are some Buddhists out there who say, 'This is the right way,' and there are some Christians who say, 'This is the right way,'" she says. "For me, it's just whatever you believe."
Duong's parents are "nonpracticing Buddhists," she says, and they never attempted to make her ascribe to their religion. She attended a Baptist church for several years as a teen-ager and still calls herself a Christian. But she doesn't attend any particular church now.
And religious groups' claims that they are the only right way to truth has been something of a turn off for her.
"At the time that I was going to church, I thought, 'Wow, this is really it,'" she says. "And I still believe that — God and whatever, all that stuff."
"As I got older, I started questioning all of that, just the Protestant beliefs."
"Maybe that's part of the reason why I'm not going to church right now, or a specific church right now, because everyone is saying, 'We're the only right way,' and I don't think that that's true," she says.
Working it out for ourselves
We're looking for answers like the rest of society. And that society is looking inward.
By Joe Harder
We've seen television evangelists branded as shysters. We've watched the fervor of David Koresh take 72 people to a fiery death. We've seen Catholic priests on trial, accused of molesting children.
Our generation is a little cynical when it comes to religion.
We know there's Something Out There — but we're not sure what it is.
But that doesn't mean we've quit looking.
For Kristin Brumm, Lawrence junior, that search has included "dabbling" as she calls it, in several religious groups — even training to be a minister at one point. Now, at the age of 29, she's at the University of Kansas majoring in religious studies.
"I don't associate myself with any organized religion," she says. "Mostly, I've drawn my beliefs from doing a lot of searching and a lot of reading of different religious or philosophical texts."
Her search for a personal religious truth is common among our generation. According to a Gallup Poll in 1991, 47 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the nation that their own experiences were their most reliable guides to truth. Only 22 percent said they relied on scripture.
Part of that religious self-reliance could be the result of seeing global problems — AIDS, environmental catastrophes and homelessness, to name a few — and no solutions.
In the past, people had trust in the
future, says Bill Tuttle, professor of history.
Today's problems "seem limitless," he says. "People before had a sense that there was a business cycle, a political cycle, that what went around came around. If they were bad, the good times would return. I don't think people have that same optimism in the midst of pessimistic conditions. I think today people look into the future and they go, 'Things are not going to get better.'"
Yet we haven't thrown up our hands in complete despair, forsaking faith in everything.
Faced with problems of such staggering proportions, where do we turn?
Inward.
Brumm says people are finding that traditional religions aren't providing answers that they find satisfactory.
"So they're searching for other answers," she says.
Our generation, with the rest of society, still believes in the existence of a higher power and the importance of religion.
The number of people who say they believe in some sort of higher power has stayed fairly constant in the past 40 years — about 95 percent for all age groups, according to the Gallup Poll.
But the trust in the effectiveness of that belief has been slowly decreasing in recent decades.
In 1957, according to the Gallup Poll, 84
percent of 18- to 29-year-olds answered affirmatively to the question, "Do you believe that religion can answer all or most of today's problems?" By 1911, that number had dropped to 59 percent.
The priority that our generation gives religion also has decreased. In 1952, 64 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds said that religion was "very important" in their lives. By 1991, that response had dropped to 46 percent among 18- to 29-year-olds. The same trend has been happening in other age groups as well.
The point is that we aren't that different in religious attitudes from other generations.
And people in their 20s usually go through a period of lower religious activity, says Tim Miller, professor of religion. After accepting our parents' religions during our childhoods, many of us see the move away from home as a chance to experiment.
"They break out, go to college and it tends to be a period when they question a lot of things, and attendance and participation tends to go downhill," Miller says. "And then, eventually they get married and have a family — it's the standard pattern — and they sink back into some of the old routines, and a certain percentage of people drift back in."
But while we may be traditional in that respect, the religious focus of the society around us has been changing.
Miller points to an increasing number of religious groups in the United States as evidence of a growing individualism, a slow turning inward. Our generation is a part of that.
He sees that changing focus as a result of the proposition that "you work things out on your own."
Brumm sees herself in that description.
"What I believe is that everyone has to find their own truth and their own connection to God or a universal power or life, however one wants to phrase it, and to derive meaning from that and find their answers by going within as opposed to looking outside themselves to answers that other people provide," she says.
Yet, in a generation fragmented in what it believes, how do we iron out our differences?
One answer we come up with is to avoid the question.
Bill Sharp, senior instructor in the department of Western Civilization, says that dodge is prevalent among students he teaches.
they seem to be reluctant to take any sort of personal stance on issues except that everything is OK," he says. Part of the reason, he says, is that our generation is aware of wrongs against people in the past and is reluctant to be a part of any further oppression.
"Nobody wants to be the bad guy, so one way of dealing with that is to sort of withdraw from the discussion." he says.
According to a 1991 Gallup Poll, a large majority of 18- to 29-year-olds, when faced with the question of right and wrong, simply say — it depends. Seventy-three percent agreed with the statement, "There are few moral absolutes. What is right or wrong usually varies from situation to situation."
Some people would contest the virtue of this open-armed tolerance. Tolerance and Truth are two different things. And our generation struggles with something as complex as Truth. If we've got to answer the question, we'll skip the essay and opt for multiple choice.
Jim Sire, author and senior editor of InterVarsity Press, the publishing branch of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, says that a society that puts no value judgments on claims to truth loses all moral absolutes.
"They are in this quandary of trying to figure out who they are in the light of the fact that there is nothing transcendent he says. "I think that's a key element of modern people. Generation X has to face that. But so have the baby boomers, so have the earlier generations."
And in the end, it's the individualistic approach to religion that will continue to dominate the religious attitudes of our generation.
"People tend to find answers where they, find answers," Miller says.
THE KU
RESPONSE
How important is religion in your life?
Not important
Somewhat important
Important
Very important
No opinion
How would you describe your view of the future?
Optimistic
Somewhat optimistic
Indifferent
Somewhat pessimistic
Pessimistic
Out on the ocean of AIDS statistics, faces appear — faces of lovers, friends and family. Renee Speicher knew one of those faces: her uncle, who died of complications of AIDS in 1990.
His death changed her life. Speicher saw that others needed to know the truth about AIDS and how to prevent the disease.
Speicher began volunteer work as a peer educator at the Center of Sexual Health Education at Watkins Memorial Health Center. As she dispelled the myths of AIDS for students, Speicher let them know that sexuality involved more than just a physical act.
SEXUAL RELATIONS
"Sex should be done on a relationship basis," Speicher says. "We really need to drive that home to students."
Playing Russian roulette
AIDS hasn't scared our generation into practicing safe sex. We're still taking chances.
Ten years later, we'd like to play it safe. But we're still taking chances.
"There's nothing that's as hard to control as the sex drive," says Janine Gracy, coordinator of health education at Watkins Memorial Health Center. "People don't like change. People know they have to use condoms, but they don't."
Recent studies indicate the number of us using protection during sex has risen only slightly from five years ago, when condoms became fashionable and functional.
During the '80s, when most of us had just discovered pubic hair, the rest of the nation was discovering AIDS. Sure, more than half of us had graduated high school without our virginity, but we faced new standards and mixed messages. After all, how safe was "safe sex"? How could we "just say no" and still "just do it"? Could a Harlequin Romance relationship ever include the new truth of death by sex?
What our generation has come up with instead may be the new ritual of "serial monogamy."
"People go through these periods of being together for six weeks," Gracy said. "You may think you're monogamous for someone at the time, but then you decide to move on to someone else."
Risky. But like other generations, ours may feel invincible, says Renee Specher, Hutchinson graduate student and coordinator for the Center of Sexual Health Education at Watkins. The reality is we're the first generation in a long time to face ending up dead from sex.
"Too many students have this view that AIDS only happens to other people, espe-
cially to homosexuals," Spicer says. "It's a tough mentality to break out of."
by David Stewart
After five years experience as a peer health educator, Speicher can rattle off statistics: One in seven students has an STD; from 1 in 200 to 1 in 500 college students has the HIV virus; students average 12 partners — three a year — during their four years here.
She has seen the worst case scenarios at her Watkins office: a pregnant student who can't say who the father is, an AIDS test comes back positive. Speicher says students usually can't even believe they have caught a sexually transmitted disease.
"A lot of people are still buying into the myth that you can use a condom every once in a while, and the pill is going to protect them from STDs," Speicher says. "These days, getting pregnant doesn't quite have the taboo that getting an STD does."
Resent it as we might, unfair as it might seem, this is the age of sex as a disease.
"Sex isn't just something you can do for pleasure. It's also a health issue," Speicher said. "That's a hard pill to swallow. Most people want it to be spontaneous and fun."
But it's not anymore."
Our parents found sex during the days of chaperoned dances and midnight curfews. Now a blood test, not a class ring, has become the new rite of commitment. Twenty years ago, who thought about bisexuality, date rape and designer condoms? Now fear of a positive AIDS test has made sex with a stranger much like biological Russian roulette.
We would like to think we know a lot about sex, especially more than our parents did. We're probably wrong.
"Youth has this bias against the generation that came before them that they know so little about sex," says Dennis Dailey, professor of social welfare. "We don't like to think of our parents as what they are: sexual, desirous, horny human beings. They may not have had the same environment that you have today, but that doesn't mean they weren't aware."
In our own fight between death by AIDS and raging hormones, the hormones seem to keep on winning. With nearly 60 percent of entering freshman sexually active, we pretty much know how to do it. But as the rules have become more complicated, Dailey says, we still may not know how to do it safely.
"I want to get rid of the guilt that has built up around sex," Dalley says. "At the same time, you need to think about what you're doing to be safe."