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Revolt or not, says the Rev. George Buttrick, Harvard's professor of Christian morals, "the cycle has come full turn. Once we doubted our faith. Now we have come to doubt our doubts." The most overshadowing reason for this is "the threat of nothingness" brought on by the atomic bomb. Adds William D. Geoghegan, assistant professor of religion at Bowdoin College: "The resurgence oi religion is largely due to the shock administered to cultural Couéism by two world wars, a depression, and the painful knowledge that the great powers possess the awesome tools of genocide. Religion is seen as an essential tool in the hard work of sheer survival, not as a matter of icing on the cake."
For the most part, one of the dominant characteristics of the new young Christians is not their concern with social service but their preoccupation with finding themselves. "Religiously," says Clarence P. Shedd, emeritus professor of Christian methods at Yale, "it is a wistful generation, tired of living on 'snap judgments' and seeking enduring foundations . . . This does not mean a 'return' to religion or a 'revival' of religion. Rather it means that these students are seeking to come to grips with the basic problems of faith and living. They are asking not superficial but ultimate questions, and they will not be satisfied with easy answers. They want to find solid grounds for ultimate loyalties."
In their search for solid grounds, the students have not surrendered their right to criticize, nor do they seem any more susceptible than their parents to blind acceptance of dogma. As a matter of fact, says Kaare Roald Bergethon, dean of the college at Brown University, the students seem so tolerant of the beliefs of others that "if I had seen this same phenomenon in the '30s, I would have thought it was indifference, but today I know it isn't." This tolerance has meant that old gods have not been dethroned; they have merely been demoted. "Science students," says Goucher's Director of Religious Activities, Walter Morris, "have come to realize that science is accurate and true in those areas to which it has purposely limited itself." Freud is still studied respectfully, but he no longer monopolizes the conversation. The fashion now, says Nicholas Cardell, director of the University of Chicago's Unitarian Channing Club, "is to talk of Niebuhr or Tillich."
Queen of the Sciences. Once again religion has become intellectually respectable. "In my day." says David Webster, acting dean of men at Temple University, "we were apt to say that religion is a superstition." Today, says Chaplain Richard Unsworth of Smith College, "theology is no longer classed with domestic science as a subject not suited for a liberal arts college." Adds Bowdoin's William Geoghegan: "One average student was recently asked if he thought theology was the 'Queen of the Sciences.' He replied: 'I don't know, but I can see how it could be.' Twenty or 30 years ago, the question would probably have been dismissed as nonsense."