FILE PHOTO BY MOLLY CAREY
Associate chaplain and director of religious life Phil Smith offers communion in Holt Chapel.
FILE PHOTO BY HEATHER CASSANO
^iia^iaiii aiiv* me i9iiiiui uiicrst (juTiiinuniun in noil onapei. Elon students observe shabbat led by members of Hillel during the annual Hanukkah party.
Progressive view of faith at Elon
More than a century after its establishment, the university's vision and mission have
shifted from training leaders of the church to ft)rming citizens of a diverse world
Aiiifinn would the Board of Trustees have to be exoand our awareness.” McBride said. “If we decades, many of the goals and |
Natalie Allison
Senior Reporter
The founders might be surprised to see
how the small Christian college they birthed
from a church became a place where no
one deity holds preeminence.
There was a day at Elon College when
chapel attendance was a requirement, a
day when college trustees were elected by
the local church and professors had to be
members of that church.
More than 120 years have passed since
Hon was founded as a training ground for
young ministers of the Christian church.
The identity of a once exclusively Christian
college has evolved into that of a university
with acclaim for its effort to foster religious
diversity.
But change didn't happen overnight.
“It was the church’s school,” said
Earl Danieley, Elon University president
emeritus. “The early documents say that
this school would be owned and operated
by the church. Not just related to, not just
an institution with obligations to, it was
owned and operated by the church."
When Danieley took over as president
of the college in 1957, the position still
required traveling up and down the East
Coast speaking in churches about Elon, as
had Leon Smith, who became the college’s
fifth president in 1931.
At that point, the majority of leaders in the
Southern Conference of the denomination,
which became the United Church of Chnst
the same year Danieley took office, were
graduates of
Elon College.
“We were
tTciining them
and then we
were sending
them out
to lead the
Church,”
Danieley said.
“In Smith’s
time, if
someone had
mentioned
multi-faith
— no, no, no.
He actually
would refuse
to employ
a Roman
Catholic to
teach. It was
his church
college.”
The
institution
started
receiving
new faculty
members
from other
universities
and new students
Hindu
0.0%
Muslim
0.0%
Buddhist
0.2%
2000 CIRP Data
Other
Catholic'
24.1%
Jewish
1.7%
m.7%
other
Buddhist
0.4%
Hindu
0.2%
Muslim
0.5%
None
20.1%
Pro
43.4%
Catholic
Jewish
5.6%
2010 CIRP Data
iicrv oiuuuiio from other Christian
denominations. Though today the inclusion
of Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists
might fall short of constituting diversity,
Danieley said this move allowed for a
gradual weakening of the institutions ties
with the church.
Not long after former president Fred
Young came to Elon in 1973, the college s
procedure of having the church elect
trustees changed. The board became self-
perpetuating, Danieley said. No longer
would the Board of Trustees have to be
dominated by church members.
“We know the church is where we came
from,” Danieley said. “But we have gone
through an evolution from being a church
college, to being a church-related college,
to being a college historically related to the
church.”
The Truitt Center is bom
When Richard McBride became the
chaplain at Elon 27 years ago, he began each
Fall Convocation with the phrase “Welcome
seekers.” That greeting, according to
Anthony Hatcher, associate professor
of communications and adviser to the
university’s interfaith student group. Better
Together, was a simple representation of
McBride’s attitude toward helping students
along their faith journeys.
“He was telling students that this is a
place where you can seek and find yourself
in a s£ife environment for figuring out who
you are,” Hatcher said. “1 think the tone was
set.”
The tone that McBride, now chaplain
emeritus, set for religious life at Elon and
the vision he cast for future developments
stemmed from his own interactions with
students from religious minorities, who
gradually began to attend the college.
He spoke with a Jewish mother who
took photos of her son playing football for
the Elon College Fighting Christians, only
to show them to family and friends back
home who didn’t understand why he would
attend a college
that appeared to
be so vocal about
its Christian values.
McBride soon began
to question the
appropriateness
of having such a
religious school
mciscot.
“That name
had reflected our
outlook,” McBride
said. “But as the
college began to
realize it wanted
to position itself
as an East Coast
school beyond
North Carolina and
Virginia and have a
national outlook, we
recognized that that
sports mascot didn’t
work anymore.”
He spoke with
a Jewish male
cheerleader who,
after cheering
for the Fighting
CATC LESOURDi Graphics Editor (^JjrigtlanS Week
after week, came to
McBride and asked if the Jewish students
could have their own organization. McBride
saw to it that the organization, now known
as Hillel, would immediately be formed.
He spoke with a young Jewish woman
who while singing in the choir at the
college’s Blessing of the Christmas Trees
program, pulled McBride aside and asked
if he could also wish the Jewish students a
happy Hanukkah when he went to the front
to speak. . i j .
“Those kinds of experiences helped to
expand our awareness,” McBride said. “If we
were going become an institution that really
welcomes people from all over, we would
have to change our behaviors, change
customs, change attitudes. 1 think we began
that process in my 25-year tenure, but it’s
not finished yet.”
And after alumna Edna Truitt Noiles
gave a $1 million endowment and the
Truitt Center for Religious & Spiritual Life
was established with the goal of allowing
students to “leam about their own and
other faiths and to live
lives of reconciliation,"
the face and mission
of religious life at Elon
changed.
Preparing students to
be ^obal citizens in
a religiously diverse
world
Since the 2010-2011
academic year, the
population of Muslim
students at Elon has
risen 250 percent,
growing from a few
students to 14 smdents
on Ccimpus who identify
themselves with Islam,
said associate chaplain
Phil Smith. A part-time
imcim now comes in on
Fridays to lead students
in Jumu’ah prayer.
The number of Hindu students also grew
from a handful to nearly a dozen this year,
he said, and the university recently held its
first Diwali festival of lights celebration.
“The needs of people have changed,”
Smith said. “The world is global. Fifty years
ago, chances were, you would graduate
and the co-worker sitting beside you was
probably not from another country or
culture or faith tradition. So I think the
nature of the education that Elon is trying
to provide has changed, and our religious
life opportunities are just keeping in line
with that.”
Numen Lumen Pavilioa Elon's multi
faith campus, which will be located in the
center of campus and serve as a space
for students of all religions to dialogue,
worship, meditate and spend time, is
a manifestation of a philosophy the
university has been encouraging for the
past decade: students must be prepared
to live in a world with other culmral and
spirinial traditions and understand and
value the traditions of others.
“The university is willing to put its money
where its mouth is, and resources where
its ideology is,” said Jan Fuller, university
chaplaiiL “I see so many possibilities in this
building. We’re going to live together. There
will be challenges. But what 1 love is that the
university wants to support this, and we are
a part of a place where these ideas are not
just said, but done.”
The UCC’s own multi-faith initiatives
The congregation now known as Elon
Community Church, located directly across
the street from the southwest part of
campus, met in Whitley auditorium from
1891 to 1959. Though Elon’s historical
association with the United Church of
Christ has changed during the past several
NATALIE ALUSON | Senior Repofter
Elon Community Church met in buildings
on campus from 1891 to 1959.
decades, many of the goals and priorities
the church and university have developed
have remained consistent with one another,
and Elon as an institution hasn’t fallen too
far away from the church it once housed.
ECC is also making strides to promote
religious pluralism.
“Our hope is that through the years, we’re
going be able to build a sense of knowing
and understanding between religions,”
said the Rev. Randy Orwig, senior pastor
of ECC. “We’re very multi-faith oriented as
a church, but we also
understand that we are
Christians first. Our
Christian roots are a
very important aspect
to our understanding of
faith.”
Some universit>'
administrators and
faculty members who
identily themselves
as Christians see the
promotion of other
faiths as a seamless
extension of the church.
“1 believe that Gxi
is very big and very
powerftil, and 1 don’t
pretend to understand
all the answers,” said
President Leo Lambert.
‘1 want to be humble
enough to be open to
other points of view
and listen and try to
understand and not judge. And 1 think the
Christian path is a wonderful path. It’s the
path 1 try to be on — very imperfectly. But
1 think we have to be open to hearing other
voices in our lives."
Fuller, an ordained Episcopalian priest,
said she sees part of her duty as chaplain to
model a Christianity in which people from
all religioas are respected and their beliefs
seen as equally legitimate — an attitude
reflective of both her religion and the values
of the university.
1 think that God is powerful enough
and clever enough to reach us all in our
individual ways," she said.
Hatcher said a multi-faith focused
chaplain is unconventional for some
colleges, but has allowed FJon to become
the type of school it is known to be among
other collegiate religious life programs.
“I think our campus is going in the right
direction, and I think a lot of that has lo
do with the fact that we have not banished
the office of chaplain,” he said. “But we
probably have the most openminded vit-w’
of what a chaplain does of almost any
university.”
Lambert said his desire for a university
that grev\’ its way out of training Bible-
minded Christians and into liberally
educating informed global citizens is that
students would find ways to live out these
missions and philosophies in practical
ways.
“I would hope that, in the end, we would
actually be living out the dream that Edna
Noiles articulated." Lambert said. “1 hope
that, during their time at Elon. students will
explore their faiths and other faiths, and go
into the worid and live lives of reconciliatiorL
That’s one of the most beautiful thoughts
I’ve ever heard in my life, and I hope we can
become that place. I think we are becoming
that place.”