A person whose religious beliefs are foreclosed has accepted a faith without thinking deeply about it. I believe that most CCCU faculty want graduates to retain the strength of commitment and active practices that they demonstrated as freshmen, while thinking critically about the reasons for having a faith. In other words, faculty want students' faith to move from borrowed to owned. If the goal is to develop students with strong, active, and reflective faith commitments, then we need to look for evidence of all three attributes in seniors. The evidence comes from survey responses, which admittedly are imperfect indicators, but certainly better than anecdotal knowledge.
Students seem to have retained their faith across four years.
Table 1 shows views of freshmen in 1994 and seniors in 1998. Instead there is a slight increase in the percentage of seniors reporting a strong faith commitment. 1 Table 1 does not tell the whole story, however. Although more seniors strongly agreed with those four statements presented in the table, more also disagreed with them. In other words, seniors looked more polarized on the statements.