There is no shortage of communities at Columbia. Of all the sub-entities that comprise our diverse population, there are a number that fit under a single, broader category. This umbrella group is made up of all those students who see themselves as religiously affiliatedbe it with a group, doctrine, way of life, or individual belief.

The word religious is hard to define in a single way, as are the many religious personalities and groups that make up this campus. Indeed, there is a wide varietytoo broad to detailof backgrounds, interests, and intellectual or spiritual journeys in our community. In this realm especially, no two students are alike. But there is a thread that connects them all: their belief in something beyond the secular liberalism that has come to define our age.

These are not the only students who search for, and sometimes find, deeper meaning in their environment. But for openly religious students in particular, a number of central questions take on added meaning: Has the University left intellectual room for spirituality? How do reason and faith relate in the classroom? And how do religious students interact with the environment surrounding them? While no student speaks for anyone but themselves, and no one story could contain the fullness of these students ways of life, this piece will attempt to explore a small segment of the vast and rich story of religion at Columbia.

An Anglican Legacy

The history of religion at Columbia begins much earlier than the founding of Hillel or the Muslim Students Association. Dating back to the earliest discussions at the beginning of the 18th century, the idea of establishing an institution of higher learning in the Province of New York was tied to the service of the Anglican Church. In 1704, Lewis Morris, the chief justice of New York and the British governor of New Jersey, wrote to the missionary arm of the Anglican Church saying that New York was an ideal place to establish a college.

At the time, college was as much a religious institution as it was a scientific and literary one. In 1746, when the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) was about to be founded, the general assembly of New York appointed a commission of 10 peopleseven of whom were Anglicansto direct the recently accrued funds to establish a college, which would later become Columbia. The commission voted to build the college on lands that had been vested to Trinity Church, on the condition that the colleges religious affiliation would be Anglican.

And yet, despite the way in which Columbia was foundedwith religious intentions in mindit was not created to train clergy, unlike its peer institutions. The earliest of the Ivies were colleges born out of American Protestantism and were initially founded to train clergy. Columbia was Anglicanand as a Kings College, was a bit different. ... Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were each founded because the previous ones became too liberal, Wayne Proudfoot, Columbia professor of religion, says.

In 1784, the New York State Legislature passed an act that prohibited the newly founded college from administering a religious test-oath to its faculty. Proudfoot still sees this legacy in Columbias religion department today, which came into its modern form in the 1950s. In contrast to its peer institutionsat which the faculty of undergraduate program in religion mirrored that of a Protestant seminarythe department at Columbia included scholars of religions from across the globe from its earliest years.

Religion and Reason Conflicts in the Classroom

Today on Columbias campus, the faade of Earl Hallthe building that houses the Office of the University Chaplaincontains the following engraving: Erected for the Students that Religion and Learning May Go Hand in Hand with Knowledge. In his recent book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco suggests that placing these words on the building at the time of its establishment in the early 1900s meant that contemporaries probably no longer believed it. As for religion, it was becoming an anachronism, and was certainly no longer at the center of campus life, he writes.

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In Good Faith