Why Aren't College Students in Church Sunday Morning, Asks Editor? March 23, 1923

It is often repeated that college students are a select group of young people who have come to college to be trained for future service. This service is to be found in the community life, the home, school and church. It follows that if we are to become leaders or intelligent followers in our home churches that we must cultivate our religious nature. Certainly there are many ways of doing this and no opportunity should be permitted to pass by unheeded. The question which naturally comes here is: “Are Guilford students availing themselves of all opportunities?”

If you wish an answer to this problem, look over the church for a few Sunday mornings to see if all college students are present. No doubt you have already been struck by the fact that the number of college girls and boys is rather small. Probably you have been wondering what is the reason for the absence of so many.

There seems to be a growing tendency among Guilford students, to spend Sunday morning in the dormitories. A few decide after the Sunday-school that it would be more pleasant to stay at home. Others still find it so much nicer to sleep or read than to go to the church that they are seldom found there. Why such a tendency should arise is not so easy to be decided, for, I dare say, practically all our students have been accustomed to attend church each Sunday at home. Why should we when we get to college consider ourselves good enough to get along without church services, or why should we become too lazy or indifferent to attend? Here we are certainly not forced to listen to a long, thundering, puritanical discourse, but are very fortunate in having interesting sermons.

College students like freedom but, as Henry Emerson Fosdick says, “Real freedom never consists in mere release from all restraints; freedom is the positive substitution of inward self-control for external restraints.” It is pointed out that we are becoming a nation of non-church-goers. The faculty do not count us each Sunday or enforce any rigid rules to make us go. Nevertheless, ought we not to remember that even though we are not being looked after like small children, that it is for our ultimate good that we go to church? We should attempt to cultivate among us a sentiment for 100 per cent attendance. If the students cannot do this, then it is time that the authorities should take the matter up. What are you going to do about it next Sunday?

From the editorial page of The Guilfordian, Guilford College, N.C., March 23, 1923