Faith on Campus

In 1877, Trinity became the first college in Texas to charter a YMCA chapter, kicking off the University’s long history of Trinity’s student-run religious organizations. The YMCA chapter, whose motto was “Every student in this College for Christ this year,” met for Bible studies, prayer sessions, and devotional services. Twenty years later, the women of the campus followed suit and chartered a YWCA chapter.

The Religious Life Council, composed of faculty and students, supervised campus religious activities, such as the Spiritual Emphasis Week of the 1930s. In addition to Presbyterian ministers, professionals with expertise in areas other than religion were invited to participate. In 1938, Howard McClusky, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, led Spiritual Emphasis Week by "presenting religion in a new form, joyously and skillfully presenting this vital matter in terms of psychology and other sciences.”

During the 1920s and ’30s, observers noted a decline in student religiosity as secularism arose on college campuses. Trinity President John Harmon Burma acknowledged that the spiritual life of many Trinity students was "at low ebb" and that "a spirit of worldliness and irreligion was sweeping the young people of the land."

In the 1970s, Trinity students showed a growing interest in Eastern religions and in practices such as yoga and meditation. The Student's International Meditation Society organized in 1972 to promote the practice of transcendental meditation (TM), as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Adherents of diverse groups such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), the Unification Church, and the Children of God periodically visited the campus, talking informally with students and speaking in religion and sociology classes. Most visible were the saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, devotees of a Hindu group who chanted their rhythmic devotional mantra to the accompaniment of drums and tambourines.

Today, Trinity is home to several religious groups, serving students and faculty of all faiths.