By Kate Bulinski, Ph.D. The educational landscape in America is changing in a way that is difficult to keep up with. This is the conversation playing out among educators everywhere. I hear faculty talking about it in the hallways at my university. I hear it from K–12 teachers at professional development workshops. When I attend conferences, it is a frequent topic of conversation. The phrases that emerge over and over again? “The students are different.” “Residual pandemic effects.” “Addiction to social media.” “Anxiety and depression, mental health challenges.” “Artificial intelligence and academic integrity.” Within Catholic institutions, you also hear another phrase crop up: “Disaffection and disaffiliation.” As a Catholic faculty member at a Catholic university, I am challenged by all of this but find myself most drawn to the topic of disaffection and disaffiliation. I wonder about the links between this phenomenon and our students’ well-being and academic engagement, especially as it relates to their pursuit of knowledge, meaning, values, purpose and Truth. 

The problem of disaffiliation is not new to our post-pandemic reality. The phenomenon has been studied for decades and much has been written about it. In the well-publicized 2018 publication “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics” by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate and St. Mary’s Press Catholic Research Group, more than a third of millennials say they are disaffiliated from any religious tradition. More recent statistics with Gen Z also bear out this pattern. 

 Aside from being alarmed at what decreased Mass attendance means for the future of the Church, there are other pressing reasons why this matters. There is a link between poorer health outcomes and religious disaffiliation, which may contribute to other problems that educators have observed in the deterioration of well-being (spiritual and otherwise) among their students. Many reasons have been cited for this rise in disaffiliation: distrust in authority and institutions, political polarization, weak or absent catechesis in the home, poor catechesis in general, perceptions of the institutional Church being judgmental, the rise of moral relativism, secularism, the rugged individualist spirit in American culture, the sex abuse scandal, the question of gender equity in the Church, concerns related to Church teachings about gender identity and reproductive health and much more.  All these factors play a role. Another factor, though, is most interesting to me as a Catholic paleontologist: perceptions of conflict between faith and science. In the “Going, Going, Gone” study, more than a third of young adults and teens who disaffiliated from the Catholic faith cited a conflict with scientific beliefs as a somewhat or very important factor. If someone thinks that the Church is teaching that science is incompatible with faith, but they themselves trust the process of science, it is no wonder that young people are choosing to disaffiliate. With that misunderstanding in place, how could both faith and science be true?  Every semester I encounter students, some of whom had the benefit of more than 12 years of prior Catholic education, who are absolutely amazed to learn that faith and science are compatible within Catholicism, and they are left wondering what to do with this new information. Unfortunately, I think that by this point in a young person’s life, reconnection with the Church may be a difficult path, and the revelation of the compatibility of faith and science is not an especially compelling reason to reconnect. So what should we be doing about the embedded misconceptions? I am convinced that untangling perceived conflicts of faith and science is precisely what is needed at this moment to redesign and strengthen catechetical efforts and help our young people engage in asking the big questions about life, the universe and everything. I am also convinced that the best way to achieve this is to lead with science. 

Faith and Science in the Classroom

 As a Catholic paleontologist, I am particularly sensitive to instances when questions about creation, origins and the age of the earth are misrepresented both scientifically and theologically. I wanted to explore this cultural phenomenon in the classroom. In 2009, I designed a first-year seminar course focused on the Evolution and Creationism debates, a hot topic in the 2000s and early 2010s. This course required students to examine the nature of science and faith traditions and explore different models of conflict and compatibility. It was an effective course for achieving those intellectual goals, but after a few years, taking a whole semester to explore just one controversial demonstration of the intersection of faith and science became tiresome. The topic also faded out of the cultural spotlight as our society fixated on other social issues. In the 10 years or so since I taught those classes, the broader perceptions of conflict between faith and science persisted and, in some ways, became more acute. In the last decade, we found ourselves facing a pandemic, worsening climate change, and a “post-truth” political moment riddled with conspiratorial thinking. Considering this, in spring 2023, I relaunched the class, this time with a broader scope. The new interdisciplinary seminar class, designed for first-year honors students, was entitled “Exploring Scientific Controversies.” The idea was to explore the various ways to acquire knowledge, discern what was true, and understand this moment in time when many aspects of scientific knowledge in our society are being questioned, misinterpreted, manipulated and misunderstood. The first half of the course focused on the philosophy of science, and the second half of the class focused on cognitive bias, logical fallacies and psychological effects involved when evaluating information. Throughout the semester, case studies were introduced to examine these aspects of science and cognition. We explored the scientific merits of different hypotheses for the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Galileo Affair, evolution and creationism, climate change, anti-vaccination and more. Teaching this class was a deeply fascinating experience, but what I found most interesting was what this group of 18- and 19-year-olds were thinking and talking about. In this small class, five students identified as belonging to a religious tradition, while the other four identified as either atheist or agnostic. At the start of the semester, the class conversations were strongly aligned with a kind of scientism, or the point of view that knowledge is only reliably attained through scientific observation and experimentation. As we explored the philosophy of science more deeply and began to examine various sources of knowledge, however, the students realized that science is only one possible pathway to uncover knowledge and truth. Knowledge of the human experience of the world could also be ascertained through philosophical and theological exploration. For the students, this was a revelation: two ways of knowing. This kind of revelation is certainly not constrained to a class like this. Hopefully, every philosophy and theology class can also lead students to this understanding. What I think is different is that this class used science as a starting place. For the most skeptical student, one who may be suspicious or even hostile towards anything that remotely smells of religion, it is hard to gain trust in exploring topics that may delve into questions of belief. For my students, who belong to Gen Z (Americans born between 1997 and 2012), the institution they trust most is science. In fact, science is the only institution that most members of Gen Z trust. I am convinced that leading with science, which is supposed to be objective, dispassionate and devoid of the supernatural, is a very powerful way to reengage young people in questions about their own beliefs.  Dispelling the many misconceptions about faith and science and their interactions is a way to open dialogue and create a safe space where students can reevaluate their prior assumptions about how the world works. This is precisely what we hope our college students are doing—searching for meaning, truth and purpose—and sometimes it takes tearing down prior assumptions and knowledge to build them back up. 

The Path Forward

 Are classes like this going to solve the disaffiliation problem? Probably not. Only a small number of young adults are privileged enough to pursue higher education at all. Of those, only a few might find their way to a seminar exploring questions involving epistemology, and an even smaller subset will be transformed by the experience.  There is another opportunity for approaching this problem that holds more promise in course-correcting with our youth. The disaffiliation question as connected to faith and science starts much earlier than in the college years. In the “Going, Going, Gone” survey, the median age for leaving the Church was 13—middle school, when young Catholics are discerning confirmation and coming of age in general. They encounter scientific information that presents a perceived conflict with the biblical accounts of creation, which is very likely their first entry point to Scripture.  If these 13-year-olds are lucky, their teachers or clergy members have a clear understanding of the compatibility of faith and science within Catholicism and are equipped to answer questions. However, my experience is that our educators do not always have a clear understanding of Church teaching around faith and science themselves. The topics are completely siloed.  In 2022, my husband, a theology teacher and a permanent deacon, and I began offering professional development workshops for K–12 teachers and parish catechists on the topic of faith and science through our Archdiocese Office of Faith Formation. They received training in what this relationship looks like according to Catholic teaching, what Church history and Scripture tell us about faith and science, and how best to implement this topic in the classroom.  After two years, it is abundantly clear that catechesis concerning this topic is sorely needed. Anyone educating our young people in the Church needs to know that religion and science classes can enhance one another in a way that provides clarity.  We must provide our teachers and catechists with effective strategies for engaging our young people in the big questions of our faith in a way that makes sense to them. Finding ways to effectively integrate science and faith in the classroom should be a part of the faith formation curriculum in every diocese and Catholic school. Communicating clearly, effectively and often about the “two ways of knowing” may make a difference in dispelling the myth of the conflict between faith and science and engaging with our increasingly skeptical youth.  Dr. Kate Bulinski is an associate professor of Geosciences in Bellarmine’s Department of Environmental Studies. The piece excerpted here originally appeared in the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal under the headline “Science, Truth, and Disaffiliation” and is reprinted with permission.