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In 1995, Dr Neville Knight, a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University, conducted a pilot study of the religious experience of teenagers in three Australian secondary schools in Melbourne, Victoria. One was a parent-controlled private school with an overt evangelical Christian orientation. A second school was an independent Anglican school. The third school was a state school in a lower socio-economic area with a high migrant population. Over 450 students between the ages of 14 and 17 completed a questionnaire.
Dr Knight asked the question which has been asked in many studies around the world:
Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by, a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday life?
He then asked the students to describe their experiences, which were classified according to typologies developed by David Hay and A. Morisy in England.
Dr Knight found that the percentage of students from each school reporting a religious experience varied considerably. At the parent-controlled school, 53% of the students said they had had such an experience, compared with 21% of the state school students, and 10% at the independent Anglican school. This gave an overall incidence of 21% of all students reporting a religious experience.
Most of the experiences fell into one of three groups:
1. 34% spoke of the presence of or help from God, perhaps through reading something, or dreams, or when in physical danger, or help in a time of illness.
2. In 29% of cases, God’s invention was seen in relation to prayer, or asking for specific or general help.
3. In 25% of cases, there was a presence or something which was not identified by the student as ‘God’. Some wrote in very general terms about being influenced to go somewhere. One boy reported there was something which ‘helped me out with family problems’. A girl wrote ‘I was walking and I was severely depressed and all of a sudden I felt elevated’. Some wrote more specifically of a presence: ‘I don’t remember much except that it was dark, except for a light. I felt trapped, and suddenly something took my hand and led me to the light’. A few mentioned angels, spirits, or hearing voices.
There were a few other sorts of experience. Five per cent of the students wrote of the presence of or help from the deceased. One girl wrote:
We met a woman who said she could talk to spirits. She got in contact with my mother and said things that she couldn’t have known. She also said that she is always with us. We always hear unexplained noises in our house, like footsteps up and down the hall and things turning on by themselves, such as a hairdryer.
One or two reported premonitions and others spoke of dreams of events which happened after the dream. Surprisingly, there were no reports that fitted the category of ‘a meaningful patterning of events’, which has been a significant category of experiences in other studies.
Other studies have generally found a higher percentage of people reporting experiences than was found in this study, although percentages have varied widely. In two studies in Britain, both conducted in 1985, one found 33% and another 43% of people claiming a religious experience. In general, reports of such experiences have been found most frequently among people aged between 30 and 55 yers of age. Nevertheless, in several studies between one quarter and one third of people under 25 have reported such experiences.
The variation in the responses suggests that the background or context of young people makes a considerable difference in their openness to such experiences and their ways of interpreting them. However, as found in overseas studies, many experiences, if not most, are experienced when people are alone, rather than in the context of a church or religious group.
Most of those who reported experiences said the experiences were very important to them and, in many instances, had strengthened their faith, given them a sense of peace, or helped them in some other way. Some, however, did indicate that the experiences had frightened them, given them a sense of uncertainty, or that ‘it had been weird’.
In Britain, there has been a movement to build religious education on a phenomenological approach, and such experiences have had a significant place as a starting point for thinking about religion.
To determine how significant religious experiences are to Australian students, further study would need to be done. Another approach to the topic which did not begin to suggest that experiences might be described as ‘religious’, but asked for information about a variety of experiences, might lead to wider and more significant responses.
Philip Hughes
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