Environmental Faith Commitment and Religious Attitudes: Reviewing Differences in College Student Perspectives

Catholic education shares in the evangelizing mission of the Church through the faith formation of young students. The Framework for Student Faith Formation in Catholic Schools sees the need for faith to dialogue with life issues like ecology often articulated in developmental views. Religious communities and the academe are only beginning to make sense of the impact of ecological crises lately. Hence, there is a need to bring ecological discussions that account for college-level appreciation of the environment from a faith perspective. The study sought how students differ in perspectives according to age, gender preference, religious affiliation, and academic program based on perceived Environmental Faith Commitments (EFC) among selected students in a tertiary school in Central Luzon. Secondly, it wants to know how their perceptions differ for religious attitudes in terms of age, gender preference, religious affiliation, and college academic programs. This descriptive quantitative survey will have college students selected through random sampling from various academic programs in a Catholic tertiary school. To analyze data, we checked first for internal consistency of EFC and FSAR by checking for the inter-item correlations of the items and correlations between EFC and FSAR. One-Way ANOVA was used to determine the effects of age, gender, religious affiliation, and academic program towards perceived faith-inspired environmental responses (EFC), and religious attitudes. The results offer insights into the characteristics of college students’ perceptions of faith to the environment. Further, the implications of the results were discussed concerning current efforts of the school to adopt gender and ecologically- sensitive academic programs.