Three times each week during the school year, Wheaton College’s 2,400 undergraduates gather at a large chapel on the campus’ west end. Outside the Georgian-style building one sunny Friday in September, students hugged their friends in greeting and fiddled with their cell phones. Once inside and seated at their assigned spots, however, most of the students turned attentive. They raised their hands during an emotive worship song, closed their eyes for prayer and listened to a pastor from Tennessee deliver a sermon on “Finding Our Joy in God the Trinity.”
The door to Edman Memorial Chapel closes promptly at 10:35 a.m., and as chapel begins, student workers with clipboards stand in the balcony and count off the unoccupied seats. There’s a telling kind of tension here: Students attend chapel freely, for the most part, but attendance is also enforced.
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