“When students come back at semester breaks, that’s when the conversations really pick up,” said Jon-Michael Phillips, 35, a youth pastor at a nondenominational church in Jackson, Michigan, a city of about 31,000 between Ann Arbor and Lansing, the state’s two big college towns.
As students from the University of Michigan and Michigan State return home for the holidays, Phillips is less concerned about college football rivalries than about the political discussions he is bound to have. “Every year, students want to talk to me about things they are struggling with,” he said, “and one of the topics a few are sure to bring up is politics.”
Phillips said students often share that when it comes to LGBT issues, the environment or the Republican Party, they increasingly feel at odds with the politics they often heard from the pulpit as they grew up or what was shared at home.
As they become more politically aware and active, Phillips said, they start to question how their evangelical Christian parents and pastors have presented these issues and others.
“The nice thing is they still want to talk and want to know what I think,” Phillips said. “The question is what I can do with these conversations.”