- Religion is a very personal experience.

It is also social and highly political.

- We are a public institution and a taxpayer funded institution.

Religions have a special kind of, of position within public institutions.

And we have to keep that in mind.

(gentle music) We've always had religious diversity on campus.

- Coming from North Dakota it's either you're, you're Protestant or you're Catholic.

- I went to a Christian school from third grade through 12th grade.

- One part of my identity is as a Muslim American woman.

- My dad's side of the family is Catholic.

And my mom's side of the family is Jewish.

But I don't come from a very religious upbringing.

- I am a Coptic Orthodox Christian.

There's not many of us here.

- 'Cause a lot of people don't even think that Dakota spirituality is a thing or that Dakota people are invested in our traditions or practices.

- It's important that students who do profess a particular religion or religious perspective don't feel that they have to check their religion at the gate when they come onto campus New groups are now part of the religious diversity on campus.

- And I struggled to find a difference and a balance between all of my identities.

I do find a lot of community of students who are going through the exact same thing and who can relate on almost every level which I have found in the Muslim Student Association.

The academic study of religion is not as my colleagues say, not a moralizing activity.

We are here to investigate religions.

- I have never associated religion with my academics, just because I think it's an extremely personal journey.

- All the books that I read it in American indigenous studies are spiritual and sacred.

- I appreciated the opportunity to learn about religion in the classroom just because my experience with it was not going to be the same at this level.

- It's very tough to understand, you know, what different communities of people face when you don't understand their core principles.

- Students who come out of our major or minor or who takes religious studies classes, they understand, they learn a language that allows them to communicate and to facilitate communication across different religious groups.

- I think I want to experience, you know, another religion like Islam, which is really one of the biggest religions in the world through a professor for example who actually practices Islam and knows about the intricate details of it.

And who has those experiences and a lot of students, students in those class also tend to be, you know, Muslim.

- These lessons that I'm learning in class are something that I take and put in to my spirituality.

- And as I got older I got a lot more comfortable in dialing in exactly what it is that I believe for myself about faith but also like how I'm comfortable expressing that outwardly has been very beneficial because it gave me the perspective of an outsider who might be turned off by very conservative evangelical beliefs.

So I think I can kind of step in and out of both of those worlds in a really productive way.

- It's not diverse views that's the problem.

It's not disagreement that's the problem.

It's that we need to cultivate a higher tolerance for leaning into what's uncomfortable and for engagement with diverse views.

- What happens when you become more religiously literate is students gain a vocabulary to talk about religion in the public sphere, to talk about religion amongst people of other religious perspectives.

Religious literacy increases the ability to think about the spectrum of ideas.