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The four University of Utah students were sharing one of those sublime moments.
Piled in the back of Alec Gehrke's Malibu -- a refurbished car bought from the LDS Church -- they were parked above the Salt Lake City Cemetery in the Avenues late on a warm Saturday night.
Stars lit the sky and the city lights twinkled from the valley floor below. Even their breathing seemed connected, as if they were links on the same chain.
"It was existential," Gehrke says.
"It was so gorgeous," Hannah Munn recalls. "I thought: This is it. This is a defining moment, just being here together, in sync."
The friends were experiencing, they agreed, something sacred.
Like many college students who have shed their ties to religion, they nonetheless hold on to the spirit.
"I now just believe in loving people. That's my religion," says Munn, a native of Bristol, England, who was raised in the LDS faith in Santaquin.
While it has long been understood that attending college can undermine a young adult's religious faith, researchers in separate studies have found some interesting trends.
Christian Smith, a professor at Notre Dame University and author of the new book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, and his colleagues interviewed the same group of students several times through the years, starting when they were 13 to 17 and most recently, as young adults.
What they found is that the collegiate loss of faith is not as big as many believe. Moreover, he says, college campuses today are less hostile to religion and spirituality than they once were.
A University of California, Los Angeles study that interviewed college students as freshmen and again as juniors, found declining church attendance but increasing numbers of young people on a quest for spirituality.
"Many students are emerging from the collegiate experience with a desire to find spiritual meaning and perspective in their everyday lives," UCLA Emeritus Professor Alexander W. Astin said in a 2007 news release when the research was published.
Indeed, many colleges are actively encouraging students to explore faith.
Salt Lake City's Westminster College staged a Faith and Spirituality Fair on Thursday, with various faith groups stationed in the main corridor of the Shaw Center so students could stop by and chat. The school also has a director of spiritual life, Jan Saeed.
Just up the road, the University of Utah boasts an Interfaith Student Council.
Carla Zilaff, the campus minister at St. Catherine's (Catholic) Newman Center, says that she has noticed increasing interest in worship and public service among the students involved at the center next to the U.
This year, only two of the 12 on the student leadership team wanted to spearhead the social events of the center, Zilaff says. The rest wanted to help lead worship and service projects.
"It was really amazing," she says. "They are looking at something that grounds them."
Smith, the Notre Dame professor, says the National Study of Youth and Religion research project poked holes in myth that peers have more influence on young people than do their parents, particularly when it comes to religion.
"It's counterintuitive, but parents have the most important effect," he says. What parents believe and how they act on that belief stays with young adults, the research showed.
Yet, while 53 percent of young adults remain in the faith traditions of their youth, 40 percent do not.
Among young people ages 18 through 23, 15 percent are devoutly committed to their faith, a group he said includes conservative Catholics, Mormons and evangelical Christians.
Among Latter-day Saints, many of those students find their way to Brigham Young University in Provo.
But several -- who attended a recent devotional in which LDS President Thomas S. Monson spoke -- say that attending a church-owned school does not guarantee one keeps the faith.
"It's not necessarily the institution you attend, but your own convictions," says Katie Hill, who has attended both BYU and Utah Valley University in nearby Orem and is preparing to leave on an LDS mission in November.
"The Lord isn't going to help us more because we're at BYU," says her friend, Brady Rice, who just returned from a mission to Taiwan and is majoring in Chinese.
Nonetheless, Elise May, BYU's student-body president, says it helps to be surrounded by others who share the religion. "We're able to strengthen one another in our faith."
Her father, Mark May, of Salt Lake City, says the family didn't send Elise to BYU to assure she kept close to the church.
"She came here," he says, "to strengthen the faith and testimony of others."
Other devout LDS students say they attend the U. so they can experience more diversity.
"I like ... to see the other side of the story," says Robert LeCheminant, who served an LDS mission to Anaheim, Calif., and is studying jazz composition at the U. "It challenges me. It makes me have to be strong in what I believe. I'm not complacent."
No firm numbers are available, but estimates show about half the U. students are Mormon. And the east-bench campus, like many others in Utah and elsewhere, has an LDS Institute of Religion.
Alex Madsen, who began classes at the University of Puget Sound this fall, says it isn't as easy to be a Mormon on a campus with only a handful of other Latter-day Saints.
A Magna native who previously earned an associate's degree at Ephraim's Snow College, she arrived on the Tacoma, Wash., campus without ever having visited or even chatted with another student. She believes God wants her there to expose her to diverse ways of thinking and living.
Only two LDS students showed up at a recent meeting to organize a church-centered social group. Nonetheless, Madsen remains strong in her faith.
"I know that, for me, my church is true. That's one thing that keeps me going. Without it, I don't know where I'd be, and I don't intend to find out."
Smith says he and his colleagues have found a number of reasons college students drop out of religious practice: They move a lot. They are interested in partying and other activities that their religions frown on. And they want to be independent of their parents..
Young people also lead busy lives, he says, and most faith congregations cater to families, not single young adults.
Both of those latter factors are part of why Minna Shim no longer attends the Korean Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City, where she was a member for years. She is a senior at the U. in international studies.
"It's just school, school, school, work, work, work," Shim says. "I don't have time to think about it."
Besides, she adds, since the church lost its coordinator for young-adult programs, there is no ministry targeting the nearly two dozen college-age people who used to attend.
"I just decided not to go anymore, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that, as a Christian."
The friends who recently parked above the cemetery, Gehrke, Munn, Drew Baker and Nathaniel Hinckley -- once were committed Mormons. Now they feel bound by their common interests in drama -- they are all theater majors -- and spirituality.
"We are really spiritual people," Gehrke says. "I still love the teachings of Christ. I just don't believe the way the church teaches it."
They spend countless hours talking about spirituality and the wisdom found in many faith traditions: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism.
"Truth is truth, no matter where you find it," Munn says. "I have never been in a happier place than now, spiritually."
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