“We don’t want to offend people, but we don’t want to be offended,” said Stella Burak, 20. “We have to be tolerant of so many things, but nobody has to be tolerant of religion.” Like the school administrators who supported the dorm, students argue that the Newman hall is not, as it was originally marketed, a dorm designed for Christians on the campus of a public university. “It is faith-based housing, but faith can be anything from atheism to Catholicism,” said Dom Godwin, a 19-year-old Catholic. Less than 3 percent of Alabama’s population is Catholic.

TROY, Ala. — There are many clues that life at the newest residence hall on the campus of Troy University is not centered on parties and beer.

In the lobby, students with Bibles gather to offer Christian testimony. On a dorm-room door, a chalkboard holds a passage from Psalms.

And in the 2,300-square-foot Catholic-run ministry center, evenings are given over to clergy-led discussions on the meaning of God and a few good-natured rounds of “Stump the Priest.”

Citing reports from students who say they are hungry for more faith-based options on campus and national surveys that show a strong interest in spirituality among college freshman, officials at Troy, Alabama’s third-largest public university, this semester opened the Newman Center residence hall, a roomy 376-bed dormitory that caters to students who want a residential experience infused with religion.

Kosher dorms, Christian fraternity houses and specialized housing based on values have become part of modern college life. But the dorm on this campus of 7,000 students is among a new wave of religious-themed housing that constitutional scholars and others say is pushing the boundaries of how much a public university can back religion.

Officials said the dorm met a growing demand and did not conflict with the Constitution.

“It is not about proselytizing, but about bringing a values-based opportunity to this campus,” said Troy’s chancellor, Jack Hawkins Jr. “The parents are the most excited. I’ve had calls to get me to intervene to get their son or daughter in there.”

Others are less convinced.

“This is too cozy,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, a founder and president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. “We are very concerned about this idea of religious-based dorms. This is very insidious.”

The foundation, based in Madison, Wis., argues that the Newman hall’s purpose was to create a space that favored religious students and thus was a violation of the Constitution.

The dormitory is part of a new push into housing by the Catholic ministry that runs hundreds of Newman Centers on non-Catholic university campuses.

This year, the Newman Student Housing Fund, a private Catholic development company, helped open two residence halls at public universities, the one at Troy and one at the Texas A&M University campus in Kingsville. They are modeled on the Newman Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which opened in 1926 and houses 586 students, most of them Catholic.

The company, which also opened a dorm at the private Florida Institute of Technology this semester, has plans to expand to a public university in Florida next year and to keep rolling out a dorm or two each year over the next decade, said Matt Zerrusen, the president of the fund.

The South, with its large population of churchgoers, is particularly ripe. “It’s definitely an evangelization opportunity, which is why we went down there,” he said.

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