Well, that is a tendency of college students in general, I think.  I used to work at a Christian college in a program that tried to get students to integrate faith and social justice and they tended to do the same thing, albeit from a slightly different direction. "I am going to care about the poor and no Christians have ever done that before!"  They grow out of it eventually - or at least some do.  I guess a lot of us want to think that we are more groundbreaking and original than we really are.

I think it's a symptom of our highly individualistic culture that many people- whether inside or outside of religion - tend to think that their view of the world and spirituality just sprang out of nowhere.  I've seen the same thing with the "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship" line - as if the way that a person interprets Jesus has nothing to do with their location in history and culture and that there aren't wildly varying interpretations of Christianity and what it means.

And I think the answers you get depend on the questions you ask.  If you asked me, "Why aren't you a Christian anymore?", you'd get one kind of answer, one that would be predominantly negative.  If you asked me, "What does your spiritual practice look like?" or "How do you experience the Divine?", you'd get a very different sort of answer.