Books and Culture has an interview of Christian Smith conducted by Michael Cromartie in which Smith assesses the spiritual state of American youth with wonderfully impressive precision. The interview should be an absolute must read for every parent, teacher, and religious leader in America. It's an extensive piece and is filled with wisdom and insight. Indeed, Smith says things that many parents and teachers have intuitively believed to be true but seldom saw endorsed by any cultural authority and rarely so cogently. Smith is such an authority. Here's the introduction B&C gives him:
Christian Smith is Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. One of the most influential and widely cited sociologists of his generation, he is the author of many provocative books....His latest book, due in March from Oxford, is Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton. Based on the National Study of Youth and Religion, an unprecedented survey conducted from 2001 to 2005, the book opens a window on the religious beliefs and practices of American teens.
In the course of the interview Smith points out, among other things, the following:
Teenagers today (and I am talking about 13- to 17-year-olds) are invested in society as it is and in mainstream values. They are well socialized into the mainstream, they are committed to it, and they want to succeed in it. From the Sixties we've inherited the notion of the "generation gap," but that model simply isn't adequate to describe what we are dealing with today. For the most part, young people have a great deal in common with their parents and share their values. That may not be immediately apparent, but underneath, not too far below the surface, there is a lot of commonality.
We've been conditioned to look for kids who can't stand traditional religion. But that's just not the case! Most kids are quite happy to go with whatever they are raised to believe; they are not kicking and screaming on the way to church. On the contrary: most teenagers have a very benign attitude toward religion.
Lots of people think that a key category for young people is "spiritual but not religious." What we found is that this concept is not even on their radar screen. But one thing that most teens emphatically don't want to be is "too religious." They want to be religious, but they don't want to be perceived as overzealous, uncool, embarrassingly intense about their faith. They have an image in their mind of one kid in their high school who walks around with buttons and badges all day carrying a Bible, and they think that that's wacko.
It really struck us in our research that very few teens are getting a chance to practice talking about their faith. We were dumbfounded by the number of teens who told us we were the first adults who had asked them what they believed. One said: "I do not know. No one has ever asked me that before."
Very few teens are hardcore relativists. In fact, they are quite moralistic. They will confidently assert that certain things are right or wrong. What they can't do is explain why that's the case, or what's behind their thinking.
Based on our findings, I suggest that the de facto religious faith of the majority of American teens is "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." God exists. God created the world. God set up some kind of moral structure. God wants me to be nice. He wants me to be pleasant, wants me to get along with people. That's teen morality. The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good, and good people go to heaven. And nearly everyone's good.
It's unbelievable the proportion of conservative Protestant teens who do not seem to grasp elementary concepts of the gospel concerning grace and justification. Their view is: be a good person.
It turns out when you look at the structure of teenagers' lives, and their schedules, religion fits in a very small piece of all that. It's actually amazing to me that religion has any effect in teenagers' lives. Part of the structure, too, is that what really matters to teenagers is their socially significant relationships. If teenagers have socially significant relationships that cross at church, that cross with other families of believers, then that helps out a lot. But many teenagers have their socially significant relationships almost exclusively through school; even if they have friends at church, the youth group is a satellite out there on the fringe of their life, rather than at the center.
Despite their abject failure at the level of conscious articulation of their faith, on every measure of life outcome-relationship with family, doing well at school, avoiding risk behaviors, everything-highly religious teens are doing much better than non-religious kids. It's just a remarkable observable difference....there are all sorts of other benefits from simply being connected to a religious organization-social capital, social ties, and so on-that empirically make a difference. That's not excusing the relative failure of religious educators, but the difference is there. Highly religious American teens are happier and healthier. They are doing better in school, they have more hopeful futures, they get along with their parents better. Name a social outcome that you care about, and the highly religious kids are doing better.
Non-religious teens are more likely to say, "who cares?" Who cares about suffering, who cares about old people? By every measure we have, religious kids are more likely to live out their faith in terms of volunteering and taking care of people. It's the more religious kids who are more involved in their communities, more civically active. So there are real differences.
This is one of the things that really hit us hard: that parents still have an enormous amount of influence on their kids' lives, even though I'm sure that's very hard for them to believe at times. Adolescents are not routinely coming to their parents and saying "thanks so much for steering me in the right direction. I really appreciate it. I really want you to know that you are a big influence." They don't say it, but it's still a fact. Parents have a lot more influence, and therefore responsibility, than they realize. Teenagers will never admit that they look to their parents for guidance, but most do.
Most, though not all, religious educators in this country are failing. Most young people are not being formed primarily by their religious faith traditions; rather, they are being formed by other notions and ideologies. And in part this is because adults are afraid to teach. They are afraid of young people. They are afraid of not looking cool when they teach real substance....And yet youth actually want to be taught something, even if they eventually reject it. They at least want to have something to reject, rather than an attitude of anything goes. Teens need an opportunity to articulate, to think and to make arguments in environments that will be challenging to their faith. And I don't think they are getting that. In general, religious traditions that expect more and demand more of their youth get more. And those that are more compromising, more accommodating, more anything-goes, end up not getting much.
There's much more at the link. One of the messages that comes through in this piece is that parents should not be reluctant to talk to their children about the fundamentals of their religious faith, and they should be very willing to put up with whatever resistance some kids might offer to attending religious services. The benefits to the child in the long run are, of course, immeasurable.
On the other hand, parents also should ensure that the services they take their kids to offer more than just babysitting and social interaction. Teenagers both want and need to talk about their deepest convictions. They want and need to learn what it is their religion is all about, what it's based upon, and how it answers the most profound questions of life. Even if they reject it down the road, as Smith says, they need to know that they're rejecting something substantial and consequential. If they do the chances that they'll eventually come back to it are far better than if they perceive shedding their faith to be on a par with discarding a threadbare, ill-fitting, unfashionable coat.