Youth Truth
Soul Searching: The Religious and
Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers
by Christian Smith, with Melinda Lundquist
Denton
Oxford University Press, 2005
(368 pages, $25.00, hardcover)
reviewed by W. Bradford Wilcox
A probing and provocative look at the souls of American teenagers, Soul Searching will, at various turns, leave Christians satisfied and sobered. Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, directs the National Study of Youth and Religion, from which the book’s data was taken. Denton, a doctoral candidate at the university, is its project manager.
Positive Religion
I was satisfied by the clear connections that Smith makes between cult, community, and character. Teenagers in the United States who express strong religious faith, who pray individually and corporately, and who are involved in a church youth group are significantly less likely to get into trouble and are significantly more likely to be a force for good in their local community. Clearly, religion is a source of moral order for many American adolescents.
The statistics tell part of the story. Take honesty. Smith finds that four percent of “devoted” students report lying “fairly or very often” to their parents, compared to sixteen percent of the religiously “disengaged.” Or school performance. One percent of devoted students report being suspended or expelled from school on numerous occasions, compared to nine percent of religiously disengaged students.
Or helping the poor. In the book, twenty percent of devoted teens report helping needy people “a lot,” compared to four percent of disengaged students. Smith finds that the positive associations between religious devotion and virtue, and the negative associations between religious devotion and vice, repeat themselves on a range of social indicators—from charitable donations to cheating in school.
Smith is also honest enough to admit that religious faith may not be the only factor driving this positive correlation between religion and good behavior. He acknowledges, for instance, that teens with particular types of personalities—a desire for risk, for instance—appear to be less inclined to religion and more susceptible to vice. He also acknowledges that teenagers who fall into trouble may disassociate themselves from religious congregations and youth groups in an effort to “reduce their cognitive and emotional dissonance” with church norms.
Nevertheless, the consistent character and size of the association between religion and good behavior in this and other studies of adolescents strongly suggest that religion does play an important role in fostering virtue among adolescents. Indeed, Smith outlines a range of factors—from the moral directives aimed at adolescents by American religions to the congregational social networks that link a large minority of American teens to adults who care about their spiritual, moral, and emotional welfare—that may help to explain precisely why religion fosters good behavior among adolescents. Indeed, his chapter on adolescent outcomes offers the most thorough account of the potential mechanisms that link religion and virtuous behavior that I have ever read.
Unknown Religion
But Soul Searching also left me sobered by the portrait it painted of American teenagers’ spiritual lives. With the exception of many Mormon and conservative Protestant teens, most American teens appear altogether unfamiliar with the most basic religious and moral teachings of their own traditions.
Indeed, as Smith argues, they seem to subscribe to an alternative American creed that he calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” This creed suggests that “God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist.”
What he means is that most American teens think that faith is about following the Golden Rule, seeking God’s help when you face a practical or emotional problem, and not otherwise worrying about the dogmatic details or religious rituals of your own particular tradition. And because they have a vaguely deistic view of God, most teenagers are not inclined to believe or to assert to others the truth claims made by their own tradition.
Once again, Smith’s statistics tell part of the story. Only 29 percent of American teenagers believe that only one religion is true; slightly less than half of teens think that people should practice only one faith; and only 32 percent of teens think that the faithful need to be involved in a religious congregation “to be truly religious and spiritual.”
To flesh out this alternative creed, Smith necessarily relies on qualitative interviews with 267 adolescents. Two quotes from his respondents illustrate the way in which teenagers subscribe to the creed of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. A conservative Protestant girl described her faith this way: “God is like someone who is always there for you. . . . He’s just like somebody that’ll always help you go through whatever you’re going through. When I became a Christian I was just praying and it always made me feel better.”
A Catholic boy responded to a question about why God matters: “’Cause God made us and if you ask him for something I believe he gives it to you. Yeah, he hasn’t let me down yet. God is a spirit that grants you anything you want, but nothing bad.” All this is a far cry, as Smith observes, from the beliefs classically articulated in the various branches of Christianity and Judaism.
Surviving Religion
My observations here lead me to my last point. Soul Searching can be read as both a vindication of and a correction to Smith’s most important previous book, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, published in 1998.
Smith showed how and why religious groups that present a clear, compelling, and distinctive vision of religion and the good life—such as Evangelical Protestantism—can thrive even in the midst of a modern world that challenges many of their beliefs. By showing that Mormonism and conservative Protestantism are experiencing considerable success in attracting high levels of faith and participation from their adolescents, Soul Searching lends further support to the claim that more sectarian religious traditions can survive and thrive in late modernity.
But the broader claim that religion in general can thrive in our modern world, which Smith made in American Evangelicalism, is not supported by his findings in Soul Searching. His latest book shows that more churchly religious traditions—such as mainline Protestantism and particularly Roman Catholicism—are much less likely to attract the faith and active participation of American adolescents in late modernity.
Because they do not actively resist the largely secular or deistic cultural currents of our day, because many of their children live in comfortable middle- and upper-class milieus that foster a consumeristic and independent outlook, and because their adolescents are deeply involved with largely secular schools and popular media, these more churchly traditions have difficulty attracting the interest and attention of their young people. They also seem singularly incapable of inculcating anything that looks like a distinctive Christian faith in their young people.
Moreover, although there has never been any Golden Era in American religion, we do know that both mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism experienced markedly higher levels of religious belief and practice earlier in the twentieth century—levels that probably were reflected among the adolescents of the time. One reason that these more churchly traditions flourished is that they had broader social and cultural support for their beliefs in the society at large—from the Legion of Decency to Sabbath laws.
Without these broader supports, these traditions have lost ground, not least in shaping the spiritual lives of their teenagers. Soul Searching provides yet more evidence that the secularizing character of the late modern world has left its mark, particularly upon the more churchly traditions that have not sought to creatively resist modernity.
For information on the National Study of Youth and Religion, see www.youthandreligion.org.
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