Teenagers care about religion — a recent survey, the most comprehensive ever done on teenagers and faith, found that four of five adolescents surveyed described religion as very important to them.
Religion matters to adolescents, the survey found, and for the most part, teenagers are not rebelling against their parents’ faith — most are sticking, at least so far, with the faith tradition in which they’ve been raised.
But many teenagers have a fuzzy understanding of their own faith — of what God is like, of what their religion teaches, of what they actually believe. Christian Smith, a sociologist from the University of North Carolina and one of the chief researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion, described the basic attitude of the teens surveyed as “God is good, people are good” — an amorphous, feel-good approach that’s becoming, among teenagers, essentially the dominant religious faith.
“They’re benignly positive about religion and faith and God,” Smith said in an interview. “There’s very little hostility or negative attitude or skepticism . . . But it just doesn’t seem that deep.”
Smith leads a research team that spoke to 3,370 teenagers ages 13 to 17 and their parents by phone in 2002 and 2003 as part of a national random telephone survey. The researchers also conducted in-depth interviews with 267 teenagers from 45 states. The work — which began in 2001 and is the largest scale look yet at the faith lives of teenagers — was funded by the Lilly Endowment.
Smith is one of the co-authors of a just-released book called “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers,” which provides the first major look at the project’s findings.
Some of the major findings are these:
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Religious involvement does help young people. The researchers found that teenagers involved with organized religion tend to do better in school; have a better self-image; make moral choices based on a sense of right-and-wrong, not just what would bring pleasure; and stay away from alcohol, drugs and sex.
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Teen religion is mostly conventional — there’s relatively little spiritual seeking or exploring of off-the-beaten-track traditions (paganism, for example, is not particularly big with teens). Not surprisingly, in the U.S. most teens consider themselves Christian; the next-biggest group is “not religious,” about 14 percent of those surveyed.
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Teens are not articulate in describing their religious beliefs. Since they are articulate on other subjects, perhaps this is an indication that they have not been well taught about faith, Smith said.
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Teenagers tend to think of religion in terms of what Smith describes as “moralistic therapeutic deism” — to see God as “a combination of divine butler and cosmic therapist.” For the most part, they think “God exists, God created the world, God wants us to be nice and good, the meaning of life is to be happy, feel good, get along with people,” Smith said. “And God is not really involved in your life that much unless you have a problem or trouble you need God to take care of. And good people go to heaven. And most people are good.”
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Regardless of what many adults think, parents do matter. Teenagers listen to what their parents say about religion and faith.
A lot of adults think that teenagers won’t pay attention to them, so they don’t bother trying, Smith said. Adults — including many parents, essentially say of teens: ‘Well, they’re from another planet, they’ll come back (to church) after they grow up and have kids. Until then, we’ll just ignore them” and hope for the best.
Instead, Smith said, the research found that teenagers share their parents’ values to a surprising degree — they tend to be more conventional in their approach to religion than rebellious. Smith said he expected to find many more teenagers than the researchers did in the “spiritually seeking” or “spiritual but not religious camps” (although he said most teens didn’t want to be seen as “too religious” either).
The amount of spiritual seeking or exploration may change, he said, as these teenagers grow older, move out of their parents’ homes and go off to college or work or travel. They may feel freer then to explore spiritually or break ties with their own religious traditions — the project has another grant to follow these teenagers over the next several years and do additional interviewing to see how their attitudes about religion develop and change as they move into young adulthood.
But for now, when they’re still at home, the chance exists for parents and others in their churches to continue to have an impact. The researchers found in a preliminary report that only about 15 percent of U.S. 12th graders seemed alienated from organized religion and another 15 percent seemed disengaged.
So Smith argues that adults need to work hard to build relationships with teenagers. Engage them. Teach them about the history and foundations and meaning of their faith.
For the past nine years, Mark Yaconelli has worked with the Youth Ministry and Spirituality project at San Francisco Theological Seminary, consulting with youth ministry leaders from 11 denominations, including the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), about ways in which the traditions and practices of Christian spirituality can be integrated into discipleship programs for adolescents.
He’s been encouraging congregations to think of youth ministry creatively — to not be afraid to hook into the passion that many adolescents have to experience God and feel connected.
“Teens want relationship, connection to people outside of themselves,” Yaconelli wrote in an e-mail interview. “They want to feel valued and delighted by people outside of their family. They’re looking for a community who will claim them.”
And he wrote that “youth want to live. Their deepest fear is that they will shut down, that they’ll turn into the many adults they see who seem to be over-stressed, friendless and passionless. The question they bring to adults, churches, schools and the universe is this: ‘Do you know how to stay alive?’ “
Smith contends that the findings of his research project pose some real challenges for churches. It’s possible, for example, that teens may not be able to articulate more about what they believe because they are being taught about religion and faith by adults who aren’t particularly sure about those things themselves.
“The adults may not be able to explain it,” Smith said, “because they don’t understand it all that well either.”
Rodger Nishioka is an associate professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary and the former coordinator of youth and young adult ministries for the PC(USA). In an interview, Nishioka said he wasn’t particularly surprised by the Youth and Religion project findings — it tracks with what, in his own work, he’s heard young adults in their 20s and 30s say.
Many young adults talk of being “spiritual but not religious” — and in part what they mean is that traditional denominational life does not resonate with them, Nishioka said. For example, a classic goal of confirmation in many Protestant traditions is to make young people eligible for full church membership — but to many adolescents, the idea of being able to vote in a congregational meeting or serve on a church committee holds little appeal.
When Nishioka asks young people what it means to be Presbyterian, they’ll often answer by talking about distinctive practices — that Presbyterians baptize through sprinkling, not immersion, for example, or say “debts” instead of “trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer. But when he asks what those practices mean — why they’re done the way they are — many young people can’t explain.
Some think of God as a “candy-man God,” there to fulfill wishes and desires, Nishioka said. And others conceive of a God up in heaven “who sort of plays with us, tests us, sees how we react to certain things.” Neither approach reflects a deep Reformed understanding of God.
Often, Presbyterian congregations don’t know what to do with teenagers. They may be willing to support youth ministry financially, but they’re expecting to turn out good Presbyterians who will “be like them,” Nishioka said.
“I think what we have to be in touch with these days is how different the world in which these young people are growing up in is, and the challenges they’re facing,” he said, from religious pluralism and a sense that denominationalism doesn’t matter so much to an extended adolescence in which “the struggle for identity is huge,” and “church is there for me to meet my needs.”
Looking ahead, Nishioka said he remains optimistic — especially when young people encounter what he calls “in-breaking moments,” when they discover that the way they’d figure the world might work doesn’t hold up, “and they’re turning to the transcendent.”
He sees all around him young people acknowledging how much, these days, they cannot control.
And they wonder out loud where God might fit in.
