Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

by Christian Smith

In many discussions and activities revolving around better understanding and helping teenagers, one aspect of their lives seems frequently to go unnoticed, unconsidered, unexamined. That is their religious and spiritual lives. Very few efforts to better understand American adolescents take seriously their religious faith and spiritual practices.

reading many published overview reports on adolescence can leave one with the distinct impression that American youth simply do not have religious and spiritual lives.'

American adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 represent about 14 percent of all Americans, a population deserving the scholarly attention of sociologists of religion as much as any other group.

Many claim that youth are particularly influenced by a contemporary postmodern culture that profoundly reconfigures understandings of knowledge, belief, and moral reasoning.9 Youth are sometimes thought to have the shallowest roots in the substance of their own historical religious traditions, knowing or caring the least about the distinctive content of their own faiths, and so quite open to alternative viewpoints.10

For these and other reasons, we might expect American teenagers to serve as excellent indicators of possible developing trends in American religion more broadly.

The pages that follow do not engage in hypothesis testing per se but seek to use recent claims about profound changes under way in American religion as sensitizing questions and framing devices in our analyses. In this way, we may learn a great deal not only about adolescent religion and spirituality specificall...

I asked joy to explain how it was that she decided she was not a Christian. "I don't know, there's just a bunch of different, when I was feeling suicidal and everything, I guess I didn't think God cared that much or it really didn't matter to me if he did, I guess. I just, I'm not, let's see, how I, I don't think I could really lead a Christian life. I'm not strong enough to do that and go out and tell people about that. I can't do that." So, she thinks that being a Christian means behaving in a certain demanding way of life and she realized she couldn't do that? "Yeah, that's pretty much all it was."

I started having the feeling, though not the time then to figure it out, that there was some connection between that newsletter's messages and joy's current spiritual condition.

Joy thinks all religions are true, in the sense that there are people who sincerely believe in them, and that's fine for them. Could someone follow more than one religion? "No, I don't think you could at the same time. You need to research and find what [one] you want to do." When it comes to morality, joy thinks people usually know what is right and wrong, they just choose to do what they want to.

What, I ask, makes them wrong? " 'Cause I get in trouble for it." We go back and forth about morality.

She clearly believes certain things are just wrong but cannot explain why they are, what makes them so. It seems in the end the fact that other people thi...

The fact that her friend's father smokes pot and offered it to help comfort joy in her grief did not strike her as remarkable. "Oh yeah, just about everybody I know has either tried it or continuously does it." Lately, however, joy mostly smokes pot at her 23-year-old boyfriend's house. Don't her parents realize she does this stuff? "No, I guess we just, we got ways." To keep it hidden? "Yeah."

So Jim seems to function as joy's substitute father, an older man unconsciously serving emotionally in place of the one who was never there with joy to cuddle affectionately on the sofa in front of the television. But Jim isn't the oldest man joy has dated. She had been dating Jim's older brother before Jim, but when that brother dumped her, Jim asked her out on a date. She accepted, though for a while felt guilty for dating her former boyfriend's brother. But they're all good friends now, she says.

I was also perplexed and confused that a child raised by Christian parents in a Baptist church seemed to have understood so little of the Christian message. Had joy simply never absorbed the Christian gospel preached in her church? Or was this church not even teaching its own faith tradition's message of God's compassion, grace, and forgiveness, and a calling to become a loved child of God?

Although Kristen's family had been Christian all her life, this event seems to have been a religious turning point: "My mom then just really trusted in God and went to the Word [the Bible] and then two years later she took us out of school and home-schooled us for three years and we did some really great curriculum that was just all focused around the Bible.

Kristen was perhaps the most well-adjusted, mature, civically involved, compassionate, and religiously serious teenager I interviewed the entire summer.

"I believe that Jesus is God's Son and that he came and he died for me and for everyone else because we're all sinners and that he didn't stay dead but he rose again and he wants us to come live with him and we just need to admit that we're sinners and believe that he came and died on the cross and rose again and just choose to follow him." Okay. Who or what, I then ask, is God? "He's everything," she replies. "He's a father, like I learned, even though you may not have a dad, he's still a father, he disciplines like a father, he's a good friend, he's a provider, he cares. He is a merciful God, but he is also just."

But even if there's not, I don't think there's anything else better to believe 'cause then you've lost hope. Sometimes I wonder, there's so many other religions and they all claim to be true and I claim mine to be true and so, you know, what's right? And then I think, whatever it is, [Christianity] is the best that I've heard."

that she is against a compartmentalized religious life.

Kristen also says religious faith affects her family life: "It has a lot to do with how we treat each other, by forgiving one another and holding each other accountable-that's a big thing in our family-my sisters and I calling each other on weak points but also encouraging each other."

nothing that's outstanding like drugs or something like that.

Many of Kristen's views have a conservative edge that many people would think prudish. For instance, she seems much concerned about the "bad language" some of her peers use. She is bothered by other girls who dress like boys, in baggy jeans and chains: "I'm just like, `be feminine! You're not a guy, get over it.' " She does not want to start dating until she is ready to get married. She believes in trusting in and submitting to her parents: "I'm pretty much looking at their perspective. I've been trying to do that lately, seeing how they would feel and how I would if I had a daughter." And she likes classical music, watches Shirley Temple and other classic movies, and frequents a video shop called Clean Flicks that carries a line of videos that has edited out bad language, violence, and sex scenes from otherwise good movies. But she says that, for herself, she feels not the least bit odd or left out of mainstream American youth culture. "I think they're the ones missing out," she exclaims, laughing. "I don't think what I'm doing is wrong." At the very least, I think to myself, she's not insecure.

it's like fantasizing."

We recount their stories, rather, for two reasons. First, they help to put a human face on this book's statistics.

The second reason we recount joy and Kristen's stories are because, even in all of the particularity of their lives, their stories do highlight many of the central themes that emerged from our interviews with all kinds of American teenagers,

American adolescents as a whole experience and represent in their lives an immense variety of religious and spiritual beliefs, practices, experiences, identities, and attitudes.

There is no one way to summarize the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers as a whole because they encompass a sweeping range on a variety of religious variables-from total religious obliviousness and...

v4 Among the more religiously serious American teenagers, religious practices appear to play an important role in their faith lives. For the committed adolescent, religion is not simply a matter of general identity or affiliation or cognitive belief. Faith for these teenagers is also activated, practiced, and formed through specific religious and spiritual practices. For such teens, faith involves their intentionally engaging in regularly enacted religious habits and works that have theological, spiritual, or moral meanings that form their lives, such as habitually worshiping with other believers, reading scriptures, praying regularly, practicing confession and forgiveness and reconciliation, engaging in service to others, using and not using one's body in particular ways, tuning into religious music and other religious art forms, and engaging in regular faith education and formation. Religious practices, in short, seem crucial to vibrant religious faith among American teens. *5 Very, very few American adolescents appear to be caught up in the much-discussed phenomenon of "spiritual seeking" by "spiritual but not religious" seekers on a quest for higher meaning.

Contrary to popular perceptions, the vast majority of American adolescents are not spiritual seekers or questers of the type often described by journalists and some scholars, but are instead mostly oriented toward and engaged in conventional religious traditions and communities.

If there is indeed a significant number of American teens who are serious and lucid about their religious faith, there is also a much larger number who are remarkably inarticulate and befuddled about religion. Interviewing teens, one finds little evidence that the agents of religious socialization in this country ...

For American adolescents more broadly, the structure of relational networks and institutional ties of both teens and their parents seems significantly correlated with the character of their religious faith and practice.

parents and other adults exert huge influences in the lives of American adolescents-whether for good or ill, and whether adults can perceive it or not-when it comes to religious faith and most other areas of teens' lives.

invest time into your teenager. if u dont have a teen,invest in someone else's teen. it is crucial

Adults inescapably exercise immense influence in the lives of teens-positive and negative, passive and active. The question therefore is not whether adults exert influ...

v4 Despite their frequent confusion and inarticulacy about religion, American adolescents as a whole exhibit a positive association between greater teen religious involvement and more positive outcomes in life. In general, for whatever reasons and whatever the causal directions, more highly religiously active teenagers are doing significantly...

-APS ARE GREAT for providing a big picture sense of the proportions -and contours of the spaces that we occupy.

But before getting to such meanings and complexities, we outline some of the major dimensions of adolescent religion and spirituality to build a general framework of knowledge about the proportions and distributions of the matter in question. This chapter is full of numbers and percentages, which take some effort to digest. But working through the abstract statistics pays off in providing us with a clear overview of the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. teenagers.'

three quarters of U.S. teens between 13 and 17 years old are Christians. About one-half of teens are Protestant and one-quarter are Catholic.

next largest group is the 16 percent of U.S. teens who consider themselve...

not all of this 16 percent acts n...

First, U.S. youth are not flocking in droves to "alternative" religions and spiritualities such as paganism and Wicca.

Second, it does not appear that American religion, at the adolescent level at least, is being profoundly diversified by new immigrant groups.

The vast majority of U.S. teens (like adults) are Christia...

many of those immigrants came to the United States as Christians, such as Catholic Latinos from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, and Christian believers from a variety of non-Christian nations seeking refuge from anti-Christian persecution in their home countries. In addition, some immigrant youth become Christians in the process of assimilating to U.S. culture. The third finding worth noting in table 1 is that relatively few U.S. teens (2.8 percent) affiliate with more than one religion.

U.S. teenagers as a whole are thus not religiously promiscuous faith mixers. Almost all stick with one religious faith, if any.

Among Protestants, parents of teens are evenly split at 19 percent between fundamentalist/evangelical and mainline/liberal Protestant.

findings of table 3 add to the observation that there exists a great deal of religious variation among Christian and Jewish families of U.S. teenagers when it comes to identification with alternative traditions in their religions and among all U.S. parents of teens with regard to their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum.

about three in four religious teens in the United States consider their own religious beliefs somewhat or very similar to their parents; they are more similar to mother's than to father's beliefs

table 4 and most of the tables below split out all U.S. teens for comparisons into six religious traditions by the denominations with which they affiliate

Mormon teens are the most likely among all U.S. teens to hold religious beliefs similar to their parents', followed by conservative Protestant, mainline Protestant, Catholic, and black Protestant teens. Jewish teens are comparatively the least likely to say they share the beliefs of their parents, although, to keep it in perspective, still an impressive majority of them do. If anything, then, U.S. teens lean strongly toward similarity with their parents in religious belief.

There appears to be, in other words, relatively little switching of teens away from their parents' religion into other religious traditions.