This is part of a series of posts in which I’m reflecting on Christian Smith and Patricia Snell’s new book, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults.
Today, we’ll look at how beliefs themselves change between youth (13-17) and emerging adulthood (18-23). As with our forays into changes in religious affiliation and changes in religious practice, we’ll see a general trend away from conventional religiosity and toward non-religion. While the changes are not overly dramatic, they are disconcerting.
We’ll look at belief in God among emerging adults on two different charts. First, a line graph that shows the downward trend among all except Black Protestants.
And second, here’s a bar graph that shows the relative loss of belief in God among these same groups. The lines across are the averages among all American teenagers (85% of whom believe in God – gray line) and emerging adults (78% of whom believe in God – red line).
Whereas the drops in relgious affiliation and practice were pretty much the same among the groups, in this metric mainline Protestants show the biggest drop at 17%. Smith has an idea about why this is so — why religious identity is weakest among more liberal Christians, and why, as a result, mainline Protestantism is shrinking. It’s not a result of the failure of the mainline but, conversely, of its success:
“Liberal Protestantism’s core values — individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience — have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving… [H]aving won the larger battle to shape mainstream culture, it becomes difficult to sustain a strong rationale for maintaining distinctively liberal church organizations to continue to promote now omnipresent values” (288).
He goes on to write that even many evangelical and Catholic young adults talk about their faith in ways that are almost verbatim from the liberal theologians of the 19th and early 20th centuries — what H. Richard Niebuhr called “a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross”(288).
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Tony, that conclusion of Smith’s — not seen until the last chp unless I’m mistaken — was fascinating. I didn’t read the article but I wonder if it is not more dialectical than causative. In other words, has the Mainline liberal theology won in culture or has the liberal culture won in the Mainline? Do you know if the article asks the question from the other way around?
Scot and Tony,
While I suspect it’s a matter of both – the Mainline Churches affecting society and society molding the Mainlines into its image – there is also something positive to be said for the Evangelicals, who offer a Biblical Christ and a transforming Biblical faith.
I suspect the more dramatic decline that mainline churches are facing today will be similar to the decline “conservative evangelicals” will face in the years to come. If I were an evangelical, I wouldn’t celebrate these stats. They are just signs for the road ahead.
The challenge with these kinds of surveys is that the language so often (read: always) determines the results. That’s true both in terms of how the original interviewers craft the questions, and then in how those questions are interpreted by those being interviewed. I sometimes wonder about the validity of comparing the answers to certain questions over time, when the very interpretation of what those questions mean has shifted.
This leads me to something I really wonder about above all else: spirituality vs. religion. No doubt in times and generations past, people saw these terms as somewhat synonymous. In other words, in previous generations, for most people religion WAS spirituality.
That’s clearly not the case anymore. So I wonder, as we talk about the failing belief in God, what meaning are we (and young people) ascribing to God? And I wonder if that’s being simultaneously replaced with a growing belief in some “transcendent universe” or “life force”?
And maybe, despite initial appearances, those two aren’t so far apart after all. Again, a lot of it comes down to our definitions.