Christian Smith: Getting a Life ~ The challenge of emerging adulthood

There are not many people who spend as much time researching young people and faith as Christian Smith,  now the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Director of the Center for the Sociology of Religion, and Principal Investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion in the College of Arts & Letters at Notre Dame.  In the book he did with Melinda Lundquist Denton Soul Searching, the findings of The National Study of Youth and Religion are reported and analyzed.

Smith has a piece in the Nov/Dec Books & Culture that I'd love to be required reading for anyone over 31 -

 
Getting a Life
The challenge of emerging adulthood

Smith reviews recent works from researchers in sociology, psychology, and human development on the time of life between ages 18 and 30, a phase which in recent decades has morphed into a new experience for many.

This section is a sort of of show-stopper for the manner in which faith communities work to form faith:

Jeffrey Arnett explored the religious beliefs and practices of the more than one hundred emerging adults he interviewed in various locations around the country. Here is what he concluded:

The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults' religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood … . In statistical analyses [of interview subjects' answers], there was no relationship between exposure to religious training in childhood and any aspect of their religious beliefs as emerging adults … . This is a different pattern than is found in adolescence [which reflects greater continuity] … . Evidently something changes between adolescence and emerging adulthood that dissolves the link between the religious beliefs of parents and the beliefs of their children.

Although the transmission of religious faith is not a central concern of Arnett's, he still finds this observation startling. He writes, "How could it be that childhood religious training makes no difference in the kinds of religious beliefs and practices people have by the time they reach emerging adulthood? It doesn't seem to make sense … . It all comes to naught in emerging adulthood? Yet that seems to be the truth of it, surprising as that may be." Need I say that these findings raise serious questions? To be sure, Arnett is not working with nationally representative data, and so his findings must be viewed with some skepticism. Even so, the very possibility should make Christians sit up and notice.

In his chapter in On the Frontier of Adulthood, National Opinion Research Centers survey researcher Tom Smith analyzes religious differences across age cohorts and across time. He finds that young adults today attend church less, pray less, are less likely to believe the Bible is the word of God, less likely to be Protestant, more likely to identify as non-religious, and have less confidence in organized religion than older adults. At the same time, they are more likely than older adults to believe in life after death.

Young adults are also, for the record, more likely to have grown up in a broken home, less likely to believe human nature is good, more likely to be distrustful of other people and of social institutions generally, less likely to read the newspaper, more likely to expect a world war, much more likely to have viewed a pornographic movie, and much more liberal about sex, divorce, and other social issues than are older adults. Some of this has also changed across young adult cohorts over time. For instance, compared to emerging adults of the same ages in 1973 and 1985, emerging adults more recently are more likely to identify as non-religious and are less likely to be Protestant, attend church, pray, and believe the Bible is God's word. Today's emerging adults compared to those of previous decades are also more distrustful of other people, less likely to vote and read the newspaper, less likely to watch a lot of television, more likely to be in favor of making divorce harder, less in favor of legalizing marijuana, less in favor of teenagers having sex, more in favor of making pornography illegal to all, more likely to expect a world war, and more likely to answer "Don't Know" to survey questions. The picture is obviously complex. Emerging adults will take time and effort to understand well.

Smith avoids a simple prescription or a 7-step plan to "evangelize the future of the church" - instead he calmly holds a mirror up for all of us to look into reality:

How does or should American Christianity speak to emerging adults as people and emerging adulthood as a cultural fact? How can the church faithfully speak the gospel to 18- to 30-year-olds? The answer is surely not for the church to fall all over itself to quickly reconstruct its message and practices to somehow become more "relevant" to emerging adults. But oblivious disregard for emerging adulthood and the larger meanings and challenges it raises for church and culture surely won't do either. For starters, American Christians—parents, pastors, seminary professors, counselors, educators, and more—can simply become better informed about the emerging adulthood phenomenon. Most people probably have at least a vague sense that something has changed on the road to full adulthood. But more clearly grasping the social forces generating emerging adulthood, its typical characteristics and concerns, and their implications for a faithful church will require sustained effort. Recently published good scholarship, in particular the books discussed here, provides a very helpful start in that direction. Having engaged and digested their findings, we will be better positioned to carry on the important discussions that emerging adulthood should provoke.

Finally, in considering the challenge of emerging adulthood, another approach that will not do is to project sole blame onto emerging adults themselves or "the culture" as some amorphous Other. If anything, the challenge of emerging adulthood raises hard questions about the extent to which American Christians have bought into the values and commitments of the larger world. How different, really, are American Christians when it comes to assumptions and practices around personal autonomy, money, lifestyle consumerism, self-gratification, and relational commitments? I am not suggesting there are clear and easy answers here. But it is worth remembering that a church that is not much different from the larger culture is going to have little distinctive or helpful to offer that culture when it comes to issues such as those posed by emerging adulthood. By grappling with emerging adulthood, then, we face the opportunity not so much for criticizing and lamenting others as for some good, hard, self-critical reflection and discussion.

Comments

[Paul Fromont]

Cheers Bob. I shall look forward to reading and engaging with it from within a New Zealand context...

[marko]

FYI, chris smith is at notre dame now, not UNC.

[steve hollinghurst]

Bob
as ever good material gathered, and very exiting for me. i'm currenltuy writing a book for a major christian publisher looking at cross-cultural evangelism in todays world. a big question is about cultural patterns and belief amongst the yougn in relation to global trends in chnaing beleif. the pattern that you are seeing in the research you survey fits the European pattern....which i was expecting to start seeing but most people think 'isn't happening in the US' OK i shouldn't be excited as that's bad news, but if folks int he US begin to see it then perhaps it can help kick start a much needed global mission conversation in which the US and other nation churches really need each other.....which is kind of ironic when int he church family Bob and i share all moves seem currently on to shut the US church out....i just can't help feeling this isn't a co-incidence? and you can take that suggestion a number of ways BTW