{Kenda Creasy Dean. Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church. Oxford University Press 2010. 264 pages. $24.95}

By Deborah Arca Mooney

From 2003-2005, researchers conducted the most ambitious study of adolescent spirituality to date in the U.S. Among the results of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), it was found that while three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, only half consider it very important, and fewer than half actually practice their faith as a regular part of their lives. Additionally, the study found the vast majority of teenagers to be “incredibly inarticulate about their faith and its meaning for their lives,” with mainline Protestant teenagers ranking among the least religiously articulate of all.

Kenda Creasy Dean, Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary and a longtime youth minister in the United Methodist Church, was one of the study’s interviewers and spent a summer talking to teenagers about their faith lives and views on religion. Her experience was the impetus for her compelling new book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, an investigation into — and an impassioned response to — the results of the NSYR study, results that she and many others in the church found quite disturbing.

Dean uses the study’s findings to deliver a challenging wake-up call to the mainline church, which she believes is passing off a mutant form of Christianity to its young people. Patheos’ Deborah Arca Mooney spoke with Dean recently about the study’s findings on teen faith, the “watered-down version of Christianity” prevalent in mainline churches, why and how the church must rediscover its sense of mission and faith language, and ultimately where hope lies for the future of the mainline church and young people longing for a faith worth living — and dying — for. [Read more...]