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, I’m going to present what happens between the teen years (13-17) and the emerging adult years (18-23), according to Souls in Transition, in regards to religious practices. As we found yesterday, the general trend is away from religious affiliation and toward nonreligious sentiments, although that trend is relatively slight (about a 10 to 15-point shift toward nonbelief among emerging adults). Today we’ll see that in the actual practices that emerging adults report they regularly engage in, the shift is more significant.
First, the number of emerging adults who attend church once per week or more drops sharply — basically in half among conservative Protestants, mainliners, and Catholics. This comes as no great shock to any youth worker or parent who’s sent kids off to school and have them return for Christmas break saying, “Oh, yeah, I heard of a really good church, but I never made. I’m definitely going to go there next semester. It’s just really hard to get up on Sunday mornings, and I don’t have a car, and…”
Next, percentages of emerging adults who claim to pray daily also drops, although not quite as dramatically. Most notable here is the differences, even to begin with, between evangelicals and Catholics on the one hand, and mainliners and Black Protestants on the other.
And third, we’ve got a graph tilted in the other direction! Unfortunately, it charts the numbers who claim that they never read the Bible.
Like yesterday, we can begin to draw theological conclusions based on this sociological data. But, while we see that the mainline church seems to struggle to teach their youth to pray and read the Bible, it’s also worth noting that the youth who come out of conservative Protestantism drop their religious practices at the same rate when they become emerging adults.
Hey Tony,
I’m 21 and I fall into the emergent category, I guess. I think that my experience is like a pendulum. When I moved from Texas after I graduated from my Christian high school and started living in Missouri, the pendulum swung wildly to the left.
First, it was invigorating to forsake all I had been raised to believe. Second, it was a bit of repentance for believing some harmful theologies that I did. This was a very necessary part of growth for me.
Lately, I’ve been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with where I’m at. You could call it growing pains. I spent so much time being cynical about church as an organization, and I still have my deep reservations about the legitimacy of such a hierarchical institution in an open-sourced world; but even moreso, I want to feel hope about the mission of God as it relates to my place in the world. I think these sentiments echo many people’s who are my age. We’ve been burned by church and we’ve been through hell trying to figure stuff out, and we are ready to begin to contribute to something again.
Anyway, you should follow me on Twitter!
Alex