When I saw that you study at Notre Dame, I thought it was interesting, because you all have in house sociologist Dr. Christian Smith, who I believe has the largest data set on youth and religion surveys in the country. He was at UNC Chapel Hill and I think he left and went to Notre Dame and brought along his survey set. He\u2019s written books like Soul Searching and Souls In Transition, and does a lot with youth and religion.<\/span> When I saw that you study at Notre Dame, I thought it was interesting, because you all have in house sociologist Dr. Christian Smith, who I believe has the largest data set on youth and religion surveys in the country. He was at UNC Chapel Hill and I think he left and went to Notre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
<\/span>I actually wrote an article not too long ago called \u201cHabits of the Heart\u201d that was featured in [a special issue on Race, Religion, and Late Democracy of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science] and I sent it to him, but I never got a response. But my research actually shows the opposite of what he\u2019s doing with youth and religion. I lean way to the left on the youth and religion stuff, he leans a bit to the right. Most of his work on youth and religion is motivated by different interests \u2014 whether they\u2019re conscious of it or whether they make it explicit in the work itself \u2014 of saying that religion among young people is drastically changing, that there\u2019s a sharp decline. When they say that what they mean is that there\u2019s a sharp decline in youth participation in institutional religion. So that is to say, \u2018Well if young people aren\u2019t going to church, then what are they doing?\u2019 and then scholars such as Christian Smith might suggest \u2018Well, they\u2019re on this postmodern individual quest for spirituality but it doesn\u2019t look like any religion we know and we don\u2019t know how to categorize it.\u2019<\/span>
<\/span>So it\u2019s just interesting because what motivates that type of scholarship is this conservative concern about how to keep churches in business, how do we maintain that market maintenance of the church. My research shows that those kind of studies are flawed because of what they study as \u2018belief\u2019 \u2014 they\u2019re actually studying primary processes of socialization. So in other words, if I were to study what you believe about religion, I might ask you questions about growing up, or your parents\u2019 religion, what kind of church you go to, and more often than not, your answers to my questions about your religion are going to say more about your primary socialization than what you actually do in your every day practices currently. So there\u2019s that disconnect between the two. So I try to focus not on claims to belief but on what young people do in their everyday lives like how do they deal with Christianity, reject religion, how do they remake it into something that is not yet captured in studies. So I\u2019m on the other side of where Christian Smith is at.<\/span>
<\/span>Kelsey Manning: So what you\u2019ve said is that this book is calling for a redefinition of what religion is \u2014 is that correct?<\/span>
<\/span>Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"