Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults<\/a>.<\/p>\nToday, I\u2019m going to present what happens between the teen years (13-17) and the emerging adult years (18-23), according to Souls in Transition<\/em> in regards to religious affiliation.\u00a0 There\u2019s lots of data in the book, and very many different religious groups are dealt with therein, but I\u2019ve culled the data that\u2019s most interesting to me \u2014 and probably will be to my readers \u2014 and made some graphs to better show the trends.<\/p>\nI\u2019ll do is describe the trend below, then show the graph, and then offer a bit of reflection on the numbers and trends at the end.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
First, how religious affiliation changes<\/strong> during these years.\u00a0 Affiliation is what respondents say when asked how they classify themselves religiously.\u00a0 Among both Protestants and Catholics, there\u2019s about a 10-point drop.\u00a0 Meanwhile, there\u2019s a 15-point increase among those who claim to be non-religious.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Next is the change among claimed religious traditions<\/strong>.\u00a0 Again, there\u2019s a lots among every group \u2014 the biggest loser being Catholicism \u2014 and a hearty gain in the \u201cnot religious\u201d category.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
And third, we see the change and retention among the religious traditions<\/strong>.\u00a0 What you see below is that 64% of conservative Protestants stay conservative Protestant, 10% switch to mainline, 15% become nonreligious, and 11% become something else, and so on.\u00a0 Notable here is that mainline Protestantism has the lowest retention rate, at 50%.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In the end, Smith makes it clear that emerging adults are still relatively conventional in their religious beliefs, with about 60% claiming religion of one sort or another.\u00a0 But that\u2019s down about 15 points from when this same group was teenaged, about five years ago.\u00a0 The biggest loser over those five years is mainline Protestant, and the biggest winner is nonreligious.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll get to the question of \u201cWhy\u201d in a couple days, but so far the data seem to indicate that the more progressive version of Protestantism results in young adults who are more likely to forsake their religion, especially in favor of non-belief.<\/p>\n
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This is part of a series of posts in which I\u2019m reflecting on Christian Smith and Patricia Snell\u2019s new book, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. Today, I\u2019m going to present what happens between the teen years (13-17) and the emerging adult years (18-23), according to Souls in Transition in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-christianity-in-america","category-youth-ministry"],"yoast_head":"\n
Souls in Transition: Changes in Religious Affiliation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/tonyjones\/2010\/01\/14\/souls-in-transition-changes-in-religious-affiliation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Souls in Transition: Changes in Religious Affiliation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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