belief in God among emerging adults <\/strong>on two different charts.\u00a0 First, a line graph that shows the downward trend among all except Black Protestants.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
And second, here\u2019s a bar graph that shows the relative loss of belief in God among these same groups.\u00a0 The lines across are the averages among all American teenagers (85% of whom believe in God \u2013 gray line) and emerging adults (78% of whom believe in God \u2013 red line).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whereas the drops in relgious affiliation and practice were pretty much the same among the groups, in this metric mainline Protestants show the biggest drop at 17%<\/strong>.\u00a0 Smith has an idea about why this is so \u2014 why religious identity is weakest among more liberal Christians, and why, as a result, mainline Protestantism is shrinking.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a result of the failure of the mainline but, conversely, of its success:<\/p>\n\u201cLiberal Protestantism\u2019s core values \u2014 individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience \u2014 have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving\u2026 [H]aving won the larger battle to shape mainstream culture, it becomes difficult to sustain a strong rationale for maintaining distinctively liberal church organizations to continue to promote now omnipresent values\u201d (288).<\/p>\n
He goes on to write that even many evangelical and Catholic young adults talk about their faith in ways that are almost verbatim from the liberal theologians of the 19th and early 20th centuries \u2014 what H. Richard Niebuhr called \u201ca God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross\u201d(288).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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, we\u2019ll look at how beliefs themselves change between youth (13-17) and emerging adulthood (18-23).\u00a0 As with our forays into changes in religious affiliation […]<\/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-1050","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 Belief (aka Less God)<\/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\/18\/souls-in-transition-changes-in-belief\/\" \/>\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 Belief (aka Less God)\" \/>\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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