What do American teenagers think about religion?
Most American teenagers have a positive view of religion – they’re not hostile to it – but beyond that don’t give it much thought. Many lack a theological language to express their faith; they can’t put into words what they believe. They see God as kind of a “divine butler,” who wants people to be basically nice and good, and will step up to help when people get stuck or worried and ring the bell.
Those are some of the findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a ground-breaking study conducted from 2002 to 2005 of more than 3,300 teenagers ages 13 to 17.
Kenda Creasy Dean — a member of the research team that conducted the study, and an associate professor of youth, church and culture at Princeton Theological Seminary — thinks the study also tells a lot, indirectly but powerfully, about what’s happening with the parents of teenagers and with the congregations they attend.
Dean, a Methodist minister, writes this in the opening pages of her just-released book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church: “Here is the gist of what you are about to read: American young people are, theoretically, fine with religious faith – but it does not concern them very much, and it is not durable enough to survive long after they graduate from high school. One more thing: we’re responsible.”
Church barometers
The adults are responsible, Dean says, because in many ways the teenagers’ tepid response to religion reflects a lack of clarity among their parents and among adults from their congregations about their own beliefs. In other words, the teenagers don’t have much to say about faith because many of the adults around them don’t either.
As she writes in Almost Christian: “The National Study of Youth and Religion reveals a theological fault line running underneath American churches: an adherence to a do-good, feel-good spirituality that has little to do with the Triune God of Christian tradition and even less to do with loving Jesus Christ enough to follow him into the world.”
For teenagers, that translates into growing up in church circles in which people often do not speak directly and personally about their faith, and may not readily demonstrate how their faith changes the ways in which they live and act outside of church.
“We are not going to solve this problem without addressing the church as well,” Dean said in an interview. “That’s the wake-up call for me. It’s not a youth ministry issue. It’s young people serving as a barometer of American churches. … The only way you can learn to speak a language is to be in a community that speaks it. Young people tell us they are mirroring what the adult world is communicating to them.”
As she writes in Almost Christian: “The problem does not seem to be that churches are teaching young people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job of teaching youth what we really believe: namely, that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little, and that the church is a helpful social institution filled with nice people focused primarily on ‘folks like us’ – which, of course, begs the question of whether we are really the church at all.”
As a result, “Teenagers tend to approach religious participation, like music and sports, as an extracurricular activity: a good, well-rounded thing to do, but unnecessary for an integrated life,” Dean writes. “What we have been less able to convey to young people is faith.”
Religion by proximity
In an interview, Dean said parents may too often assume that teenagers will form ideas about religion sort of by osmosis – by being in church and youth group, just by being around Christians. But often that’s not enough.
Dean recalls well one teenager girl she interviewed as part of the research.
“Here’s a kid who had been in church since she could walk,” Dean said. She was raised in a Presbyterian church, “she loved her church, she loved the people who were in it. But she had absolutely no way to describe anything that’s going on there theologically.”
Dean asked the girl, “What do you think about God?”
And “I remember the look that went across her face was like, ‘Really? I don’t know!’ This chatty girl just suddenly clamped down. … She didn’t have a way to describe what I was asking her.”
Dean doesn’t buy the argument of some persons that teenagers are just inherently inarticulate about big issues. “Teenagers have a lot to say about any number of subjects, and can talk about significant subjects,” she said. “Even politics and relationship issues, drugs and alcohol and sex, they can talk about with great nuance. Faith doesn’t happen to be one of the things we’ve given them nuances to talk about.”
Parents may expect that sending their teenagers to youth group at church is enough.
“Youth pastors are not responsible for your child’s faith,” Dean said. “The idea that you take your kids to church to get them done by a professional simply doesn’t hold. … Faith is part of a narrative. … That means you have to live inside that story in a way that is three-dimensional. It can’t be just a couple of hours on Sunday.”
For parents, that means that faith “has to matter to you and it has to matter to you in a big-enough way that it actually changes something for you as a parent, as a family member, as a person in the world,” she said.
Sometimes, that can mean parents talking explicitly with their children about why they do what they do. Dean remembers clearly, for example, the Thanksgiving Day when a homeless man who occasionally turned to her grandmother for help knocked on the door. “My grandmother opened the door and said, `Mr. Edwards, I’m so glad you’re here! Come on in. Pull up a chair.’”
She has passed that story on to her own children, saying explicitly that her grandmother treated Mr. Edwards with respect because of her Christian faith. She tells them: “This is who we are as a family. This is the goal we want to have – to be people who live like this, who treat people like this.” Because of what Jesus taught, “This is who I want to be.”
Competing narratives
Adults also need to remember, Dean said, that teenagers are forming their religious views in a pluralistic world, and one that offers young people many variations of themes with which to align their lives and beliefs. They have friends from other religious traditions; they have friends who see no value in organized religion at all, or any real consistency between what’s preached from the pulpit and the way that people who sit in the pews on Sundays act outside of church.
“It used to be that Christianity was one of two or three possible narratives you could choose from, and it was the dominant one,” Dean said. “That’s no longer true. With the Internet and globalization and the information age, young people have thousands of possible narratives they could use to describe their lives. The church does not know how to be in a world where they are not the dominant narrative.”
From a historic point of view, however, “we can learn from the fact that the early church was in a pluralistic world that is much closer to the world our kids are in right now than being in Christendom,” she said. The message of Christianity “took hold in the world where it was a minority story, and it had a massive transformative impact.”
“We’re asking them (teenagers) to be Christians in a world where most people think it’s a bad thing, or make-believe or irrelevant, where there’s a lot of anger directed towards religious people, and some of that anger is justified. … When we are asking them to be Christians, we are asking them to do a very counter-cultural thing.”
So Dean urges adults who want to convince teenagers to give Christianity a chance to do something distinctive out in the world, and to be clear they’re doing it because of their faith. She encourages parents to “do something that strikes at the root of who we are as Christians,” and to articulate their motivation.
“Probably the most radical thing you could do about your faith is to make it matter, and to let it shape those daily small things you’re confronted with,” Dean said “When it comes time to figure out what to do with your income, you try to give more away than less.” And then say: “It’s true that other people need things, but this is also the way Jesus calls us to live.”
Sometimes, teenagers or their parents aren’t sure why they’re in church to start with. The question these days isn’t “How can we keep young people in church?” Dean writes, but “Does the church matter?”
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