Religious Life of Young Americans: What Has Gone Wrong?

Dr. Christian Smith, professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, has researched and written four books based upon one of the most comprehensive and in-depth surveys of teenagers, young adults, and their parents.

His conclusions are sobering at best.

The first book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, (2005) describes the religious faith of many teens between the ages 10-17. He states that for most teens, religion is something to personally believe in that makes one feel good and resolves one's problems. For many, God is imaged as a cosmic therapist or counselor who responds in times of trouble but who does not particularly ask for devotion or obedience.

Dr. Smith claims that this instrumental image of God is not the invention of teenagers but the dominating image of religion embraced by their parents and other adults. Smith further points out that hardly any teens spoke directly about religious subjects like repentance, love of neighbor, social justice, grace, the cost of discipleship, personal holiness, or any other of the key themes in America's main religious tradition, Christianity.

The second book, Emerging Young Adults: Souls in Transition, (2009) studies the religious life of emerging young adults ages 18-23. Dr. Smith describes their perspective of the good life as focused on material prosperity and financial security. Most want secure jobs, big incomes, whatever consumer purchases they desire, vacations, leisure, and abundance for themselves and their future families. What is left out are visions of the good that involve the transcendent, the spiritual, faith, community, the common good or an environmentally sustainable world.

The third book, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adults (2011) presents the complex issues that shadow the lives of many young adults. In the introduction, Dr. Smith applauds many of the good things going on in the lives of young adults today, but the data from his research suggests that the dark side needs to be named and taken seriously. The titles of the chapters reveal the more unsettling aspects of their lives: Morality Adrift, Captive to Consumerism, Intoxication's Fake Feeling of Happiness, The Shadow Side of Sexual Liberation, and finally, Civic and Political Disengagement.

The final book, Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone from the Church, (2014) documents the indispensable role of parents and other supportive adults in laying the foundation for a strong and living faith. Dr. Smith writes, Committed and practicing Catholic emerging adults are people who were well formed in Catholic faith and practice as children, whose faith became personally meaningful and practiced as teenagers, and whose parents (reinforced by other supportive Catholic adults) were the primary agents cultivating that lifelong formation.

Yet the study also reveals the troubling inability and sometimes unwillingness of parents to model, teach and pass on the faith to their children.

This summary does not do justice to the complex issues presented in these four studies. Yet they describe a sobering picture of a growing crisis as many of our young people are not looking to the Church for guidance as they form their identities and make decisions about the meaning and purpose of their lives.

A fundamental conviction of our faith affirms that we are made in the image and likeness of God with an inbuilt desire for God as the source and fulfillment of our lives. A major challenge that confronts us daily is finding effective ways to enable our youth to recognize, experience, and live this truth as the centerpiece of their lives.