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Youth and Religion: An Interview with Christian Smith

Christian Smith is one of the leading sociologists of American religion on the scene today. The Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Smith is the author or co-author of several acclaimed books, including American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving and Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want. His most recent project has been the massive National Study of Youth and Religion. Over the past five years, he and his team have conducted over 3,200 telephone surveys and over 250 in-depth, one-on-one interviews with American teenagers. Many of the findings, of extreme importance for youth workers, are available at www.youthandreligion.org.

Smith's book on the study, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford Press, 2005), is an invaluable resource, and YouthWorker Journal advisory board member Kenda Creasy Dean of Princeton Theological Seminary is currently working on a book about the implications of the study for the church. Tony Jones and Chris Smith corresponded after meeting at a recent conference at Princeton.

Tony Jones: Chris, yours is by far the largest study ever undertaken of the religious lives of American youth. Why do you suppose this area of study hasn't interested sociologists in the past enough to study it, and why did it interest you enough to spend several years of your life on it?

Chris Smith: Academic scholarship has in general, until the last decade or two, tended to ignore religious aspects of life. An old secularization theory predicting religion's demise with the advent of modernity had something to do with that. So it never may have dawned on serious adolescence scholars to look at teenagers' religious lives. Scholars of American religion have tended to be interested in adult religion and religious movements and organizations. Perhaps studying teenagers seemed like dealing with 'kid stuff'—below them somehow, not serious.

Anyway, around 2000, I was considering a new research project. This seemed to be something very interesting, potentially important, and definitely understudied. The Lilly Endowment was generous enough to give us a sizeable research grant to do this, and we've been having a great time with this project.

TJ: You had dozens of conversations with Christian teenagers over the past few years. Is there one that stands out as epitomizing the findings of the study?

CS: The story about youth and religion that comes out in our findings is complex, so there's no one teenager who epitomizes the larger findings. But there are a few who represent to me some key themes we heard repeatedly. Joy and Kristen in Chapter 1 of my book are two of those, as well as Raymond, the non-religious boy, in the next chapter, and John in the Catholic chapter. Each of these did capture an essence of some key stories from our project around the potentially positive influence of faith, the spiritual and theological impoverishment of some teenagers, and the real openness of many nonreligious youth to religious and spiritual matters.

TJ: How does a sociologist go about determining how religious a teenager is?

CS: We employ a variety of standard measures, such as religious beliefs, church attendance, importance of faith, and religious experiences. Our national survey included tons of religion questions, so we were able to angle in on the religion question from many different positions. Of course, these kinds of sociological measures never get at a person's true personal spiritual condition. They're useful but limited metrics of inner states that are hard to access directly.

TJ: You found that, contrary to much that's been written, American teenagers aren't particularly influenced by postmodern-pluralistic culture, that they don't claim to be 'spiritual but not religious.' If young people are really religiously conventional, why do you suppose many of us have this false perception of seeking?

CS: Good question. This view certainly seems to have created a major impression among many observers. This is probably partly a sampling problem: journalists, book authors, and other religion commentators often base their impressions and stories on small groups of 'convenience sampled' teenagers who may not well represent all of them.

Also, my observation is that many youth ministry practitioners and thinkers are rightly struggling to get others' attention to and investment in what they themselves are pouring their lives into, and semi-alarmist stories about a major postmodern turn and teen spiritual seeking is more likely to get this than a story about teen conventionality. Partly, too, the media is often interested in sexy stories that will sell and draw ratings, however inaccurate they may be. And some authors have a personal interest not only in describing an alleged postmodern or 'spiritual but not religious' cultural change among youth but also in positively promoting it—they don't just report, they advocate.

But it's the sociologists' job to represent social reality as accurately as possible, however boring or unfashionable their findings may be.

TJ: Do you suspect that young adults between 18 and 22 (even the college students that you teach) are more influenced by postmodern cultural shifts like pluralism and globalization than the teenagers seem to be?

CS: Yes, I suspect it increases as teenagers move into young adulthood, especially among those who go to college—though we're not sure yet how dramatic that change is. Still, it's important to know that this normally isn't the case among 13-17 year olds. In the summer of 2005, we'll be re-surveying all of our teen survey respondents three years later and will know what changed as they grew older.

TJ: Overall, the findings presented in your book are kind of a good-news-bad-news report for church youth workers. Let's start with the good news: you report that most American teenagers are religious; indeed, that the vast majority are Christian. Doesn't this contradict much that we read in the press, hear from the media, and see portrayed on MTV? You imply that there are ideological forces at work that tempt people to overstate the religious pluralism in the U.S.

CS: Yes, many Americans think the U.S. is more religiously pluralistic than it actually is. Some of my college students, for example, think that 25% of Americans are Jewish, and are shocked to find out that the actual number is 2%. Some advocate-scholars who evidently wish not only to describe but also to promote religious pluralism push the religious diversity story, which isn't really accurate. Minority religions do have a cultural importance and influence disproportionate to their numbers; but when it comes to actual numbers, the vast majority of Americans, including teenagers, are either Christian—practicing or nominal—or simply not religious at all.

TJ: You also write, 'Highly religious teenagers appear to be doing much better in life than less religious teenagers.' What do you mean by 'doing much better'?

CS: Social scientists have a variety of measures of different outcomes in teenagers' lives, from doing well in school to getting along well with parents, not abusing substances, not having sex, not engaging in risk behaviors, having strong subjective wellbeing, not watching a lot of trash TV, and so on. On all of these many measures, the most religious U.S. teenagers are significantly different from the non-religious teenagers, in what is normally considered the positive direction. Eight different tables in the book reporting on scores of such outcomes show this pattern clearly.

TJ: Now the bad news. Although most American teenagers are faithful, you say the faith they practice can best be described as 'Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.' Can you take a sentence or two to unpack each of these terms?

CS: Yes, I am suggesting that MTD is the actual de facto functional religious faith of the majority of teenagers, regardless of their official affiliation.

By 'moralistic' I mean oriented toward being good and nice, in ways that assert certain moral claims (for example, 'You should never have sex with someone you don't really care about.') in fairly arbitrary ways without their being integrated into any larger, coherent moral tradition.

By 'therapeutic' I mean being primarily concerned with one's own happiness, good feeling, personal comfortability, and emotional wellbeing—in contrast to, say, a focus on glorifying God, learning obedience, or serving others.

Finally, by 'deism' I mean a view of God as normally distant and not involved in one's life, except (as qualified by the 'therapeutic') if one has a problem one needs God to solve, one can call on God to fix it and make one feel better. In MTD, in other words, God functions as a combination divine butler and cosmic therapist.

TJ: Another way that American teen Christianity is described in the book is 'benign whateverism.' Some might suspect that teenagers are unable (or unwilling) to be articulate about anything—that rolling their eyes and grunting is the most you can often get out of them. In the book you seem almost shocked that these kids are generally able to talk quite articulately about STDs, drunk driving, and teen pregnancy, but when you asked them to talk about Jesus, they were stumped. Is that right?

CS: Right. Teenagers aren't universally inarticulate. In areas where the adult world has made a point to get their attention and educate them, where the young people can see that something really matters, like not diving drunk or getting pregnant, teenagers can be quite articulate.

But it hit us like a ton of bricks that most religious teenagers aren't being well educated in the faith or given much practice in articulating their beliefs and why and how they matter. For more than a few teenagers, in fact, it seems like ours was the first time any adult ever asked them what they believed. Some of them said exactly that.

TJ: If you're right about this—and I suspect that you are—it would seem that Christian parenting and Christian youth ministry have largely failed to inculcate or implant a distinctly Christian identity in our 13- to 17 year olds. Would you agree?

CS: Yes. In very many cases it seems that is so. Many parents come from a generation that has bent over backwards not to 'shove anything down anyone's throat.' Consequently, their kids aren't getting much direct theological substance to embrace, revise, or reject. If so, that's a real disservice to kids.

My sense is that most youth ministers are knocking themselves out to do their best. Many also tell me they're under pressure from all sides to entertain their teenagers, which isn't a great context for sustained, solid teaching in faith. But for whatever reasons, the bottom line is that the majority of teenagers, including many evangelicals, turn out to be pretty clueless and inarticulate about their own faith perspectives.

TJ: You surmise that this 'Moralistic Therapeutic Deism' isn't unique to young people, but that they're actually just reflecting the less-than-passionate faith of their parents. Many youth workers will agree with you on this; yet you caution church youth workers not to see parents as their adversaries. Why?

CS: One of the most powerful realizations I took from our research is how formative parents are in their teenagers' lives. They often don't realize it, but parents are the most significant influences on their teenage children's faith lives. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that normally the most important pastor a young person is going to have is his or her father and mother—for better or worse (often the latter).

If this were the case, youth ministers would be much more effective working with parents rather than against them. I realize not all parents want to work with the youth minister. I've picked up among youth ministers from many faith traditions a distinct sense of tremendous frustration with the parents of their teenagers—and I can understand why—but in the long run, an adversarial relationship with teenagers' parents is counterproductive. It seems to me that the more youth ministry can work with parents and be set in a larger context of family and church ministry, the more effective it will be.

TJ: In the book, you give some hints as to how you think youth workers and parents can remedy this. Help, then, to unravel this paradox. On the one hand, as you said, you found that parents are by far the most influential people in the religious lives of their teenagers; on the other hand, you write that congregations with full-time youth workers and active youth ministry programs are much better at developing young people who are decidedly religious. Yet many thriving youth ministries make a point of keeping the youth in activities that distance them from their parents. Can these two be reconciled?

CS: There's not a paradox here. Good and effective youth programs only distance youth from their families and parents for limited periods of time, which is entirely sensible and appropriate. But they don't entirely separate teenagers from parents. Surely what works best is a rhythm between youth-focused times and activities and family-and congregational-focused times and activities.

So, according to our findings, anyway, if they want the best outcomes for youth, churches should have strong, prioritized, well-funded youth ministry programs. But that in no way has to detract from the role that parents and families play. There's no reason why these shouldn't be complementary.

TJ: Have you seen this work in your own church, or in one that you've studied? If so, will you briefly describe what you've seen?

CS: Sure. Listen, young people may not broadcast this very much, but most really want to have parents they admire and are close to and model their lives on. They want strong relationships with lots of other adults whom they respect and who care for them. That's why they so often love a good youth pastor. Teenagers spend all of most days with other teenagers close to their age. They like that; but they also need, and actually want, more than that.

In my own (Anglican) church, the most committed, involved, and spiritually mature young people are also the ones who have committed, involved, and mature parents and have real relationships with other mature adult members of the congregation. This isn't rocket science—it's Basic Human Relationships 101.

The challenge, however, is what to do in cases when parents are simply out to lunch or don't care. I don't have all the answers, but I can't believe that the answer involves youth ministers being ticked off at and sustaining ongoing conflict with their teenagers' parents. There's got to be a more constructive approach.

TJ: You wrote an 'unscientific postscript' in the book for religious communities and youth workers. This seems extraordinary for a sociologist—what led you to include that?

CS: The potentially useful implications of our findings for parents, ministers, and communities of faith were too many and too juicy to simply draw the line at 'value-free' social-science description and analysis and then let readers figure out implications for themselves. Good sociology often has policy implications anyway. Why not be explicit about it? We make it clear in the book that we're not ministry consultants or anything.

In that postscript, we simply float some ideas that seem to flow from our results and let readers make of them what they will. Some readers may take offense over us being 'prescriptive' or 'biased toward religion.' Well, let them. You reach a point where you just do what you think you should do and let the chips fall where they may. If I wanted never to be criticized, I wouldn't be writing books in the first place. I mean, just cranking out more normal science is boring anyway, right?

TJ: Right. Actually, I hope that the postscript is one of the things that causes a lot of youth workers to buy the book and then read the whole thing. In that postscript, you warn against an instrumentalist view of faith, where kids should be Christian because it'll keep them out of trouble and get them into a good college. Again, most youth pastors will heartily agree with you on this, yet this is what many parents expect. Indeed, many youth pastors get in trouble with parents—at least I did—when they try to instill a more radical, demanding faith in their students. Any ideas on how to bridge that divide?

CS: Well, again, I'm not a ministry consultant, and I don't have lots of answers. But it would seem to me to be an elementary principle of any effective organization—religious or not—that the entire leadership be of one mind and vision about the organization's purpose, goals, and basic approach. So if I were a youth pastor, I'd want to make darn sure on the front end that I had a common mind with the other pastors and church staff members on key matters so I wouldn't be working at cross purposes with, or without the support of, the others. Then if parents got unhappy with me, my colleagues would back me up.

I realize this may be a luxury not all youth ministers can afford. But without such a common vision, youth ministers are often forced into 'stealth' or 'guerrilla' styles of ministry, which can only lead to frustration and conflict. The basic underlying question, then, is: What the heck are churches trying to be and do, anyway? Without having that figured out first, you'll only have problems.

TJ: You're now working on a video project that will accompany the book. How's it coming along, and how do you think you'll use it?

CS: Not everyone who could learn from our project will buy and read an Oxford Press book. So we're trying to package our stuff in video form. We're working with a great video company from California, and so far it's going great. Filming video is tremendous fun. And I think in certain ways there's a lot more potential for human impact than ink on pages, as much as I love books.

We're thinking the video will be the kind of thing that a youth minister could show parents and other key people in a congregation, hopefully as a catalyst to change priorities and generate some discussion and energy around teenagers. I expect the video to be available sometime in the fall of 2005. We'll announce it on our Web site: www.youthandreligion.org . People can sign up there for free notifications of such things.

TJ: Are you planning to run a sequel study of people in the next age group, what might be called 'late adolescence' or 'young adulthood'?

CS: Yes, we worked hard to keep in touch with all of our teen survey respondents and have been funded to conduct a second wave survey and interviews with them this summer, 2005. Ideally, we'd follow them into young adulthood and middle age, to get a solid picture of how faith and life evolves developmentally over time.

TJ: It seems to me that your larger, personal sociological project is to discern if and how religion can thrive in a postmodern-pluralistic context. In American Evangelicalism, you wrote that evangelicals have negotiated a love-hate relationship with American culture, and that this engaged, yet conflictual, relationship has allowed evangelicalism to develop a distinct sub-cultural identity within American culture. The study on American teenagers found something quite different about their religious identity, yet the 'benign whateverism' of American teen religion seems to be another way to be religious in a world of many religions. Can you comment on this?

CS: What is this, career psychotherapy analysis? It would be fair to say that most of my research and writing has focused on religion's viability and influence in the modern world. Different projects and different methods reveal different aspects of social life. The evangelical project tried, among other things, to understand and theorize how and why American evangelicals are relatively vibrant religiously (on sociological measures at least—I make no claim about how God actually views evangelicals!), despite the fact that academic secularization theory predicted their demise. Our methodology in that project focused us on the most self-conscious evangelical believers and churches, which are also the most religiously vibrant.

The current adolescent research, however, examines a cross-section of all U.S. teenagers. And the overall picture it portrays—despite our having met a minority of some very impressive religious teenagers—is rather one of religious mediocrity and debility, in some cases even pathetic bankruptcy. I viewed evangelicals as carving out a creative way to be Christians in a modern, pluralistic world. I'm afraid I view the majority of religious teenagers as engaged much more in passive accommodation to the surrounding culture. Yet, as I repeatedly emphasize throughout the book, it's not only teenagers—the teenagers merely reflect truths about our larger adult culture, institutions, and commitments. I confess that, as a result of this project, I'm more open to certain versions of secularization theory than I've ever been.

But this isn't a council of despair. After all, who would've ever thought that a mere Hobbit in the darkest of circumstances could have been used to destroy the power of Sauron? But there it is!

In 2004, Tony Jones left Colonial Church in Edina, Minn. where he was the minister to youth and young adults for six and a half years; he's now pursuing a Ph.D. in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Tony's books include Soul Shaper: Exploring Spirituality and Ancient Spiritual Practices in Youth Ministry (YS), and he is on the YouthWorker Journal advisory board and the Emergent Coordinating Group.