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Souls in Transition: The Religious Lives of Emerging Adults in America
Abstract
How important is religion for young people in America today? What are the major influences on their developing spiritual lives? How do religious beliefs and practices change as young people enter into adulthood? This book explores these questions and many others as it tells the definitive story of the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults, ages eighteen to twenty-four, in the U.S. today. Based on candid interviews with thousands of young people tracked over a five-year period, this book reveals how the religious practices of the teenagers portrayed in a previous book Soul Searching have been strengthened, challenged, and often changed as the young people have moved into adulthood. The book vividly describes as well the broader cultural world of today's emerging adults, how that culture shapes their religious outlooks, and what the consequences are for religious faith and practice in America more generally. Some of the book's findings are surprising. Parents turn out to be the single most important influence on the religious outcomes in the lives of young adults. On the other hand, teenage participation in evangelization missions and youth groups does not predict a high level of religiosity just a few years later. Moreover, the common wisdom that religiosity declines sharply during the young adult years is shown to be greatly exaggerated.
... From a more international perspective, there have been several prominent studies that touch upon a faith in motion (Ammerman, 2007(Ammerman, , 2014Bengtson, 2017;Bengtson et al., 2018;McGuire, 2008;Perrin, 2020;Smith & Snell, 2009;Zuckerman, 2008Zuckerman, , 2012. Most of them are qualitative studies, but Bengtson (2017) employs a longitudinal mixed-method approach, primarily examining how religion is passed down, while Smith & Snell (2009) focus more generally on spirituality within a younger age group. ...
... From a more international perspective, there have been several prominent studies that touch upon a faith in motion (Ammerman, 2007(Ammerman, , 2014Bengtson, 2017;Bengtson et al., 2018;McGuire, 2008;Perrin, 2020;Smith & Snell, 2009;Zuckerman, 2008Zuckerman, , 2012. Most of them are qualitative studies, but Bengtson (2017) employs a longitudinal mixed-method approach, primarily examining how religion is passed down, while Smith & Snell (2009) focus more generally on spirituality within a younger age group. Nevertheless, none of these studies focuses on the interplay between a faith in motion and the quest for community. ...
This study explores the dynamic relationship between fluctuations of faith and the quest for community among Norwegian millennials using a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative data from a survey of 585 participants with follow-up interviews. The research reveals that faith is not static but evolves throughout life, and for many, it changes back and forth several times. The study also looks at when these changes seem to happen and elaborates on what lies behind them. The application of McAdams' Life Story Theory suggests that these faith narratives are integral to individuals' broader life stories and identity formation, where one looks back at different vantage points in life, and what you see may be different from how you once saw it. The relation aspect seems to be an important point, where warmth, trust and integrity play a central role, which makes it interesting to look at this also through the lens of the integrative model of organizational trust. Among the stories of those who have distanced themselves to a greater extent from the faith, an interesting aspect nevertheless emerges. It seems to be a form of longing for the community that once was a part of their life, at least where trust re-emerges, even if the community was perhaps left intentionally at an earlier point in life. Perhaps faith does not stand alone? Perhaps the Christian community has an attraction in itself that should not be underestimated, at least for those who have once experienced it. How can the church meet fluctuation of faith, be experienced as relevant through the different seasons of life, and help the individual with the transition from mere longing to actual reintegration with a community?
... One possible explanation may be that students do desire to discuss the meaning and purpose of life, but not frequently, such as every week. Emerging adults do appreciate religion, but they do not desire religion or spirituality to be discussed frequently, as it may be viewed as preachy or common sense (Astin, Astin, and Lindholm 2011;Smith and Snell 2009). Furthermore, students who discuss the meaning and purpose of life with faculty outside of the classroom may be a source of validating cultural identity, which can increase belonging. ...
... Likewise, more frequent religious service attendance did not predict higher levels of belonging. Emerging adults experience new opportunities and distractions that can decrease the importance of religious engagement and create alternative sources for belonging (Smith and Snell 2009). In addition, religious participation can be a source of stress or negative mental health outcomes, such as depression, anxiety, and psychological distress (Ellison and Lee 2010). ...
a Baylor university, Waco, texas, usa; b university of Hawai'i at Hilo, Hilo, Hawaii, usa ABSTRACT Sense of belonging is important in higher education. Unfortunately, sense of belonging is not evenly experienced by all college students. Using a theoretical framework based on the Culturally Engaging Campus Environment model, we examine the influence of social class and discussions of religion/spirituality (in class, with faculty, and with peers) on students' sense of belonging at a religious university in the U.S. South. Regression analyses in a survey of seniors reveal that lower-and working-class students feel less belonging at the university , but occasional discussions with faculty on the meaning and the purpose of life enhance belonging for these students.
... From a view of the broaden-andbuild theory by Fredrickson (2001), experiencing gratitude appears to broaden people's immediate and momentary thoughts to help strengthen or build personal resources (e.g., psychological or cognitive resources) and increase well-being (Czyżowska and Gurba 2022;Jiang et al. 2022). The more they expressed gratitude, the more satisfied they were with their lives, the more meaningful their lives were, and the more psychologically free and in control of their lives they felt (Lee et al. 2015;Smith and Snell 2009). The expression of gratitude can increase individual resilience to recover from stressful situations, reduce negative emotions, protect them from psychological illness, and enhance effortful goal striving (Fredrickson 2004;Emmons and Mishra 2012). ...
Grit denotes an individual's passion and perseverance to accomplish a long‐term goal despite obstacles and challenges. It has been consistently supported by its beneficial effect in promoting students’ educational, developmental, and psychological outcomes. Yet less is known about how to shape and foster grit from parents’ perspectives and the mechanism underlying this process. To fill this gap, we adopted a sociocultural view of grit and conducted a cross‐sectional study examining the mediating and moderating effects of gratitude in the relationship between parenting (parental concern and parental control) and grit. Self‐reported data were collected from 326 university students in China. Subsequent Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analyses showed that gratitude mediated the relationship between parental concern and the two grit facets (consistency of interest and perseverance of effort). Further hierarchical regression analyses showed that gratitude had a small moderating effect on the relation between parental concern and consistency of interest. The findings supported different roles of the two types of parenting practices (concern vs. control) in student grit development via gratitude. As our results supported that students with a higher level of gratitude benefited more from the positive relationship between parental concern and consistency of interest in achieving long‐term goals, more attention can be paid to this group of students.
... This is particularly true for Mormons (70%) and Mainline Protestants (45%) 29 . Five years later, the same students were asked if they had participated in a 'missions or religious service trip' in the past two years: 15% said that they had: especially Mormons (35%) and Conservative Protestants (CPs: 22%) 28 . ...
Who shares their faith with people who have different religious views? This article examines ‘faith sharing’ across 22 religiously diverse countries. To our knowledge, this is the first study of ‘faith sharing’ across national and religious contexts. Evangelism can be controversial, but both historically and in our data, it is widespread—including in societies that restrict religious liberty. ‘Faith sharing’ is lowest in Europe, Japan, Australia, and the US and highest in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia (excluding Japan). Within countries, there is no consistent pattern about which religious groups share their faith more. Previous research about ‘faith sharing’ focuses on Christians in the US, but the factors that predict ‘faith sharing’ in the US often do not generalize. In fact, the association with age, education, marital status, employment status, and immigration status is exactly the opposite in many societies. Because past comparative research ignores this topic and because so much of what we think we know about faith sharing is based on US Christians, we hope this article will spur further research and expand our understanding of religious persuasion and global religious change.
This unique book investigates the real-world complexities, challenges, and mistakes that are often encountered when researching religion, values, and culture. Featuring the reflections of researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, it offers vivid accounts of designing and executing both small-scale and much larger projects. Some chapters describe in detail the process and rationale behind methodological decisions, including challenges, adaptations, and revisions. Others reveal how things went wrong in the research process, even past the point of recovery, and what was learned. There is reflection on wider conceptual, theoretical, and ethical debates about ‘religion’ and what they mean in practice. In acknowledging the messiness of researching religion, the volume seeks to humanize and improve it. The honest reflections it contains will help researchers avoid some common mistakes and messes, and face others openly without losing heart.
This unique book investigates the real-world complexities, challenges, and mistakes that are often encountered when researching religion, values, and culture. Featuring the reflections of researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, it offers vivid accounts of designing and executing both small-scale and much larger projects. Some chapters describe in detail the process and rationale behind methodological decisions, including challenges, adaptations, and revisions. Others reveal how things went wrong in the research process, even past the point of recovery, and what was learned. There is reflection on wider conceptual, theoretical, and ethical debates about ‘religion’ and what they mean in practice. In acknowledging the messiness of researching religion, the volume seeks to humanize and improve it. The honest reflections it contains will help researchers avoid some common mistakes and messes, and face others openly without losing heart.
The decline of liberal Protestantism offers an important canvas upon which to portray a myriad of cultural and structural factors at work within religion, on the one hand, and organizations, on the other. Specifically, this paper argues that the decline represents the structural consequence of Protestantism's liberal cultural triumph on behalf of such values as individualism, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellectual inquiry. As laudable as these values may be from other perspectives, they can be anathema to mobilizing and sustaining any organization that requires a loyal and disciplined membership. The paper puts religious "strictness" in a broader perspective and reviews several temporal models that specify the effects more closely. These are all at work within the most recent cycle of liberal cultural assertion followed by membership decline in the 1960s. The paper concludes with some strategic implications for the future as various "remnants" seek to stem the tide.
Two conceptual models have been proposed to describe changes in religious commitment among regional migrants. The "dislocation" model predicts that all migrants undergo a decline in commitment after being uprooted from familiar surroundings; the "adaptation" model asserts that commitment among migrants will rise or fall depending on their new region's norms of religious behavior. This paper tests these models through an examination of patterns of church attendance and strength of adherence within national samples of white and black Baptists, and white Lutherans, Methodists and Catholics in the United States. Findings confirm the adaptation model's prediction that religious commitment rises among migrants to regions of higher native commitment, such as the South, and falls among migrants to regions of lower commitment, such as the West. These results suggest that, contrary to expectation, migration may contribute to the persistence of regional religious differences in the United States.
This article examines the relative prominence of religion in the American South, in light of two contemporary phenomena: increased interregional mobility in the United States, and the rise of American evangelicalism. We investigate the effects of regional migration and non-migration on church attendance and importance of faith in the South as compared to the rest of the country. Results show that religiosity increases when people move to a region of high religious commitment, and decreases when one moves to an area where religious commitment is lower. The evidence suggests that the South maintains its religious distinctiveness for natives, but the prospects of maintaining as strong a religiosity for those who migrate out of the South are low. These findings call into question Mark Shibley's thesis (1996) about the sources of the resurgence of American evangelicalism.
Gender differences in risk preferences have been proposed to explain a large part of the widespread gender difference in religiousness. Using the same data and models that were used for a recent test of more general claims about the relationship between risk preference and religiousness, this study tests the more specific, but more provocative, idea that risk preferences account for a substantial portion of the gender difference in religiousness. The data are from the 1990-3 World Values Survey for the United States and Italy. Across four indicators of religiousness, analyses reveal no substantially consequential or statistically significant change in the estimated effect of gender on religiousness when risk preferences are added to regression models. In other words, while the data do support the notion that risk preferences are related to religiousness, they give no indication that this relationship accounts for the observed gender difference in religiousness.
Why has Christianity as a religious tradition survived for two millennia? What makes Christianity "work"? Many social scientific answers to related questions focus on structural forces shaping religion and on factors that explain variance across belief and practice. This article takes a different approach, seeking to explain the ongoing existence of the phenomenon itself before analyzing variance within it. The idea is to address basic causes of what exists as distinct from more superficial causes of variation within it. To do so, I take a phenomenological approach that focuses particularly on emotions, seeking to explicate the recurrent, characteristic, and subjective experiences of many Christians that help to explain their ongoing commitment to and involvement in the faith. I also reflect the subjective focus on emotions in the tone of the article, which introduces a strong sense of subjective experience and affect. By complementing typical sociological analyses of religious variance with this kind of causal analysis of its existence, this article seeks to expand our range of explanation and understanding in the sociology of religion.
A large body of empirical studies shows that religion often serves as a factor promoting positive, healthy behaviors and outcomes in the lives of American adolescents. This research note reports findings of one test of a "moral order" explanation of these religious effects. I use the national Survey of Parents and Youth (1998-99) data (N=1,073) to examine the relationship between parental religious participation and measures of parental moral expectations and supervision of youth ages 10 to 18. The findings support the hypothesis that parental religious participation increases parental moral expectations and supervision of their adolescent children.
Stephen Kemp and John Holmwood, Realism, Regularity and Social Explanation, pp. 165–187.
This article explores the difficulties raised for social scientific investigation by the absence of experiment, critically reviewing realist responses to the problem such as those offered by Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer. It suggests that realist arguments for a shift from prediction to explanation, the use of abstraction, and reliance upon interpretive forms of investigation fail to demonstrate that these approaches compensate for the lack of experimental control. Instead, it is argued that the search for regularities, when suitably conceived, provides the best alternative to experiment for the social sciences.
This essay develops a "middle range" sociological research paradigm based on the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar. It begins with an account of Critical Realism and its evolution over the last three decades. It then expands upon Bhaskar's Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA), moving in a step-by-step fashion from the philosophical conceptions of Critical Realism to a concrete sociological rendering of the TMSA itself. In making the transition from the philosophically abstract to the socially concrete, the author uses complexity theory and the works of Georg Simmel to illustrate the dialectical process through which human agency and community mutually constitute and reproduce one another.