| The Faith of the Next Generation
If the faith of today’s youth is any
indication, the future of Christianity in America could be
in jeopardy, says Christian Smith, keynote speaker at Seattle
Pacific University’s Day of Common Learning and Church
Leaders Forum on October 19, 2005. Smith based this troubling
assertion on the findings of the National Study of Youth and
Religion (NSYR), the largest-ever study of the religious beliefs
of American teenagers, which he directed.
A five-year project begun in 2001, the NSYR interviewed 3,370
randomly chosen teenagers, ages 13 to 17, in 45 states. The
initial findings, chronicled in Soul Searching: The Religious
and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, uncovered
a disturbing state of affairs: The vast majority of America’s
teenagers — most of whom call themselves Christians
— believe in and practice a religion that bears little
resemblance to Christianity.
Smith, the Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor at the University
of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and his Soul Searching
co-author, SPU alumna Melinda Lundquist Denton ’96,
call this new religion “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,”
or “MTD.” “My firm belief,” says Smith,
“is that MTD is the actual, functional, de facto
religious faith of the majority of American teenagers from
a variety of religious and nonreligious traditions.”
Among the study’s most significant findings, two stood
out. First, contrary to popular notions fueled by the media,
most teens today are not religious “seekers” rebelling
against their parents’ religion. Instead, they willingly
accompany their parents to church. Second — here’s
the troubling part — these teens, even those regularly
attending Christian churches and youth groups, are hard-put
to articulate the first thing about what they believe. And
when coaxed by the study’s 17 trained interviewers,
the teens eventually described a religion largely devoid of
any notion of Jesus, grace, judgment, salvation, or the cross.
Rather, the creed of their faith goes something like this:
“God’s out there somewhere, and if you just do
what makes you happy and avoid being really bad, you’ll
go to heaven when you die.” This faith is characterized
by what Smith and Denton call “benign whateverism,”
otherwise known as indifference. “MTD is wide open,
accepting, and tolerant,” says Smith, “so it fits
well with the general whateverism we observed in the youth.”
Did the findings surprise Smith and Denton? Yes and no. “The
first part didn’t surprise us as much as the second,”
says Denton, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill and full-time
project manager for the NSYR. “Children are socialized
into certain families and communities. Knowing the socialization
process and how powerful it is, we were not all that surprised
to find that teens are going along with what their parents
are doing religiously. We were surprised at how little
they were able to talk about or understand what it was they
were following.”
How has MTD gained such a hold on America’s youth?
There appear to be two main culprits: an absence of biblical
grounding and an absence of conversations about faith.
Teens interviewed for the NSYR were largely unable to back
up statements about their faith with an awareness of Scripture.
“Without that grounding, they were at a loss,”
notes Denton. “We would ask them, ‘What do you
believe?’ and because they didn’t have Scriptures
with which to talk about their faith concretely, it was difficult
for them to answer the question.”
Says Smith, “I’m repeatedly told by experienced
Christian college Bible and theology professors that biblical
literacy has declined in recent decades. In a junior high
Sunday school class I taught not long ago in which we were
discussing the Exodus, one girl interrupted and asked, ‘Who
is Moses?’ I nearly fell over.”
Seattle Pacific is not immune to the problem of biblical
illiteracy. Longtime Professor of Theology Frank Spina has
seen the trend firsthand: “It’s generally been
the case that my students believed they knew the
Bible, whereas they actually knew scattered theories about
the Bible. There has been a clear diminution over the years.
I’ve often told my students, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek,
that their ignorance of the Bible was impossible to exaggerate.
There’s almost no part of my tongue in my cheek anymore.”
But it wasn’t just biblical knowledge that was lacking.
The NSYR also uncovered an absence of “faith conversations.”
“For many we interviewed,” says Smith, “it
seemed as if this was the first time anyone had ever asked
them what they believed. Some of them actually said, ‘I
don’t know, nobody’s ever asked me that before.’
By contrast, there was a lot of clear articulation about subjects
they’d been drilled on, such as drinking, drugs, and
STDs.”
If children never talk about what they believe, they never
develop a “faith language,” argue Smith and Denton,
and consequently have difficulty coming to understand what
they believe. Faith language is a second language, an acquired
language, they write in Soul Searching: “Religious
faith, practice, and commitment can be no more than vaguely
real when people cannot talk much about them. Articulacy fosters
reality.” In other words, it’s hard to know what
you believe until you talk it out.
The primary goal of the NSYR, according to Smith and Denton,
was to generate discussions in families, churches, and communities
about the faith of America’s teenagers — and,
ultimately, the future of Christianity in America. And from
these discussions, they hope, will come new energy and direction
on the part of those individuals and institutions who most
influence youth.
At Seattle Pacific, where all students are required to take
three Foundations courses in “Christian Formation,”
“Christian Scriptures,” and “Christian Theology,”
biblical literacy has become one of the “signatures”
of SPU President Philip Eaton’s 10-year plan, 2014:
A Blueprint for Excellence. “We are committing
ourselves — faculty, staff, students, trustees, alumni
— to the hard work, the discipline, of becoming biblically
and theologically educated,” says Eaton. “In a
day of growing biblical and theological illiteracy, this commitment
is critical if we are going to engage the culture with the
good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Denton, who spent four years at SPU, believes colleges and
universities can help shape the religious lives of students.
“What we sensed was missing in teens was the answer
to the question, ‘What does religion have to do with
the rest of my life?’” she explains. “Many
Christian universities take the stand that ‘we’re
a Christian university inasmuch as we require chapel.’
My experience at SPU was much more integrated than that. What
it takes is a university community that recognizes that our
faith and our language of faith intersect with every
other facet of our experience. For instance, hurricane relief
efforts: Are we talking about why we’re doing
this? Just about any university could have those same issues
and activities going on. How is our response different because
we’re Christians?”
In the end, however, SPU or any other Christian university
can do only so much. “I’m not sure a college alone
can solve the problem,” says Smith. “I think it
ultimately has to get back to churches and families.”
That’s one reason the researchers are taking their
findings to the clergy, such as those who attended the recent
SPU Church Leaders Forum. Nearly 200 Seattle-area youth pastors
and other church leaders who work with teens heard Smith’s
presentation of the NSYR research, followed by a discussion
session about the role of the church in the faith development
of youth.
But the results of the study weigh most heavily on parents,
says Smith, a father of three. The NSYR has profoundly impacted
his parenting, especially of his two teenagers. “It
has encouraged me to be more intentional, purposive, authorized
to teach them,” he says. “As a result, I have
talked with them more, discussed theological issues. I put
together a year-long introductory course on Christian history
and theology for my kids, using age-appropriate readings and
videos.”
He adds, “Many parents of teens say, ‘my teen
doesn’t listen to me anymore,’ but I believe in
most cases that is wrong — most teens in fact are still
very influenced (for better or worse) by their parents and
other significant adults in their lives, whether people realize
it or not.”
Denton, the mother of an 8-month-old, agrees. “I think
the main point we’ve tried to make is that parents matter,”
she says. “Some parents don’t want to intrude,
assuming their children don’t want them involved, but
for the most part, teens really do want their parents involved,
and their involvement really makes a difference. I think it’s
important for parents to say, ‘This is a household where
faith is embraced, and we engage that conversation. It’s
not something that’s just between you and God; this
is something that we deal with as a family.’”
Moralistic therapeutic deism, Smith told his SPU audiences,
is converting believers of all faiths to its “vision
of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal
niceness. The question we must then ask is this: ‘What
is a good and faithful response — by parents, by professors,
by youth pastors, by each of us?’”
— BY Kathy Henning
— PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES
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