Religious Lives of Young People - “Sociology of Religions” with Dr. Christian Smith
Shownotes:
Broad historical and cultural changes have shifted traditional life scripts from generation to generation. Over the past several decades, the changing nature of families and work has made a significant impact on the role of religion, particularly in teenagers and young adults. While many young people have embraced religion as a part of their lives, sociologists and pastors have observed a compartmentalized version of faith rather than a rich solid ground for growth in love and grace. What factors make the idea of church-going less plausible or less attractive in our modern society? Where can true, meaningful change happen in the lives of young people?
In this episode, Chris and Eddie are joined by Dr. Christian Smith, the William R. Keenan Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and author of Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation. Dr. Smith’s work examines the variety of reasons that individuals and communities are religious, as well as the impact of the family institution on traditional religious beliefs. Dr. Smith talks to Eddie and Chris about a general form of faith called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” the structures of society and culture that have made transitions challenging for young people, and the expectations that parents have for church congregations.
Series Info:
Over the past several decades, religious beliefs and habits among young people in America have been on the decline. A 2020 survey from Pew Research Center showed that only 24% of US teens say religion is very important in their lives. With mental health issues on the rise in adolescents and young adults, pastors and churches across the nation are desperately seeking new ways to attract and engage young people to adopt a faith tradition that provides peace, community, and a sense of purpose. In this series, we’re bringing in some of the leading voices in the conversation about the religious habits of young people and their families, focusing on the larger sociological, philosophical, and theological questions surrounding this issue. This will be a helpful series for anyone asking questions about why and how they’ve lost their faith, for pastors and youth workers trying to bear the weight of faith formation in the next generation, and for parents grappling with the importance of faith in the lives of their children.
Resources:
Learn more about Dr. Smith’s work here:
Check out all of Dr. Smith’s books here
Order Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation here:
https://www.amazon.com/Handing-Down-Faith-Religion-Generation/dp/0190093323
Read more about The National Study of Youth and Religion here:
Full Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly. It's good to see you today, Eddie Rester.
Eddie Rester 0:02
Good to be back. This is The Weight, in case someone was wondering what they were listening to today.
Chris McAlilly 0:07
I imagine if they push the play button, they probably know.
Eddie Rester 0:11
They know. Today we're talking with Dr. Christian Smith. He's the William R. Kenan Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He's written just lots of books. He's done a lot of sociological research on religion, the transmission of the faith. His most recent book, is the role of parents in transmitting the faith.
Chris McAlilly 0:32
Yeah, the book is called "Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation." And it's a book about different cultural models that folks have, that American religious parents have in trying to pass on their values and their faith to the next generation. And it looks at the ways in which immigrant communities and different demographics, approach this in different ways. And we talk not just about parenting, though, but some of the broad cultural and sociological dimensions that make it difficult to do this.
Eddie Rester 1:12
And as a sociologist, he is looking at painting a picture of current cultural reality. He, in the conversation, there are moments where we tried to get him to speculate a little bit. But as a good social scientist, he just continued to push back, "This is what we found. This is what we see." And I think, for me, as someone who's raised inside the church and has worked inside the church now for almost a quarter of a century or more, getting to hear that view of what's really going on, what expectations are of the church, is extremely valuable.
Chris McAlilly 1:48
Yeah, he describes the work of sociology as being society's self reflexivity. I think that was before we get into the conversation or after, but I think that that's helpful. It's kind of putting up a mirror and not assuming that your personal anecdotes or, you know, your particular tribe has it all sorted out, and you all figured it out. But actually saying, empirically...
Eddie Rester 2:09
"This is what's going on."
Chris McAlilly 2:11
"This is kind of the big picture." And I think, you know, if you're a young person, I think one of the things that, that Dr. Smith's work offers is a way of trying to analyze why your life is so difficult, because there's some big picture structural realities that make life, of transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood, really hard right now. And some of those have to do with opportunities and the fact that people are getting married later and having children later, etc. But I think you'll find some things in here that can be helpful as you think about what's going on right now in your life.
Eddie Rester 2:55
This is one of those conversations, I think, that I'm going to come back to to reflect on later as I listen to what he has to say. I hope you'll do the same thing. Hope you'll pass this conversation along to others.
Chris McAlilly 3:06
Yeah, if you can... You can help us out in two ways. One of the ways you can help us out is by subscribing on Apple podcasts or on Spotify or wherever you listen. The other way that you can help us out is just be thinking about, as you're listening, people in your network, friends that you may have that you think would benefit from the conversation, just passing it along to them. We're always glad that you're part of the conversation with us on The Weight. Thanks. Thanks for being here today.
Chris McAlilly 3:33
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 3:40
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 3:43
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:51
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 4:03
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity and intellectual honesty, that grapples with scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 4:18
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Eddie Rester 4:21
Well, today we are with Dr. Christian Smith, who is the William R. Kenan Professor of Sociology at Notre Dame. Dr. Smith, thanks for being with us today.
Christian Smith 4:30
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Chris McAlilly 4:32
We wanted to just start by going back in your work. You wrote wrote a book called "Religion: What It Is, How It Works and Why It Matters." I wonder if you would just talk a little bit just around the question "why are people religious?"
Christian Smith 4:48
Yeah, well, that's actually a huge question to get started with. And that particular book is pretty theoretical, and it's kind of heavy, but maybe the answer for most people is that the reason individuals are religious is because they were raised to be by their parents or their family or their grandparents. But that's a separate kind of answer from why humans tend to be religious. And people that study this have a lot of different answers.
Christian Smith 5:18
As you know, religion provides meaning to life that the empirical world can't. There's a lot of different theories about why people are religious, but what I argue in that book is that, you know, religion provides sources of help in life, to manage crises, as to cope with the world. Humans are actually quite vulnerable in life and in the world. And our capacities to take care of ourselves are strong, but they're limited. And so religions offer kind of the, in the technical language, superhuman powers to be in contact with, to deal with, all sorts of difficulties and challenges in life.
Eddie Rester 6:12
And you in the writing are optimistic that religious understandings of the world will continue to be a persistent dimension of who we are as humans. Why are you optimistic? It seems like when we read all the reports about religion in America that come out from the Pew Forum, it's pretty pessimistic, but you seem optimistic?
Christian Smith 6:37
Well, I mean, the history of this is that, you know, Western Europe went through, or some countries in Western Europe went through some centuries of secularization. And given that Eurocentric view of the world it was assumed, well, we became modern, and we secularized. So that's going to happen to all the rest of the world. But it hasn't really turned out that way. Things are much more complicated. Some regions of the world are becoming more secular, and some are actually becoming more religious. But my argument in the book to answer that question is, yeah, there are certain features of human existence and human experience that make religion plausible, that make religion attractive to human beings. And there are some conditions when that tends to decline or diminish in modern situations, but there are other features of experience that still make religion appealing to people.
Christian Smith 7:37
So I don't think there's any one sort of evolutionary, deterministic narrative that's going to explain anything. People may be going to church less in the US, and especially younger people. I mean, that's an empirical fact. But if we broaden out the scope of our vision to the world and to longer term history, nothing is determined that it's going to end up secular necessarily at all. And as the world changes, as politics change, as global warming happens, yeah, the future is wide open. And the role that religion might play in that is really open ended.
Chris McAlilly 8:17
As you mentioned in the American context, it is an empirical fact that younger people are going to church less. What do you see that is happening, in the American context, in American culture? You've written extensively about kind of its impact on on the religious and spiritual lives of young people. What do you see?
Christian Smith 8:38
Well, yeah, that's a great question. And a lot of people have given a lot of thought to it. And the answer, there's no simple answer, though there are a lot of different kinds of forces that converge that then that put pressure on, you know, sort of regular, traditional church going, institutionally grounded religion. It's everything from like, you can think demographically. Young people, for other reasons, are getting married less, and they're getting married later, and they're having fewer children, or no children, and cohabitation is on the rise. So you might think of that as a simple demographic, family institution factor, but that has an impact on religion.
Christian Smith 9:22
Traditionally, American religion is associated with family and associated with having children. So the fewer young people get married and have children, or later in life they do it, the less they're going to be saying, "Hey, you know, we need to raise our kids the way we were raised," or "maybe we should settle down and become part of this community." So that's just one example of a lot of factors that don't necessarily have to do with "do I actually believe in God?" or "am I worried about salvation?" It has to do with many other things.
Christian Smith 9:54
I would say factors, this is a little more speculative, but to me it's an interesting coincidence, at least, that the rise of the number of Americans who say they're not religious started exactly at the end of the Cold War. And so in the United States for much of the 20th century, we conceived of ourselves as sort of against... The main battle was against godless communists, and we were sort of a free and in some general sense, Christian-believing nation. Well, when that changed, what was the next global battle was against militant Islam. And so religion went from being a resource for fighting atheism to a source of violence in the world. And I'm not saying that people sat down and rationally calculated this, but these are very broad cultural, historical changes that affect generations. And so the place of institutional religion has just been sort of changed in the broader, macro zeitgeist or gestalt of things.
Christian Smith 11:06
Another thing, I don't want to go on too long, but just to give a range of all these factors, is, you know, mass consumer capitalism has just been growing stronger and stronger, stronger in our culture, and not just as the economy but sort of taking over all of--this is my view, at least--taking over all of culture, and especially neoliberal capitalism, thinking about the market replacing so many other ways of living? And that's basically the message of neoliberal capitalism is competition, self-advancement, self-satisfaction as a consumer. And also, for your career, you no longer can just sort of get a job out of high school, work for GM your whole life and retire. Like young people know they have to always be ready to move, to develop, to switch. And so the idea of settling in, settling down, becoming part of the community of which church is often a part, just makes less and less sense. So those are just a few ideas to give. But the main point is, there's a whole range of big changes that have been going on that make the idea of traditional church going less plausible.
Chris McAlilly 12:19
Yeah. Sorry.
Eddie Rester 12:20
Chris and I are both sitting here with questions. And so, one of the things you talk about is the loss of kind of the enemy. I was raised in the 80s, and the godless communists were going to parachute in at any given moment. And one of the things that we didn't really talk much about as we started today was that you're a sociologist who writes about religion. And so help maybe the listeners understand a little bit about that approach. How that informs how you look at the world of religion?
Christian Smith 12:58
Right. Yeah, I'm a sociologist. So I'm not a ministry person. I'm not a theologian, and I'm not an ethicist. I'm not a church consultant. I view religion from a social science point of view. And that means I'm interested in how religion interacts with other things that we normally in the modern world, considered not religious: economics, family, you know, everything that's going on, the place of religion, and how religion is shaped by and shapes those things. So it's essentially how culture and institutions all form each other and develop historically over time. So that's why when we're talking about church going, say, I'm thinking about families and the Cold War, and capitalism and so on. That's the kind of perspective I have. I'm not in the business of deciding which is the right theology or what's the right ethics. I'm trying to understand empirically to describe the world as it is accurately and to try to understand an explanation of why it works the way it does.
Chris McAlilly 13:59
I came across your your sociological work for the first time I was working on a project on the Rite of Confirmation in American Methodism, which is our tradition, but one of the things that I realized is that really you have been involved in this large research project that goes back now 20, 25 years, 30 years, perhaps, looking at youth and religion, the religious and spiritual lives of, of adolescents in the United States. Could you just kind of talk about the trajectory of that work? I mean, you're looking at a broad interplay of factors, cultural influences, family socialization, you know, religious motivations for behavior. Could you just tell people a little bit about that long term project?
Christian Smith 14:48
Yeah, so I've studied different things in in my career, but I'm generally interested in questions of modernity and secularization and the meaning of religion in modern society. So in the late 90s, I was trying to think about a new and interesting research project, and I realized, so many people that study adolescents ignore religion, and so many people that study religion ignore teenagers. So I told Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis, hey, you know, teenagers really matter and how they get formed is going to influence the future of American religion. And they really liked that idea. So we planned out a longitudinal study, a study over time of American teenagers, and did a big study survey and interviews, starting in the early 2000s, and then followed them over time as they grew up into emerging adults in their 20s.
Christian Smith 15:43
I did four waves of interviews and surveys with them and did a lot of analysis and wrote books and, you know, have spent a lot of time trying to think about what forms young people? What are the most important factors that form young people, as they grow older, especially if they're religious, to continue with that religion or to sort of back away from it or to totally bail out of it? And then also kids who aren't raised religious, you know, that might draw them in, or might solidify their non-religious upbringing. It's just a fascinating way to think about sort of the life course, how people are formed and sent on different trajectories, so to speak, religiously, and what are the main factors that influence that.
Chris McAlilly 16:30
I think that, you know, kind of the flip side of this, these larger world historical, cultural factors that are pressing in on the religiosity of people from the outside is also kind of the substance or the way in which people describe their own experience with religion, and how they describe their own religiosity. That was one of the things that I found most fascinating and it's one of the things that became a kind of wider phenomenon in the literature about your research, and I'm thinking about moral therapeutic deism, of course, but I wonder for folks who are not familiar with that insight from the work, if you could summarize it.
Christian Smith 17:09
Yeah, so after spending a lot of time interviewing a lot of teenagers I was somewhat shocked with the way they talked about God and faith and religion and so on. And I came away after wrestling with it a lot and ended up arguing in the first book of this project that the actual de facto functional religious faith of the vast majority of American youth is not Methodism or Judaism or Catholicism, but it's moralistic therapeutic deism, that there's a lot there to unpack. But basically, it's theistic beliefs: God created the world and God wants people to be nice to each other and good to each other. And the purpose of life is to be happy and to be satisfied and fulfilled. And God sort of is not very much involved in life until you have a crisis or a desire, and then you can call on God to come take care of that need, and good people go to heaven.
Christian Smith 18:03
So it can be thought of and described in various ways, but it struck me as kind of a super watered down, hyper-functional religion to help young people cope with life in a highly pluralistic society, that's demanding of them, that's challenging. And so the implication there is for people, for leaders, say clergy and denominational leaders and people that care about their own religious tradition. What does that mean for the particularity of their tradition? What is it? How does that compare to historically received Christian orthodoxy, for example? And there's a lot there to wrestle with, but you're right, the larger point is, it's not just that religion is fixed, then sociologists look at the interaction between other institutions and religion, but also how is religion itself shaped or reformed, or maybe twisted, from a religious point of view, under these external and internal forces?
Chris McAlilly 19:11
I do think that the response of a lot of religious leaders, particularly in our tribe, to the decline over the last 50 to 70 years, has been to do this diagnosis. And sometimes that diagnosis is one of the culture and sometimes it's of our own fidelity to our, you know, to where we come from, or you know, and so we argue about who's the most Wesleyan.
Eddie Rester 19:34
Who's the most orthodox?
Chris McAlilly 19:36
Yeah. And I think there's...
Christian Smith 19:38
The Calvinist circles are your a TR--you're truly reformed or you're not.
Eddie Rester 19:42
[LAUGHTER] That's right.
Chris McAlilly 19:44
Yeah, and it's, I mean, in some ways, it's a form of navel gazing. And in another way, there is a kind of particularity that you do want to pass on and it is hard to figure out kind of how to do that. But the thrust of the work is really... I mean, I guess some of the insights that come out of it are for religious professionals, people that are in, you know, roles who are leading religious institutions. But you really get to, and this is your most recent work is around parenting. The book is "Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation." Talk about that, how that became one of the crucial dimensions or insights that has come out of this work.
Christian Smith 20:29
Yeah, I'll do that. But first, as a quick aside, and it's directly related to parenting, both in terms of fertility, and that is, you know, a lot of this stuff can get caught up in culture wars that happened within denominations, and liberals and conservatives bash each other over the head with some of these things, but, you know, some really good studies have shown one of the main causes of mainline Protestant church decline in the US is that mainliners adopted birth control a lot earlier in the 20th century. And so it's just the long-term outcome in terms of numbers. It's a long-term outcome of lower fertility rates among a mainliners compared to evangelicalism. If you have less children, you multiply that even if you're retaining your children, multiply that out over two or three generations, and there's just going to be less of you. So, I mean, again, I'm not trying to say theology doesn't matter, culture doesn't matter, but there's multiplicity of forces that are that are at work here. So anyway.
Chris McAlilly 21:30
Eddie was not multiplying fast.
Eddie Rester 21:32
It was all my fault.
Chris McAlilly 21:33
It's your fault, man.
Christian Smith 21:34
Exactly.
Eddie Rester 21:35
I read a study, I think it was out of Stanford back in the late 90s, that said that exact thing that mainliners, on average, were having, like 1.6 kids. Meanwhile, Pentecostals were having still having like, 3.7 or something. It was just this dramatic difference. I'm butchering the numbers, I know, because it's been forever since I've read it. But when you look at the growth of Pentecostals versus the decline of mainline it was, if you weren't gonna convert people, which mainliners are terrible at doing, then you are going to decline, just because you were.
Christian Smith 22:08
Yeah. It's all about numbers of children. But that sort of thing also matters. And Evangelicals in the latter 20th century started using birth control a lot more. And so they, you know, we have an expectation that they will decline in numbers, too. It's, again, I don't want to be reductionistic. But just to throw that in there, because it's interesting and important to have a sense of the wide range of factors that can affect things. Anyway. Okay.
Christian Smith 22:31
So back to the original question. When we studied teenagers, I went into it--I wasn't an adolescent family or anything like that scholar at the time. I had to learn it all for that. But I went into it, there's kind of a popular narrative in our culture that after a kid turns 12 or 13, they stop listening to their parents. Their parents don't matter anymore. Parents' influence declines. And so I sort of had just absorbed that. But what we learned from our studies is the most important influence, as a whole, on aggregate, for the religious outcomes of teenagers as they go into their 20s, is their parents. Which was, once you realize that, once you know that you think about it, it's like, well, obviously, families and socialization and lifestyles, that it kind of makes total sense, but it goes against that cultural narrative.
Christian Smith 23:24
So we just, everything we analyzed showed how committed parents are, how important faith is to them, how much they attend church, how much they've intentionally tried to form their children, is just more important than summer camp, and Sunday school and youth group, and mission trips and just about any other thing you want to throw at it. If the parents are not... Basically teenagers, most teenagers are going to turn out roughly like their parents, maybe a little bit less religious on the whole. Again, we know in individual families, different children and the exact same parents turn out wildly different religiously. And so I don't want parents to walk away feeling guilty about this or feeling oppressed or feeling overly responsible. It's not deterministic, but sociologically, on the whole, parents are the most important influence.
Christian Smith 24:17
So when we were done studying teenagers, we went back to Lilly and said, you know, we need to understand more about parents because there really wasn't a lot of great research at a national level on religious parenting. That's what launched me into this latest research project. So we went ahead. We did the interviews with lots and lots of American religious parents, not all parents, just religious parents, from Christian traditions, all Christian traditions, and also minority--Jewish, Mormon, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim--in depth interviews with parents, really exploratory. Like, how do you approach this? How do you think about this? What motivates you? Why do you want to pass on your religion to your children? And so, and it was really fascinating.
Eddie Rester 25:04
When you think about it, several years ago, I read a book that said that the average child spends, an active religious child, spends about 40 hours a year at church. 40 hours. And so then you compare that to the number of hours they spend with their parents, even in late teenage years.
Christian Smith 25:26
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 25:26
And so it just makes sense that parents would have more of an influence, and I wonder, as we look at the rise of the programmatic church over the last 50 years, where the church--all those things you just talked about--the church began to develop programs for youth and sending kids on mission trips, and all these other activities to draw kids into the church. I wonder if, over the those last two, three generations, if parents' understanding of that role declined. Were y'all able to track that or any understanding of parents and their understanding, grappling of their role with this?
Christian Smith 26:09
Our study was focused on parents today. We didn't do in historical study. So I really don't have evidence on that. Although we know, in general, from other studies that, you know, psychoanalysis in early 20th century, especially Anna Freud, and some others, gave rise to this popular notion that really flourished in the 50s and then into the 60s, with the counterculture, that young people are a completely different animal. That, like, teenagers are almost not human. They're from another planet. They're a tribe apart, and then that got translated in the 60s and 70s, early 70s into this idea of a generation gap. And these young people and old people can't even talk together and this whole...
Christian Smith 26:53
And I think that that fed into this notion of we need a separate youth group, you know, with their own room in the basement with a bunch of couches and a guitar and this notion that ministering to youth is a totally different thing than ministering to adults. And I think that that did feed into this notion, well, they have to have their own programming in some sense. Now, having said that, I would say, I think most perceptive, responsible, proactive, parents realize it's their job. In fact, that's one of the things we found plucking the parents. The vast majority don't think they should just dump them in church, and it's somebody else's responsibility. I mean, most parents realize they're the parent. It's up to them to socialize their children, to raise them a certain way. But I do think it's almost like the church has, maybe more than the parents, had this notion that, you know, we need to separate our our people by age, which is very much following the school system way of doing things. And maybe, maybe there was less emphasis on intergenerational relational connection across ages in thinking, that we're increasingly realizing really is important, really matters.
Chris McAlilly 28:14
One of the chapters in the book describes different cultural models that inform the way in which different religious parents make assumptions and have beliefs about the value and meaning of religion and how they pass that on. Could you just kind of lay out some of those models, some of the ones that you discovered?
Christian Smith 28:35
Yeah, so I mean, there's a dominant model, and then there's some variants. But the thing that really struck us here is how much parents from across all different religious traditions and family types and regions of the country thought quite similarly about why it is that they wanted to pass on religion, that is, their motivation for sort of transmitting their religious heritage to their children. And it's complicated. There's a lot there, but the core of it is, basically, life is like a journey. That's one of the images. Life is a journey. And that journey can, almost inevitably will, at some points get very hard. And religion is a resource that I want to give to my children in order to navigate that journey better. It's both a resource for navigation and as a home base. These are the kind of the metaphors parents, almost all parents use. Religion is kind of a home base that they can return to if they get into trouble. Or if they get emotionally whacked out, or if they make some bad decisions, religion will provide this sort of home base or this place to return to to reset, to get their lives back together and to head off on the journey again. And to navigate life well.
Christian Smith 29:53
So what comes out of that is eventually you realize that the for most parents, at least what they stress to us, the main motivation for passing on religion to their children is not... is basically very this worldly. It's not the afterlife. It's not salvation and going to heaven. It's not communion with God. It's not other worldly. It's this worldly. It's how to have a better life in this world. And religion is a resource to help one do that.
Christian Smith 30:26
I suppose in America, it's been like that for a long time, but in the long stream of, say, Christian tradition, that might be a change from the way people have thought about it in the past. So then you can back up and say, well, if that's what the child hears, and if the child thinks, "well, I'm going to do okay," rightly or wrongly, they think "I'm going to manage my life okay. There's other resources. I don't need religion", then it's kind of hard to explain why should I be religious? If it's just a way to help me navigate my life in this world.
Eddie Rester 31:03
Just one app among other apps helping you figure things out. You can replace it with something else.
Christian Smith 31:10
Yeah, it's an... I have in the in the book another argument that religion--this is speculative, theoretical--but I think there's something to it that religion has over time, in the long run, historically, it's gone from being a communal solidarity project, like a social collective thing to being an individual lifestyle accoutrement. Like, you may want to have this as part of what you do, like you say, a different app, or a different voluntary organization you're part of, or a different piece of your identity, etc, etc. and becomes very much like an optional accessory.
Chris McAlilly 31:44
You mentioned, there are some variants in the cultural models, what are some of the other things?
Christian Smith 31:49
Yeah, the way I just described is true., for me, surprisingly, is true, even of very many evangelicals. I was expecting to hear a lot more about salvation and not go to hell and relationship with God. And that's in there, but not as much as I expected. However, there are evangelicals who tend more in that direction. Some of the other variants, mainline Protestants parents we talked to tended to be much more like, "My kid needs to choose whatever they want. I'm not going to force them to believe what I believe." So mainline Protestants have much more a model of "It's my job as a parent to expose my child to the range of options, and then they choose."
Christian Smith 32:35
Other other traditions like Catholic, evangelical Mormon, were much more, the parents are much more like, "I really want them to be what our family already is. I don't want them to become something else." So there's variants on that. And there's some variants on race and race and ethnicity lines. And this fits with what's already well known in the literature. White parents tended to be much more like, you know, God is your friend, and God will help you and so on. Among African American parents--these are broad generalizations, but they're true generalizations--there tends to be more of a sense of, you know, God is not messing around with you. Like, God has expectations for you, and you need to obey God, and God will keep you out of trouble. But you, you don't mess around with God. Like you do what God says.
Christian Smith 33:29
So there's just different kinds of tones and styles that vary by different groups. We also interviewed a lot of immigrant groups, Latino Catholics, Hindus, etc. And they, compared to sort of natives, so to speak, they have a whole nother sets of things they have to wrestle with. So if you're an Indian Hindu, those two things are so closely linked, you want your child, the parents, they want their child to identify as Indian, to maintain some connection to the home country. They would like them to be Hindu. But they also want their child to fit in. They're interested in Americanizing, but they don't want their child to go off the deep end and just become like every other American. So there's a lot more tensions that those parents have to navigate, immigrant parents have to navigate, as they sort of go from one generation to the next in this new culture.
Chris McAlilly 34:23
You also mentioned, or I guess, one of the chapters in the book is around parents' expectations of religious communities or religious congregations. And talk a little bit about that, I guess, the positive and the negative and kind of what those expectations are and maybe how they've changed.
Christian Smith 34:41
Yeah, this was also a little surprising to us. Because, again, there's a popular, there's a common narrative out there that parents are really demanding. And I'm sure if I was a clergy person or a youth minister, I would feel this, but the narrative is, you know, congregants are just really demanding and parents want to know why there isn't more programming, and when are we going to hire a full time youth minister. And the worst version of this is why can't I just drop my kid off at Sunday school and go to Dunkin Donuts and pick them up later and expect them to turn out like good Christians, and so on.
Christian Smith 35:14
But the parents we interviewed, the vast majority of them actually have very low expectations of religious congregations. They said they knew it was their job to raise their child in their faith. They didn't really expect too much. They hoped their congregations would be friendly places, would be nice, accepting communities. They hoped their children would have some good friends there and some positive interactions with adults. But basically, they just wanted, they would be satisfied if they found a congregation that was warm and friendly and supportive. But they didn't really have very high expectations of the congregation. It was a sense of realism, like, you know, just can't expect that much, be too demanding.
Eddie Rester 35:59
That's very surprising to me. And I wonder if, was that across the board evangelicals, mainline, other religious traditions? Or was that more focused on one group of those?
Christian Smith 36:12
That was pretty common. That was quite common. Now, again, there may be a little bias in an interview situation like that, where parents are trying to protect themselves as "I'm a really good parent," right? So and therefore, they might say, "No, I know this is my responsibility," and so on. But it came across to us as pretty authentic. Now, it could also be that parents tell clergy, like, "When are we going to hire?" Like, "Why isn't there more?" Maybe the parents give that message to the congregation. And then in their real life, they're like, "You can't expect too much."
Christian Smith 36:48
But, you know, as a social scientist, it's just my job to report. Like, we talked to some hundreds of parents, and here's what they told us. So there seems to be a kind of a mismatch. The other mismatch, again, is parents did not really hardly ever mention things like, "I want the right theology," and "I want this kind of liturgy." And "I want doctrine and sacramental things." That really did not show up in our conversations as all that important, if at all important. It was more like a nice, supportive, friendly, positive community with some relationships was what mattered. So again, that goes along with the screen, the orientation is very this worldly, very having life on this planet, while my child's still alive be good. Not like, let's learn the correct creates, let's learn the doctrine and let's make sure we get to heaven.
Chris McAlilly 37:50
If there's a parent out there who is, you know, wanting to transmit their religious faith to their children and struggling with that, what are maybe a couple of insights that come out of the broad sociological research that, you know, perhaps are helpful or that would be, you know, that could be conveyed?
Christian Smith 38:12
Yeah, there are some findings that have definite implications. One of them that also was really interesting to us, is one of them, aside from the parents' importance of faith and religious service attendance, which matter a lot, another factor that really stands out that we did not anticipate is the extent to which parents talk about religious things with their children, in families during the week at home. So we didn't expect this. But once you start thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense so that the more parents sort of talk with their kids or just talk in life, and the families are in the car, whatever, about religious things, that's very strong strongly correlated with the children in those families growing up to be more religious, than those parents who don't.
Christian Smith 39:04
So you can think about the reasons why. One is when parents don't talk, when the old time religion comes up in a family is one or two hours on Sunday morning or Saturday or Friday night, that's a very compartmentalised version of faith. Like that's just like a little thing. And that communicates to children, "this is just a piece. This is like being part of the YMCA. You may want to do this. You don't have to do this. Whereas when parents talk about it routinely, as just a matter of normal life, that shows to children, "oh, my parents think about this. This matters. This is connected to other things in life. This is part of the fabric of who we are as people."
Christian Smith 39:44
And this has consequences for other things in life. It has consequences maybe for politics or for ethics or how we live or decisions we make. All of that communicates to a child, "This matters. My parents care about this. This is a crucial part of who we are." Also talking about religious things during the week gives children opportunity to think about and to practice speaking for themselves, their own minds, what do they think about this. What is their input? And sort of cultivates that second language, almost, chance to practice speaking the language of faith.
Christian Smith 40:24
For that and other reasons, I think--I don't think, I mean, it's a fact from the research--that families, parents who want to work on this can be more intentional about just talking about things in a natural way. Not all of a sudden coming out and start preaching about this out of the blue, preaching about religion out of the blue, right? That would be weird, but
Chris McAlilly 40:47
Just don't be weird.
Christian Smith 40:48
Part of normal life.
Eddie Rester 40:49
Yeah, don't be weird.
Christian Smith 40:51
Don't be weird. The other thing is have a good relationship with your children. Like, your listeners may be familiar with the parenting style stuff, authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, etc. Net of and interacting with the religiousness of parents and talking about religion, parents who have authoritative relationships with their kids--that is, they have expectations, they have standards, they make demands of their children, they want something out of their children--in combination with warm, close, open, friendly relationship, emotionally available relationships with their children, those kids are also more likely to turn out the way their parents are religious.
Eddie Rester 41:36
You know, one of the things that I do premarital counseling with folks, I make sure that that they hear that we live in the ruts that other people have dug for us. Some of those ruts are good, some of them are bad, but it sounds like that's kind of with religion, with faith. How do you take that rut for your kid to live in with conversations and healthy relationships? One of the things that we know and you've researched and written about is that the transition to adulthood for our kids is complicated. It's different than it was just a generation ago. You talked earlier about how young people are waiting longer to get married, have children, even choose a career direction that sometimes gets delayed into the 30s. Now, what are some of those challenges that our young adults or teenagers are facing that maybe you found that adults parents need to be aware of?
Christian Smith 42:40
Yeah, so we have in social science, we've started talking about this idea of emerging adulthood. And and the idea is that a number of technological changes and institutional changes, things like the expansion of higher education and the availability of birth control, have contributed to the stretching out of the length of time between being a child at home under one's parents authority and being a fully functional, independent adult.
Christian Smith 43:12
In previous generations, that transition could often happen quite quickly. Now, it's stretched out 5, 10 years, maybe beyond 10 years. It's this amorphous time when young people are trying to figure out not just who they are, but as you said, what they want to do, what their values are, where they're going to settle down, what kind of commitments they're going to have. And again, religion gets all wrapped up in this.
Christian Smith 43:40
On the positive side, or what we might think of as the positive side, you know, young people have a structure, it's a structured thing. It's not a personal choice thing. It's like the way the culture structures, young people have freedom to maybe try different things, to travel, to make some bad decisions, to date some different people, to make some bad decisions and hopefully recover, to date some different people, to figure things out, to explore.
Christian Smith 44:05
On the negative side, this is this period of life now called emerging adulthood is fraught with uncertainty and limbo and up in the air and a sense of not having a grounding, not having any roots. It can be a time that's incredibly self-obsessed. It can have lots of churning and turmoil. And again, it's not just that young people are less responsible. It's that the structures of society and culture having to do with careers and family formation and education and so on just create this time that's a real challenge for young people.
Christian Smith 44:47
Again, it has its benefits, but it can also be a real challenge. And for churches, it's usually a time when people are not regular church attenders. And so if they do come back to church, after they get married, have children, say in their 30s, they're already quite well formed in life, you know. They know who they are and what they want to be doing. It's different from 23-year-olds bringing their newborns back to church, you know, so that, again, this is a quick, broad brush skimming, but it has a lot of implications.
Chris McAlilly 45:18
I'm completely fascinated with this, just in part because I'm 38 and just lived through it, you know, but I also see, we're in a college town, and we just see young people who are in the process of kind of moving from late stage adolescence, through emerging adulthood and launching into life successfully and healthily, with with health and wellness and all the rest. And those things are kind of prerequisites for growing deep and mature spiritually. I wonder, you know, we could have a whole nother conversation about this, but I wonder just for both parents or congregations or folks who are interested in transmitting the faith to emerging adults, what insights or suggestions do you think about or are there any models that you see where people are doing this well, with young people?
Christian Smith 46:23
Yeah, I mean, as a sociologist, at some point in this conversation, I kick it all back to the ministry people and say, "Look, I'm just telling you, here's how the world is going. And you figure it out." But I can, I'll say at least this: So if the essence of emerging adulthood is not settled down, not making commitments, not tied to anything? If that's the essence of it, then it seems to me, if I were a pastor, or youth minister or a young adult leader, I would have to think about how can I create a culture that accepts, essentially accepts that.
Christian Smith 46:58
Let's see, I have two minds about this. But let's say essentially accepts that and say, Look, this is the way things are, and basically encourages young people, encourages emerging adults to keep in play. That's the image that's coming to mind right now is encouraging them to think, instead of putting your faith, your religious life and thoughts, your spirituality, whatever, instead of just putting that on the shelf and coming back to it later when you become a true adult, which is how a lot of young people think about it. How do you keep it into play? How do you keep those conversations alive? How do you keep those interests and engagements going in the context of emerging adulthood? Without demanding the traditional model of well, are you going to come to a membership class? And are you going to always be at Sunday School? Right?
Christian Smith 47:00
So in other words, what would the church look like for a certain population of people who are just not going to be committed and settle down and have roots? I don't know what that looks like. And there's also always the danger here, I think, theologically from any traditions point of view of sort of having the world squish the faith into its own mold. Like how do you keep from being transformed into some other image?
Chris McAlilly 48:19
Yeah, that's the word.
Christian Smith 48:20
There are a lot of things to sort out.
Chris McAlilly 48:22
That's the word for sure. Yeah,
Eddie Rester 48:24
That's what you're kicking back to us right now is what I hear.
Chris McAlilly 48:26
Yeah, I think that those are good questions to end on and ones for us to ponder as we end today. I'm, I mean, there's so much more that is there. If you want to really dig into Dr. Smith's work, there's a there's a whole body of research and books. But we're incredibly grateful to you for taking the time to be with us today. Thanks for offering your time.
Christian Smith 48:48
It's been a fun conversation. Thanks for having me.
Eddie Rester 48:49
It's been a great conversation. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Eddie Rester 48:52
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 48:57
If you like what you heard today, feel free to share the podcast with other people that are in your network. Leave us a review. That's always really helpful. Subscribe, and you can follow us on our social media channels.
Eddie Rester 49:09
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com [END OUTRO]