“If it feels good, do it”: Chicken Soup for the Capitalist Soul.

By Scott Korb

They are not running away. They are not rebelling. They may not actually know, or be able to articulate, what they believe, but almost every one of them — ninety-seven per cent — believes in God. The vast majority of them — like the vast majority of us — are Christians. Very few are what might be called spiritual seekers; hardly any of them know what it means to say (or be) “spiritual but not religious.” When prompted, nearly all of them speak positively about religion, yet with each other they hardly ever talk — much less argue — about it at all. They are conventional and, according to Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, they “may actually serve as a very accurate barometer of the condition of the culture and institutions of our larger society. Far from being alien creatures from another planet, American teenagers actually well reflect back to us the best and worst of our own adult condition and culture.”

From July 2002 to March 2003, with Smith as principle investigator, the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) conducted 3,290 national, random telephone surveys of American teenagers. Then, in the spring and summer of 2003, the NSYR followed up by conducting 267 in-depth interviews with a subsample of those telephone respondents in forty-five states. The results comprise the largest sociological study of adolescent religiosity ever conducted. Smith and Denton’s book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005), is the first publication to present the results. Others, they say, will follow.

While the data presented in Soul Searching are at once too sweeping and too specific to consider here — as with a review of any in-depth sociological study — the above generalizations may suffice as a summary of what Smith and Denton believe to be the most surprising findings of the NSYR. Least surprising, perhaps, is the fact that the United States is predominantly Christian, and the authors are unapologetic (and perfectly justified) in making Christianity their chief focus. More than thirty Protestant denominations are broken down into three categories — Conservative, Mainline, and Black — representing more than half of American teens. Catholics represent nearly another quarter. Alongside these majority Christian affiliations, the authors present Judaism and Mormonism as the two largest minority religions, representing 1.5% and 2.5% of the U.S. teen population, respectively. Given these numbers, the authors dismiss as simply false (“as a matter of empirical religiodemographic proportions”) recent claims that the United States has become the most religiously diverse nation in the world. And Christian congregation leaders should rest assured: you are losing hardly any teens at all to Wicca, Buddhism, or anything at all New Agey.

This is not to say, however, that Christian leaders have nothing to worry about. All those Christians who feel under siege may not, in fact, be wrong. Yet, their teenage children are almost all conventional believers who follow their parents in matters of faith. According to the data, something far more insidious than Wicca is stealing them away.

Smith and Denton’s most significant contribution to our understanding of American teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives begins when the authors attempt to explain why teens believe what they believe — in a sense, why they are so conventional. The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that “powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States.” Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: “Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings.” And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.

Blessed.

These beliefs are killing American religion. The authors call it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The creed is simple and, yes, conventional — but, where the authors find that it matters, MTD is not traditional. Basically, God exists and watches over human life, which was created by God. God wants people to be nice, as it says in the bible and in most world religions. God does not have to be involved in our lives except to solve our problems and make us happy. Good people will be even happier in heaven after they die. The religious beliefs of American teens tend to be — as a whole, across all traditions — that simple. It’s something Jews and Catholics and Protestants of all stripes seem to have in common. It is instrumentalist. “This God is not demanding,” say the authors. “He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good.”

Finally, it’s no wonder to Smith and Denton that adolescents don’t seem to argue much about their faiths — when it comes down to it, they all believe pretty much the same thing. And it gets worse. MTD is not as strictly childish as it sounds. What Smith and Denton call a parasitic creed affects religious American adults, as well. Though subtle, Smith and Denton’s insistence that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree becomes a sharp indictment of America’s religious grown-ups who may well speak, understand and think as adults, but cannot bear the thought of putting away their childish beliefs.

While adults may have found a way to articulate their beliefs in a way that sounds convincingly Christian (or Jewish or Mormon or Muslim, etc., etc.), what the authors have found is that the teens can’t really talk about faith. (Perhaps they are simply too young to make sense, or rationalize, between one moral system that emphasizes self-sacrifice and another that emphasizes self-esteem.) Yet, teenage inarticulacy, the authors argue, is not a matter of mere adolescent bumbling, or the result of nerves brought on by interviews with a stuffy sociologist in the study room of the public library. In interviews (with those same stuffy sociologists in those same study rooms), teens were able to speak with real fluency on other matters of ethical, cultural and social significance — from the impact of HIV/AIDS, drug use, and drunk driving, to “television characters and pop stars.” Nor are teenage episodes of verbal faltering harmless. Referring to Charles Taylor’s arguments that “inarticulacy undermines the possibilities of reality,” the authors warn that “religious faith, practice, and commitment can be no more than vaguely real when people cannot talk much about them.” Such arguments are not, of course, just theoretical musings; these are the exact findings of the NSYR. Teenage religion is nothing, if not vague. Yet, even nonreligious teens do not tend to be hostile to religion; their reasons for being nonreligious are often as vague (or nonexistent, in some cases) as the explanations religious teens give when asked what or why they believe. Having already established just how conventional teenagers are when it comes to religion, just how much they actually depend on their parents (and other trusted adults) for their faith formation, Smith and Denton resume their general indictment of the American religious establishment for its basic failure to teach. Still, it’s important to ask, what would they be teaching anyway?

The authors conclude that American Christianity is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or…is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” When asked to articulate their faith, not one of their interviewees mentioned self-discipline, working for social justice, justification or sanctification, and 112 of them described the purpose of religion in terms of “personally feeling, being, getting, or being made happy” (using the “specific phrase to ‘feel happy’ well more that 2,000 times”). Yet, for all the trouble they see, the authors do not turn their backs on American Christianity. Whether or not teens recognize it, the data suggest that in a wide range of life outcomes — from the formation of community and leadership skills to the accumulation of social and cultural capital — the more religious a teen, the more successful she will tend to be. By interspersing within their book of empirical findings a series of discursive passages that draw the distinction between a morally significant and morally insignificant universe, or that speculate on the deleterious effects of U.S. mass-consumer capitalism on American religion, Smith and Denton make plain that their interest in American spirituality is not a dispassionate one. The authors really seem to care about these kids, who, in being treated by most adults like rebellious aliens, have been entirely misserved. The instrumentalist parasite of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is killing off the “historically key ideas in America’s main religious tradition, Christianity”: “repentance, love of neighbor, social justice, unmerited grace, self-discipline, humility, the cost of discipleship, dying to self, the sovereignty of God, personal holiness, the struggles of sanctification, glorifying God in suffering, hunger for righteousness.” And this is lamentable.

But rather than simply lamenting, the authors mean their book to stimulate conversations about teens and religion, how better to take them seriously by rejecting the generalizations that tend to misunderstand the role teenagers play in American religious life. Teens are not aliens. Their inarticulacy is a problem. Most of them are teachable. And since they tend to follow parents more than anyone seems to admit, conventional wisdom suggests that parents would be indispensable teachers. Of course, it’s not the point whether or not Smith and Denton believe in God. They believe in religion. They believe in teenagers. And for good reason. The data suggests that America would be better off if we all believed as they do.

Scott M. Korb is books editor for The Revealer and last wrote about Randall Sullivan’s The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions. He’s also an editor of Killing the Buddha, and plays holy basketball in Brooklyn.