I don’t know that it is a mark of health or sickness, so much as a sign of the information age in which we live, and the fact that people have access to explore a variety of religious traditions like never before, as well as access historical-critical analysis about their own faiths that, in times past, used to more or less be restricted to the walls of the ivory tower, and sometimes goes a long way (for some) toward dismantling what a person once took for granted.
Though, on the health and sickness spectrum—I am not surprised that the number of adults who identify as evangelical Christian is growing, and the number who affiliate as Catholic is plummeting—save the immigrant population helping percentages stay steady for Catholics in the U.S. I say this based on my own investigations into young adult religiosity in America (see Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance & Religion on America’s College Campuses). I believe that what may indeed lead so many adults to identify shifts in their religious identities is tied more to their relationships to religious traditions during young adulthood than anything else.
So what interests me immensely about the Pew study, is how it offers a futuresque window in what is already so clear among college students. That, save evangelical Christians, most youth are floundering when it comes to practicing the faith traditions they’ve inherited from their families, at least in the ways they believe they are expected to practice. Catholic youth, especially, are alienated from a faith tradition and hierarchy that they see as “out of touch” and frankly, rather disinterested in what they deal with in reality on an everyday basis—especially when it comes to sex, romance, and dating.
What evangelicals have, that no one else has yet seemed to master, is walking the tightrope of being at once countercultural in its interpretation of the Christian tradition, while at the same time using popular culture in its vast permutations to effectively and creatively deliver faith, salvation, and its version of the Christian message to a wide demographic of young adults hungry for meaning, structure, and religion, but in a way that meshes seamlessly with their lives and the fact of American popular culture in which they are immersed.
Evangelicals aside, interest in “the spiritual,” in ways that young adults often detach it from what they understand as organized, institutional religion, is at an all-time high. To what this interest will translate in this next generation’s adult years and how this will affect America’s future religious landscape remains to be seen.
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