- Smith and Denton, Soul Searching (2005)
- Regnerus, Forbidden Fruit (2007)
- Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition (2009)
- Dean, Almost Christian (2010)
- Smith, et al. Lost in Transition (2011)
- Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex in America (2011)
- Smith, et al., Young Catholic America (2014)
Monday, December 29, 2014
While We Are At It
For those of you who do not know the books that have come out of the NSYR, they are:
Why Do They Leave?
I have previously used statistics from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to highlight that: (1) we do a better job at keeping our youth than other religions, though we still lose just over a third; (2) we lose about three-quarters of the youth we lose to secularism though there are also some losses to various sects. A third key ingredient in understanding the situation is to know why youth are leaving. In this case raw statistics do not help answer the question. Simple surveys rarely help elucidate those sorts of issues.
Fortunately, not only did the NSYR track thousands of youth for a decade but they also engaged in in-depth interviews with a significant number of the youth at various stages. These interviews let the youth explain themselves and their reasoning behind the decisions they make and why they answered some of the questions the way they did. This provides richer data than otherwise might have been the case.
Unfortunately, the data published by the NSYR does not directly address the issue of why some Latter-day Saint youth become atheist, agnostic, or apathetic. It does, however, delve into the reasons why youth in general choose that path. For the sake of discussion, we here assume that reasons why Latter-day Saint youth choose that path are similar to reasons that youth in general choose that path. The NSYR cataloged a number of different reasons why youth lose their religion. These are worth listing:
Unfortunately, the NSYR gave no approximate weight to the frequency of the various reasons. One can hunt around the data and get some indications (and I provided one of these in point number 5 above). Among emerging adults (18- to 23-year-olds) in America, 84% have engaged in sexual relations and 66% have done so with more than one partner (Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex in America, 25). Thus about five-sixths of emerging adults may potentially fall under those whose sex lives conflicts with their religion and, if they give it much thought, will fall under the temptation to make their beliefs conform to their practice. For teenagers we have better separated data published. Among Americans 37.2% or teenagers have been sexually active and another 24.5% wish they were. Among Latter-day Saints 12.6% of teenagers have been sexually active and another 14.9% wish they were. (Regnerus, Forbidden Fruit, 132-33.)
So the desire to sin in ways that fundamentally conflicts with their religion affects about 30% of LDS teenagers. We lose 13% of our teenagers to secularism. So the desire to sin does not automatically lead to an abandonment of religion, but the NSYR found a statistical correlation on keeping religion and obeying the law of chastity (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 218, 271-75). On the other hand, having doubts about religious beliefs was only weakly correlated with retaining or losing faith to the point that the NSYR deemed it not significant (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 216). Doubts play a role in loss of belief and commitment but only in combination with other factors. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 229-31). For instance doubts play a role in the loss of faith of emerging adults only when faith did not play a big role in the teen's parents' lives, and the parents were lax in their church attendance, and faith already played less of a role in the teen's life, and is usually accompanied by the youth's less frequent religious devotion, i.e. prayer, church attendance and scripture reading (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 229-30). In other words, doubt usually needs to be combined with other factors to come into play.
The list of issues should not be thought of as necessarily mutually exclusive reasons for abandoning faith. If 84% of youth have potential issues with sex lives incompatible with their faith and 30% want to pick and choose their beliefs, there has to be some overlap. We are looking at a list of prominent factors not a list of separate causes.
Only three of the nine reasons deal with intellectual issues (6, 7, and 8). One of these (number 6) is an uncritical commitment to diversity. Diversity can be a good thing. Society needs a variety of occupations to function well: it needs farmers and pharmacists, engineers and educators. But that occupational diversity does not mean that criminals are either necessary or desirable. Diversity, in and of itself, is not an unalloyed good. A simplistic example is that diversity of answers to 2 + 2 is not a good thing. Answers of 3, 5, -87, and 2,000,003 are not equally valid answers to the question 2+2 (they are all invalid answers). Diversity can be a good thing or a bad thing and thus one needs to exercise discernment about whether diversity is desirable in any given instance. Diversity can be a cover term for disguising that "they seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:16).
Discernment requires some external criteria for deciding right and wrong. Latter-day Saints can become susceptible to point 7 if they confuse two points of view. The Latter-day Saint point of view is that each individual can know for him- or herself what is right; he or she is then a moral agent who can choose whether or not to do what is right; he or she is then accountable for his or her actions and must accept the consequences for choices made. This should not be confused (although it sometimes is) with the position that each individual can choose for him- or herself what is right and that God will automatically ratify that choice without accountability or consequences because God loves us or Jesus's atonement somehow nullifies all the adverse consequences of our actions.
The best data available to me indicates that we are not primarily losing youth to doubts that spring up in their minds as a result of something that they read on the internet (which is not to say that such a thing does not ever occur). The losses seem to be the result of a combination of factors (in which doubt sometimes might play a role). Loss of faith seems to be a complex play of factors rather than some simplistic story. Other factors weigh more heavily including sin or the desire to sin. Far more detrimental to loss of faith than doubts are notions of relativism, or the uncritical commitment to politically correct notions of diversity, and misunderstandings of moral agency and accountability.
Instead of indiscriminately accepting diversity or declaring that all points of view are equally valid, we ought to be discussing when diversity is good and when is it bad, what sorts of diversity are beneficial and which types are not, and what are the long-term consequences of various points of view. We ought to be clarifying the consequences of moral agency and stressing accountability. We ought to be paying attention to the consequences of choices and teaching those consequences.
Now, I am willing to consider that there might exist better data for Latter-day Saints than the NSYR data. The NSYR has the advantage of being publicly available and addresses the issue being discussed. I am also open to the possibility that the NSYR data is focusing on the general picture of youth in the United States and that a different story might be playing out among Latter-day Saints (which is demonstrably the case on a number of issues that the NSYR looked at but not all of them). A better analysis of the data focusing on the particular problem could help but if such an analysis has been done it is not publicly available. Those interested in the problem really owe it to themselves to work through the seven books comprising nearly two-thousand pages of analysis that the NSYR has generated. The narrative that Latter-day Saint youth are leaving the Church in droves because of something they learned from the internet that raises doubts in their minds is not supported by the available data.
Fortunately, not only did the NSYR track thousands of youth for a decade but they also engaged in in-depth interviews with a significant number of the youth at various stages. These interviews let the youth explain themselves and their reasoning behind the decisions they make and why they answered some of the questions the way they did. This provides richer data than otherwise might have been the case.
Unfortunately, the data published by the NSYR does not directly address the issue of why some Latter-day Saint youth become atheist, agnostic, or apathetic. It does, however, delve into the reasons why youth in general choose that path. For the sake of discussion, we here assume that reasons why Latter-day Saint youth choose that path are similar to reasons that youth in general choose that path. The NSYR cataloged a number of different reasons why youth lose their religion. These are worth listing:
- Disruptions to routine
- Distractions
- Differentiation
- Postponed Family Formation and Childbearing
- Keeping Options Open
- Honoring Diversity
- Self-confident Self-Sufficiency
- Self-evident Morality
- Partying
"Many life transitions and disturbances of diverse sorts--divorce, death of a family member, leaving home, job loss" make people "less likely to attend religious services" (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 75.)
Emerging adults engage in a number of other issues and activities that often distract them from possible religious and spiritual interests and involvements. To begin with, the central task of emerging adult life itself--learning to stand on one's own two feet--is in some sense one big, macro distraction from religious devotion. . . . Outside of work and possibly school, emerging adults spend a good amount of time attending to various errands associated with living on their own. . . . Fun-related distractions in many emerging adults' lives include . . . any other number of recreational and social activities that take time, energy, and sometimes money and planning. On top of all that is time spent on gadgets. . . . Social life can be distracting and draining in other ways as well. . . . More generally, there is simply too much else going on at the time to go to church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 76-77.)
Part of emerging adults' central life task of standing on their own is establishing identity differentiation. . . . Religion, particularly public religious practice, is one arena that effectively offers emerging adults an opportunity to achieve clear identity differentiation. . . . Religion also seems to many to be of less consequence than matters of education, finances, love interests, childbearing, and other more pressing areas, as a possible place to slack off, drop out, or otherwise become quite different from one's parents (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 78.)
The postponement of "settling down" that is associated with emerging adulthood unintentionally produces, as a causal mechanism, the tendency for Americans to reduce religious involvements during this phase of life. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 79.)
Emerging adults are generally loath to close doors or burn bridges. Instead, they want to keep as many options open as possible. . . . If religion means being sober, settled, and steadfast, and if emerging adulthood means postponing those things, then it means not being particularly concerned about religion. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 80.)Some youth (about 30%) want to have more of a cafeteria approach to religion, picking and choosing the beliefs that they want. They are picky
about what they are willing to adopt of their religious tradition's beliefs and practices, some of which they think are "outdated." They often hold certain "different opinions" and desires from what their religion allows, so they pick and choose what they want to accept. [They] disagree, neglect, or ignore the official teachings of their faiths most often on the following religious issues: sex before marriage, the need for regular religious service attendance, belief in the existence of hell, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, and use of birth control. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 167.)
For most of their lives, from preschool on, most emerging adults have been taught by multiple institutions to celebrate diversity, to be inclusive of difference, to overcome racial divides, to embrace multiculturalism, to avoid being narrowly judgmental towards others who are out of the ordinary. . . . Despite the value of such inclusiveness and acceptance generally . . . this general orientation when brought to questions of religious life tends to undermine the effectiveness of particularities of faith traditions and practices. . . . As a result, most emerging adults are happy with religion so long as it is general and accepting of diversity but are uncomfortable if it is anything else. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 80-81.)
They were authorized as individuals to know and choose what is right, at least for themselves. It was difficult for them to imagine an objective reference point beyond their own individual selves by which to evaluate themselves, their lives, and those of others. They could decide what to believe about ultimate reality based on what feels right to them, whatever fits their personal experience. . . . Why would an emerging adult want or need religious faith? (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 82.)
"They believe . . . religion plays an optional role in morally good living. The single thing in which it specializes--helping people to be good--is actually not needed in order for people to achieve that outcome. Religion thus serves a nonobligatory, noncrucial function in life. It does not have a corner on anything unique. Nobody has to believe in or practice it to live morally. As a result, its status becomes that of a lifestyle accessory. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition 83.)
One of the other reasons why many, though not all, emerging adults may want to distance themselves from religion is that religion in their minds conflicts with certain other lifestyle options that are higher priorities. Most of them want to party, to hook up, to have sex in relationships, and to cohabit; or if they do not do these things now, many at least want to keep them as options for the future. . . . Many want to have sex with a boyfriend or girlfriend, or to at least be free to do so if the occasion arises, and many want to be able to hook up with someone they meet to whom they may feel attracted. Many also want to cohabit with current or future serious partners or fiancés before getting married. And all of this, emerging adults are aware, contradicts the teachings of most religions. So they simply avoid religion and thereby resolve the conflict. . . . Framed as a social-psychological causal mechanism: most emerging adults reduce a certain cognitive dissonance they feel—arising from the conflict of religious teachings against partying and sex before marriage versus their wanting to engage in those behaviors—by mentally discounting the religious teachings and socially distancing themselves from the source of those teachings. In this simple way, the role of sex, drinking, and sometimes drugs is often important in forming emerging adults’ frequent lack of interest in religious faith and practice. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 83-84.)
Unfortunately, the NSYR gave no approximate weight to the frequency of the various reasons. One can hunt around the data and get some indications (and I provided one of these in point number 5 above). Among emerging adults (18- to 23-year-olds) in America, 84% have engaged in sexual relations and 66% have done so with more than one partner (Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex in America, 25). Thus about five-sixths of emerging adults may potentially fall under those whose sex lives conflicts with their religion and, if they give it much thought, will fall under the temptation to make their beliefs conform to their practice. For teenagers we have better separated data published. Among Americans 37.2% or teenagers have been sexually active and another 24.5% wish they were. Among Latter-day Saints 12.6% of teenagers have been sexually active and another 14.9% wish they were. (Regnerus, Forbidden Fruit, 132-33.)
So the desire to sin in ways that fundamentally conflicts with their religion affects about 30% of LDS teenagers. We lose 13% of our teenagers to secularism. So the desire to sin does not automatically lead to an abandonment of religion, but the NSYR found a statistical correlation on keeping religion and obeying the law of chastity (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 218, 271-75). On the other hand, having doubts about religious beliefs was only weakly correlated with retaining or losing faith to the point that the NSYR deemed it not significant (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 216). Doubts play a role in loss of belief and commitment but only in combination with other factors. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 229-31). For instance doubts play a role in the loss of faith of emerging adults only when faith did not play a big role in the teen's parents' lives, and the parents were lax in their church attendance, and faith already played less of a role in the teen's life, and is usually accompanied by the youth's less frequent religious devotion, i.e. prayer, church attendance and scripture reading (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 229-30). In other words, doubt usually needs to be combined with other factors to come into play.
The list of issues should not be thought of as necessarily mutually exclusive reasons for abandoning faith. If 84% of youth have potential issues with sex lives incompatible with their faith and 30% want to pick and choose their beliefs, there has to be some overlap. We are looking at a list of prominent factors not a list of separate causes.
Only three of the nine reasons deal with intellectual issues (6, 7, and 8). One of these (number 6) is an uncritical commitment to diversity. Diversity can be a good thing. Society needs a variety of occupations to function well: it needs farmers and pharmacists, engineers and educators. But that occupational diversity does not mean that criminals are either necessary or desirable. Diversity, in and of itself, is not an unalloyed good. A simplistic example is that diversity of answers to 2 + 2 is not a good thing. Answers of 3, 5, -87, and 2,000,003 are not equally valid answers to the question 2+2 (they are all invalid answers). Diversity can be a good thing or a bad thing and thus one needs to exercise discernment about whether diversity is desirable in any given instance. Diversity can be a cover term for disguising that "they seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:16).
Discernment requires some external criteria for deciding right and wrong. Latter-day Saints can become susceptible to point 7 if they confuse two points of view. The Latter-day Saint point of view is that each individual can know for him- or herself what is right; he or she is then a moral agent who can choose whether or not to do what is right; he or she is then accountable for his or her actions and must accept the consequences for choices made. This should not be confused (although it sometimes is) with the position that each individual can choose for him- or herself what is right and that God will automatically ratify that choice without accountability or consequences because God loves us or Jesus's atonement somehow nullifies all the adverse consequences of our actions.
The best data available to me indicates that we are not primarily losing youth to doubts that spring up in their minds as a result of something that they read on the internet (which is not to say that such a thing does not ever occur). The losses seem to be the result of a combination of factors (in which doubt sometimes might play a role). Loss of faith seems to be a complex play of factors rather than some simplistic story. Other factors weigh more heavily including sin or the desire to sin. Far more detrimental to loss of faith than doubts are notions of relativism, or the uncritical commitment to politically correct notions of diversity, and misunderstandings of moral agency and accountability.
Instead of indiscriminately accepting diversity or declaring that all points of view are equally valid, we ought to be discussing when diversity is good and when is it bad, what sorts of diversity are beneficial and which types are not, and what are the long-term consequences of various points of view. We ought to be clarifying the consequences of moral agency and stressing accountability. We ought to be paying attention to the consequences of choices and teaching those consequences.
Now, I am willing to consider that there might exist better data for Latter-day Saints than the NSYR data. The NSYR has the advantage of being publicly available and addresses the issue being discussed. I am also open to the possibility that the NSYR data is focusing on the general picture of youth in the United States and that a different story might be playing out among Latter-day Saints (which is demonstrably the case on a number of issues that the NSYR looked at but not all of them). A better analysis of the data focusing on the particular problem could help but if such an analysis has been done it is not publicly available. Those interested in the problem really owe it to themselves to work through the seven books comprising nearly two-thousand pages of analysis that the NSYR has generated. The narrative that Latter-day Saint youth are leaving the Church in droves because of something they learned from the internet that raises doubts in their minds is not supported by the available data.
Haven't I Heard This Somewhere Before?
Last night, I ran across the following autobiographical note in a recent book by Craig Blomberg:
In college, from 1973 to 1977, I majored in religion at a private liberal arts college that in many respects was running from its Christian heritage as fast as it could.
(Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2014], 5.)In an endnote Blomberg helpfully supplies some details:
Augustana College, Rock Island, IL., 1973-1977. Until 1962 the college had housed a Lutheran seminary. A long-tenured and highly-beloved president, Conrad Bergendorff, had been a masterful champion of the highest levels of academic achievement within a framework of informed but devout Christian faith. Under Thomas Tredway, the president inaugurated during my student days, attention was given almost exclusively to the academic goals. The religion department (no longer the department of Christianity as under Bergendorff) was most eager to expose students to virtually every perspective except the historic, pietistic Lutheranism (or its equivalent in other denominations) that had characterized the school before the mid-1960s.
(Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? 229 n. 23.)I sense a pattern here.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
An Unintended Consequence
Christian Smith, no stranger to astute observations, has yet another one:
Many Catholic educational institutions have found that efforts to become more mainstream, to open up to the larger world of higher education, and to increase the quality of their instruction have had the unintended consequence of sidelining or diluting their Catholic character and identity.
(Christian Smith and John C. Cavadini, Building Catholic Higher Education: Unofficial Reflections from the University of Notre Dame [Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014], ix.)Smith is merely observing in Catholic terms the experience of Congregationalist Harvard, Congregationalist Yale, Baptist Brown, Presbyterian Princeton and many other originally sectarian institutions of higher education. Though the specifics may differ, this general experiment has been conducted many times with the same general result. Insanity, it has been said, is to repeat the same experiment over and over and expect different results.
Monday, December 22, 2014
Where Are They Going?
In a previous post, I addressed the issue of how many youth the Church is losing using data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR). The NSYR provides data on how many we keep but also what happens to those we lose.
I will present the data in chart form. The first column (A) is the percentage of LDS who change to that religion in their high school years (from Christian Smith et al., Soul Searching, 36). The second column (B) is the percentage of those who were LDS in high school who changed religion as young adults (from Christian Smith et al., Souls in Transition, 109). The third column (C) is the calculated percentage of those who were raised LDS and then changed by the time that they finished being college aged.
A B C
LDS 86% 72% 62%
No Religion 13 17 28
Conservative Protestant 1 3 4
Mainline Protestant 0 4 3
Black Protestant 0 3 3
Indeterminate 0 1 1
Roman Catholic 0 0 0
Jewish 0 0 0
Other Religions 0 0 0
LDS 86% 72% 62%
No Religion 13 17 28
Conservative Protestant 1 3 4
Mainline Protestant 0 4 3
Black Protestant 0 3 3
Indeterminate 0 1 1
Roman Catholic 0 0 0
Jewish 0 0 0
Other Religions 0 0 0
(Note that because of rounding errors the percentages in the last column add to 101%.)
One way of visualizing this data is to think of the deacon's quorum and Beehive class in a ward that comprises 25 youth. By the time that they have graduated from college we would expect that 15 would still be LDS, 1 would be, say, a Southern Baptist, 1 would be an Episcopalian, 1 would be a United Baptist, and 7 will have no religion.
The big threat to the youth in the Church is not Evangelicals but secularists. They account for more than twice as many losses as those to all other religions combined. We lose more youth to secularism during the college years (and the statistics include those who do not go to college) than we do in the high school years. Signs of secularization during the time when youth are attending the university should be of particular concern to church leaders.
Latter-day Saints are not the only religion losing youth to the secularists and so it is worth putting our statistics in context. Here are the calculated statistics (column C) for the Church compared to other religions:
Percentage of youth lost to secularism:
Indeterminate 53%
Other Religions 52%
Jewish 46%
Mainline Protestant 33%
Roman Catholic 29%
LDS 28%
Black Protestant 26%
Conservative Protestant 23%
Other Religions 52%
Jewish 46%
Mainline Protestant 33%
Roman Catholic 29%
LDS 28%
Black Protestant 26%
Conservative Protestant 23%
So various denominations tend to lose a quarter, a third, or half of their youth to secularism. We are closer to losing a quarter but are on the high end of that.
These statistics need to be considered with those of my previous discussion about the comparative loss of youth generally. We lose more than twice as many to secularism as to all other religions combined. Sectarian losses are a lesser concern. While we do not want to be in the position of saying "not one soul will be lost" because we remember who made that boast, any individual loss will be keenly felt especially by those closest to the individual lost. Still, we need to realize whence the greater threat is coming. We also need to arm our youth against that threat.
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Udo Jürgens (1934-2014)
I just saw the news that Udo Jürgens died today of a heart attack while out for a walk.
I am very sorry to hear about it.
He was a very talented and witty man, though not especially moral.
I am reminded of one of some lines from one of his more famous works:
Und das Ende vom Lied hat wohl jeder geahnt
Der Tod hat reium sie dort abgesahnt.
(For those of you who don't know: No, that is not a typo; it's a pun.)
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Archaeological Silliness in the News
'Tis the season to be silly, at least when it comes to reporting about archaeology. No, I am not talking about the wildly inaccurate reporting of the BYU archaeological excavations in Egypt (such as is found here and here). The prize for the silliest archaeological headline comes from the Independent:
If the building at Old Sarum was really built by Henry I in the twelfth century then it is certainly medieval. It is not prehistoric. Prehistoric England is earlier than medieval England. By the time of Henry I, England had definitely entered its historical period.
If archaeologists actually had found a medieval palace under a prehistoric fortress, then we might seriously think about space aliens being involved. If you read the story, you will find that such is not the case.
To his credit, David Keys, who wrote the story, did not make the mistake; whoever wrote the headline did. By writing "under" instead of "inside" the editor wins the prize for the silliest archaeological story of the season.
Archaeologists find vast medieval palace buried under prehistoric fortress at Old SarumNow, just think about what is being claimed here. Archaeology proceeds from the assumption that material is deposited chronologically. The further down you go, the earlier the material. Whenever find a building below another building, the earlier one is under the later one.
If the building at Old Sarum was really built by Henry I in the twelfth century then it is certainly medieval. It is not prehistoric. Prehistoric England is earlier than medieval England. By the time of Henry I, England had definitely entered its historical period.
If archaeologists actually had found a medieval palace under a prehistoric fortress, then we might seriously think about space aliens being involved. If you read the story, you will find that such is not the case.
To his credit, David Keys, who wrote the story, did not make the mistake; whoever wrote the headline did. By writing "under" instead of "inside" the editor wins the prize for the silliest archaeological story of the season.
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