Are nonreligious teenagers really deficient?

There is a short item that is now showing up in newspapers across the country that says, "according to an important new survey ... devout [teens] ... are better off in emotional health, academic success, community involvement, concern for others, trust of adults and avoidance of risky behavior [than their nonreligious counterparts]."

That's a pretty hefty assertion. But it's downright tepid compared with the following summary of the data by one of this new surveys authors:

   on every measure of life
   outcome ... highly religious
   teens are doing much better
   than nonreligious kids.
   ... Highly religious American
   teens are happier and
   healthier. They are doing
   better in school, they have
   more hopeful futures, they
   get along with their parents
   better. Name a social outcome
   that you care about,
   and the highly religious
   kids are doing better.

If the data actually demonstrate such assertions, it could easily be used to argue that secular parents are profoundly and even horribly damaging their teenagers' lives and futures by denying them religion, even if these parents do teach their kids sound moral and ethical principles. One could even justify allowing public schools to introduce a substantial amount of religious activity and instruction, not for any specifically religious reasons but simply "in the best interests of the kids."

But what data does the study--published as Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Life of American Teenagers--actually present on this subject and what conclusions can properly be drawn?

The problem isn't that the study was improperly conducted or that it's slanted to further a conservative religious political agenda. The survey--part of a six-year National Project on Youth and Religion funded by the Lilly Endowment and headquartered at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill--is a carefully structured combination of a very large telephone survey of 3,290 teenagers (ages thirteen to seventeen) conducted over a nine-month period from July 2002 to April 2003 as well as 276 extensive personal interviews.

The authors of the study--led by Dr. Christian Smith, associate chair of sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill--are primarily concerned with understanding and combating what they perceive as a deeply disturbing superficiality and self-involved materialism in modern teenagers' religious outlook. This concern leads them to seriously condemn the corrosive effects of "consumer-driven capitalism" (their words) and modern advertising, bringing them at times close to the views of liberal observers of American religion like Alan Wolfe and even Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? To be sure, the Youth and Religion study--like the overall six-year project itself--is unabashedly aimed at supporting the work of adult church and religious youth group leaders in their ministry with teenagers. But it isn't designed to promote a conservative, crypto-theocratic agenda.

But what the Youth and Religion study does reflect is a strongly "theocentric" perspective--one that sees religion as central and nonreligion as simply its lack or absence. In setting up the categories for the comparison of religious and nonreligious teenagers, the study defines four basic "ideal types": the "devoted" or devout religious teen--one who attends religious services weekly, is actively involved in a religious youth group, prays and reads scripture frequently, and feels deep faith and closeness to God--and the other three: the "regulars," the "sporadic," and the "disengaged," who are simply defined by the increasing absence of the particular characteristics of the "devoted" group.

The result is that the least religious category, the "disengaged," doesn't define a coherent social group of any kind but rather a heterogeneous grab bag of adolescents whose only shared characteristic is that they aren't devout--mixing together two kinds of nonreligious adolescents who are really quite distinct.

One group is the children of secular parents who accept basic American moral and ethical standards but who don't believe in a supreme being or attend church. These teenagers' parents take their kids to soccer practices and youth meetings and themselves attend PTA and neighborhood association meetings but don't show up at Sunday morning services. When asked, these parents will often say, "We seriously thought about joining the church for the kids' benefit because they teach many good values over there, but we just felt it was hypocritical to make the kids accept beliefs and doctrines that we don't really believe or practice ourselves." These parents may frequently encourage and participate with their kids in civic voluntarism, from after-school tutoring to Habitat for Humanity; with Meals on Wheels and Hands on America. Over the last thirty years young people from families like these have played a major role in tens of thousands of local and national environmental volunteer projects.

The other distinct group of non-devout teenagers is composed of the vast number of "rebellious" teens who actively reject some or even most of mainstream society's rules, norms, and values. These teenagers come in kaleidoscopic variety--gangstas, punks, goths, dopers, dropouts, bikers, slackers, skinheads, losers, ravers, weirdos, cokeheads, junkies, thrill seekers, risk takers, pill poppers, shit kickers, and dozens of other rebellious subcultures of the social environment. This vast group of young people have three basic traits in common: they tend not to be religious, they tend to repeatedly break social rules or even violate the laws, and as a group they tend constantly to get caught, racking up a wildly disproportionate share of all recorded youthful infractions of municipal laws and school regulations.

There may be some specific research objectives for which it makes sense to lump these rebellious teens together with the first group into a single catch-all category called the "nonreligious." However, in a productive national discussion of the differences between religious and nonreligious teenagers, it would seem more logical to consider the two groups separately. But it just doesn't happen in the Religion and Youth survey. On variable after variable measuring obedience to rules, compliance with social norms, and general social adjustment--variables like the number of arrests and driving tickets, frequency of expulsions, level of sexual activity, use of drugs, quality of self-image, relationship with parents, participation in volunteer activities, level of school grades, and so on--the mixed group of "nonreligious" teenagers invariably appears inferior to the devout.

It may be that the nonrebellious secular group alone might actually score as high or even higher than the religious group on some or all of these measures. But there isn't one piece of data in the entire study that is designed to find out. On the contrary, the study presumes that healthy, productive, nonreligious teenagers and morally responsible secular parents are so scarce in American society that they needn't be considered as a distinct or significant social group.

This attitude is most evident in two long personal profiles that are the most vivid and specific portraits the book contains of nonreligious teens. One of the two nonreligious teens portrayed is Raymond, a drug dealer who smokes marijuana, drinks alcohol, uses crystal meth, has withdrawal symptoms, was expelled from high school, has been in jail, and watches porn videos. The teen's father is "a biker who drinks and sends Raymond soft-porn backgrounds for his computer."

The other nonreligious teenager is described as an "earnest, caring, hardworking, affable adolescent, the kind most adults would enjoy and admire." But as the profile continues, it emerges that he once attempted suicide and has difficult relations with his parents--a mother he describes as "really new-agey, into a lot of weird, crazy things" and a father who is a "hard-ass" who "worked so much I hardly ever saw him."

Despite his extreme lack of parental guidance and support, however, the seventeen-year-old nonreligious teen expresses a wide variety of admirable moral and ethical sentiments. But the interviewer subsequently comments that, "lacking recourse to ground his moral commitments in, say, divine command or natural law, Steve finds himself ... possessing few coherent, rational grounds for explaining, justifying and defending those standards.... Of course, nobody expects a 17 year old to be an articulate moral philosopher. But the apparent lack of clear bearings or firm anchors in Steve's moral reasoning are conspicuous and perhaps worrisome."

These two profiles illustrate an unstated but evident tendency to consistently visualize nonreligious teenagers as either mired in delinquency and social pathology or as basically confused and adrift, lacking clear parental moral guidance and unconsciously yearning for the clarity and certainty religious faith would provide.

The authors do warn that the two profiles they offer aren't actually meant to typify all nonreligious adolescents and their parents. But the only broad generalization the book offers about healthy nonreligious teens and their families reflects the same basic view that, "as a whole, low-attending American teens, like the nonreligious teens, appear to reflect some likely signs of family strain and general civic and organizational disconnection."

In fact, in all of the data from the telephone surveys, interviews, and scores of regressions and statistical tables, the social categories of morally responsible nonreligious parents and decent, law-abiding and successful nonreligious teens hover like ghostly, unseen presences. One senses their existence somewhere in the underlying data, but nowhere are their numbers estimated and nowhere can they be directly observed.

In a book subtitled The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, one could be forgiven for thinking that this isn't an inconsequential omission.

Andrew Levison is the author of two books and numerous articles on the social and political attitudes and behavior of blue-collar workers and other ordinary Americans. His article, "Class and Warfare," appeared in the September 2003 American Prospect.