God? Sure, whatever

Adults, you say, view teens as living in an embattled subculture roiling with alienation. But you found that the majority of American teens were content to follow the faith they inherited and seemed to think that it was self-evident that kids would accept what their parents had taught them -- they had no real desire to assert their independence by finding a different religion.

This was another thing that really ,surprised us -- how conventional they were. Because teenager and rebellion are virtually synonymous in popular thinking. But they said, "This was how I was raised, what do you expect?" Baby boomers' main experience was not being like their parents -- changing the world, fostering cultural revolutions, breaking boundaries, thinking if you're over 30 you're evil. So their children grow up with parents who still imagine adolescence in terms of rebellion. But it's not the same world as, say, 1964. There are fewer boundaries that need to be broken through. So teens have parents who still have those particular notions of what it's like to be a teen but the teens themselves, I think, wish for more boundaries and structure than they have. And that's partly coming from what we heard in interviews and partly from what we know about psychology and human behavior, what we know about what humans need to thrive -- they need structure.

You say that teens' "benign whateverism" is a bigger problem for communities of faith than teen rebellion. Why? And can you define that?

The benign part is that they see religion as generally good for people. It doesn't hurt you -- at the very least, if you enjoy it, it can produce positive results and help you to be moral. And so they're pretty positive about religion on that score -- as long as nobody's forced to do it. And then the whateverism is that religion's not that important. It's not worth getting all that worked up about. If someone wants to do it, good. Their parents go to church now and then, most of their friends say, "Sure, God, that's fine, whatever," and it's not this kind of active, foregrounded, important belief. It's just sort of part of the furniture. You wouldn't have an argument about it in the same way you're not going to have arguments about the wallpaper in your dining room -- it's just there.

Another thing that surprised us was how inarticulate they were when it came to talking about these matters. So many Christian teens of all denominations couldn't talk about the most elementary Christian beliefs. Most of the highly devoted teens were certainly more articulate. But I would say maybe a majority of the regular or even sporadic church attenders certainly would just not be able to answer elementary questions. For example, they'd answer "Who is Jesus?" with "I don't know."

You say that teens were more articulate when discussing their views on drugs or pregnancy or AIDS. Why do you think that is?

There are two factors behind their increased articulacy when discussing their views on drugs and other problems, and they're both related. One is that these are things that could wreck their lives, things that could ruin their futures -- you die in a car crash because you were drinking. Well, they think about that. And it's also because the adult world has communicated to them, effectively and over time, that you need to pay attention to this, this is important. We don't want you getting herpes and AIDS, we don't want you killing yourself and other people driving drunk, we don't want you getting pregnant. The adult world has taken an interest and said we have got to educate them about this. And they are educated about this. So the larger point is teens are educable, they can be taught. But adults have got to decide, "Religion matters, and we're going to teach them why this matters."

Your study found that teens often subscribe to the philosophy of moralistic therapeutic deism -- the belief that God exists to help us out, that God largely exists to boost our self-esteem -- and this is how God is often imagined in the evangelical community. I'm wondering, since you've studied and written on evangelical beliefs, how much of this philosophy is coming from those churches?

There are things in the evangelical subculture that feed directly into moralistic therapeutic deism. One is the personal relationship with Jesus, and that's a big theme. And originally evangelicals intended that to mean you make a personal commitment to Christianity. But that can turn into thinking that Jesus is your buddy, Jesus is a pal, Jesus helps you out. Another thing is evangelicalism's insistence that your faith should have to do with all parts of your life and I think that makes for a strong religious tradition in some ways, but it also can easily slide into thinking like, "I prayed for a parking spot and God gave it to me." Basically, instead of thinking, "I'm living my life with God," it can easily turn into something self-centered: "I want God to fix all my problems and meet all my needs."

Another piece of evangelicalism is the whole seeker church or church growth movement, which is very much about finding out what the customer wants and delivering it. This redefines faith not as a truthful tradition that people need to get onboard with and respond to, but as a consumer commodity that is out there to meet individual needs and wants. The seat of authority then is the unchurched Joe in whatever suburb who may have an itch in his life for something different, and some church will come along and say, "Come here, there's no demands, you can dress however you want, we'll entertain you." All these things feed into moralistic therapeutic deism. And I would say -- and this is getting more theological here -- but I would say that they're all distortions of practices and precepts that are intended to be good.

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