God? Sure, whatever

Did moralistic therapeutic deism color the way they viewed politics?

We didn't ask specifically about their views on issues of the day, but from interviews I can tell you they're fairly apolitical. We did ask them what they were excited about or interested in so there would have been opportunities to discuss things like this at length if they wanted to, and the more extreme liberal or conservative teens did have more thought-out positions on things like abortion. There's a minority who are interested in politics, but a majority think it doesn't have anything to do with their life. If life is about being happy, and as long as politics isn't impinging directly on your happiness, they're not going to think about it. If they did have, for example, patriotic views, it would be because they were from a generally patriotic family. What's really pressing, we found, are things like who are they going to sit with in cafeteria, did they get good grades, did they make the play? They hear about Iraq in news, and they may feel bad about the people dying, but these are not the immediate pressing concerns.

According to your results, 11 percent of highly devoted teens have engaged in oral sex and 9 percent have had intercourse -- and they've had an average of about three sexual partners. How did they reconcile sex with prescribed chastity?

Well, if you expect the numbers to be zero then that's a high number. But if you compare it to the national norm for teens [according to the most recent figures from the CDC about 30 percent of teens aged 15-17 have had intercourse] then it's somewhat lower. With some of them we don't know when they became devoted -- they may have been involved in a relationship when they were 14 but when they were 15 they got serious about religious faith. Some amount of kids are sincere and committed about faith and it's just that stuff happens, which they may regret or they may not. Then there are some kids who are highly compartmentalized -- they may be highly religious and go to youth group but in some other area in their life there's contradictory stuff going on. The culture sends signals that say you have a human right to sexual fulfillment as long as you're ready and comfortable, and this is natural, there's no reason why it should be repressed. So for a lot of teens sex is not a moral issue, it's about A) are you being safe and B) do you really like the person. We asked everyone, "Does your faith have anything to teach about sexual behavior?" I interviewed some Catholic teens that told me the church has no teaching on sexuality. They weren't aware that this was an issue. Sex was one thing you do under certain conditions and religion was something else.

One 16-year-old boy in the book said his faith became stronger when he saw his prayers for his drug-addicted father answered. "I was like, if God can do that, than he can do other things too," he says. It's as if he sees God as an appliance -- or, as you say, a "divine butler." Of those 16 percent of kids who considered themselves non-religious, did you find that they ever gave up when God didn't function as an appliance?

The vast majority just see that God comes through. There were a few kids who said, "Where the heck is God? He's not doing what he's supposed to do." But most non-religious kids didn't put it that way. They just said, "Oh, I'm just not interested." They didn't say, "You know, I asked God for my brother to be healed and he wasn't, so I'm pissed off." They didn't say that. The whateverism is also on the not religious side -- their attitude is, "I've got nothing against it, I'm just not interested."

Were you heartened at all in talking to these kids? It seemed like even if they were encountering trouble in their lives they really did want to be good.

Unless we were deceived by these interviews, and I don't think we were, teenagers really do have this sense that you should be good, you should be nice, you should be trying to do well. They link being good and doing well. You're probably not going to do well in life if you're a complete screw-up and immoral. They're oriented toward being a good person and that God is out there -- which, compared to being neo-Nazis or Nietzschean nihilists, is great. It's just that it doesn't have much rootedness -- you ask them why and they don't know.

What consequences do you think this lack of rootedness will eventually produce?

Without roots, people become vulnerable to ideologues and demagoguery. Like the one kid we mention in the book who started off our in-person interview saying you should treat everyone lovingly. But then later in the conversation said, "Well, evolutionarily, if you had to kill a bunch of people, that's fine too." That's scary. He hasn't been trained in moral reasoning. Teens can't give a good argument so they're left with asserting. And assertions only go so far.

Why is it important for teens to be able to reason in a religious context?

Articulacy matters if you're interested in having teens and people who are serious and committed and know what they're doing with their faith. This claim of mine that it is important is somewhat Christian oriented, Christianity being in general more focused on cognitive belief, as compared to Buddhism, or Judaism, which has evolved in such a way that it can be more focused on family and community and identity. And I'm coming from a certain philosophical position, which is that if we can't articulate our beliefs, belief can only be so real. So if these teenagers grow up, and they have kids, and when their kids want to know why are certain things right and wrong or say, "Why should I believe anything you're telling me?" what substance will they have to explain why? And what will our churches look like 10 generations from now? The congregation of We Don't Really Know.

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