Twenty-Somethings and the Catholic Church

On the always interesting group blog at America: The National Catholic Weekly, Michael O’Loughlin and Tom Beaudoin offer reflections on the conference held in late January at Fordham University called Lost? Twenty-Somethings and the Catholic Church. Here are some highlights taken from O’Loughlin’s post:

The church should avoid the temptation to become a political power player. Surveys repeatedly demonstrate that young adults are turned off from the church when it appears to be shilling for a particular political party. Minor gains in policy may come at a huge cost: losing a generation of Catholics from both sides of the political spectrum.

Race and ethnicity remain sensitive and critical challenges for the Catholic Church, especially with the rapidly growing Latino population. Young Latinos are taught a sense of ownership and belonging in their parishes that is not fostered and developed in traditionally Euro-centric parishes. As a result, these young adults sometimes leave the church altogether when their talents are underutilized in mixed parishes.

The split between church leaders and young adults on issues of gender and sexuality is growing. Young people are more likely to support same-sex marriage and female ordination than their older counterparts and the hierarchy, and many cite these issues as reasons they don’t feel at home in the church. Young adults won’t support any institution where they feel that any group of people is not fully welcome and included.

Beaudoin adds more summary and reflection.

While neither blogger discusses the potential influence of these trends on college students or on Catholic colleges, the importance of the issues for Catholic higher education are obvious.

The “Zeal of the Convert” –-More from the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life offers a new analysis from its 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey regarding the “zeal of the convert.” These findings may help faculty and staff better understand students or colleagues who have switched religions or have switched denomination within Christianity. Here’s the report’s introduction:

A common perception about individuals who switch religions is that they are very fervent about their new faith. A new analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life provides quantitative support for this piece of conventional wisdom often referred to as the "zeal of the convert." The analysis finds that people who have switched faiths (or joined a faith after being raised unaffiliated with a religion) are indeed slightly more religious than those who have remained in their childhood faith, as measured by the importance of religion in their lives, frequency with which they attend religious services and other measures of religious commitment. However, the analysis also finds that the differences in religious commitment between converts¹ and nonconverts are generally very small and are more apparent among some religious groups² than others.

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (6) Can the HERI survey put the matter to rest?

In the last post in this series I summarized some of Christian Smith’s reservations about the degree of “spiritual seeking” among teenagers. Few, he finds, are on the “spiritual but not religious” quests that other researchers are so taken with. Can the HERI survey resolve the disagreement?

Probably not.

To get at the students’ “spirituality,” the HERI team adopts two strategies, neither of which gives me much confidence that their results can be used to adjudicate between Cherry, Beaudoin, and Wuthnow, on the one hand, and Smith’s findings for teens, on the other.

• Strategy one entails letting respondents provide their own definition of “spiritual,” “spirituality,” and “spiritual quest.” But do the students understand “spirituality” in the way that the researchers do? Little way to tell.
• Strategy two involved developing “scales” to measure dimensions of “spirituality”—Spirituality, Spiritual Quest, and Equanimity—that upon examination may not easily stand for what their titles suggest.

A longish justification for my lack of confidence follows the break.

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (5) More “spiritual” than “religious”? Maybe not

In the last post in this series on student religiosity and spirituality I indicated how some researchers think that today’s students are more likely to see themselves as “spiritual” than as “religious.” But Christian Smith’s National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) raises some significant questions about the extent of “spiritual seeking” among teenagers, and suggests either that some significant changes occur during the college years or that accounts of “spiritual nomads on a perpetual quest for greater insight and more authentic and fulfilling experiences”  aptly describe only a tiny fraction of today’s college students. [Smith, 73]

Teenagers tended to “espouse rather inclusive, pluralistic, and individualistic views about religious truth, identity boundaries, and need for religious congregation,” Smith explains, but very few American teenagers,

appear themselves to be active spiritual seekers who think of themselves as spiritual but not religious and actually incorporate spiritual practices of other faiths into their own lives. We estimate their number to be about 2 to 3 percent of all U.S. 13- to 17-year-olds. Thus, while most U.S. teens hold the attitude that other people should be free to mix and match religions traditions and spiritual practices, almost none of them are actually interested in doing that themselves. Most appear content, rather, to identify with and practice only one religious faith. [Smith, 115]

Furthermore, few American teens under the age of 18 at least, “appear to be exposed to, interested in, or actively pursuing the kind of ‘spiritual but not religious’ personal quests of eclectic spiritual seeking about which we have heard so much lately.” And Smith concludes, “Whether spiritual but not religious seeking is or is not prevalent among older youth, we cannot say, but it is not among contemporary 13- to 17-year-old teens in the United States.” [Smith, 260]

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (4) More “spiritual” than “religious”?

In summing up their in-depth survey of the religious belief and practice of undergraduates at three universities and one college, researchers Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield offer a distinction that may be important for understanding undergraduate belief and practice. “The undergraduates we interviewed, as well as many of the campus professionals who helped us interpret the religion of undergraduates,” they explain, “preferred to use the worlds ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ instead of ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ when describing undergraduate attitudes and practices.”[Cherry, 275] Cherry and his colleagues suggest that by “religion” or “religious” students and campus professionals mean institutions or organizations and by “spirituality” or “spiritual” they had in mind a personal experience of God or Higher Power and an expression of ultimate concerns and values. The sociologist Robert Wuthnow put it this way, quoting from an informant in his sixties, “Religion is structure, an institution. It limits you. Spirituality is something you are.” More formally, Wuthnow defines spirituality “as a state of being related to a divine, supernatural, or transcendent order of reality or, alternatively, as a sense or awareness of a suprareality that goes beyond life as ordinarily experienced.” [Wuthnow (2001), 306] It may, or may not, occur within an institutional context designed to encourage or nurture this spirituality.

Cherry and his colleagues suggest that “spiritual” or “spirituality” also connotes for today’s undergraduates a quest or journey while “religious” or “religion” suggests something fixed and handed down. One of their informants, a chaplain at a Catholic university, offer this striking definition and explanation, “Religion means, literally, to bind. Although those of us in the professional religious business see this binding as ultimately freeing, binding of any kind is antithetical to the late-adolescent project. It’s a time of questioning and stepping back.”[Cherry, 275]

Obviously, being within an institutional or organizational structure does not prevent one from feeling related to a divine, supernatural, or transcendent order of reality, and for much of history, that is how people experienced spirituality. But that may be changing.

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (3) Descriptive statistics

Here’s some descriptive statistics from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR), which surveyed teenagers between 13 and 17 years of age, and the Spirituality in Higher Education project of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), which surveyed entering college students:

• Eighty-four percent of surveyed U.S. teenagers said that they believed in God; seventy-nine percent of entering college students also professed belief in God.
• Fifty-one percent of teenagers chose “extremely important” (20%) or “very important” (31%) to describe the importance of religious faith shaping daily life, and “extremely important” (20%) or “very important” (29%) to describe the importance of faith shaping major life decisions; forty percent of entering college students checked off that it was “essential” or “very important” to follow religious teachings in everyday life.
• Seventy-one percent of teens said that they felt either “extremely” (11%) or “very” (25%) or “somewhat” (35%) close to God; seventy-four percent of entering students said that they felt “to a great extent” or “to some extent” a “sense of connection with God/Higher Power that transcends my personal self.”
• Eight-five percent of teens reported that they prayed, 65 percent at least weekly and 38 percent daily; sixty-nine percent of entering college students said that they prayed, 61 percent at least weekly and 28 percent daily.
• Eighty-one percent of teens reported attending religious service at least a few time during the preceding year, with 40 percent reporting at least weekly attendance and another 19 percent at least monthly; eighty-one percent of the entering college students reported attending religious services “occasionally” or “frequently.”

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (2) Teens largely follow the parental example

Before offering some descriptive statistics in the next post, I think it worth highlighting that in religion and spirituality at least, family continues to be the most powerful influence on teens and entering college students.

One of the clearest findings of the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) was that teens overwhelming follow their parents’ example, a finding that belies the common claim that teens regularly rebel against their parents. “What we learned by interviewing hundreds of different kinds of teenagers all around the country,” the lead author Christian Smith sums up with italic stress, “is that the vast majority of American teenagers are exceedingly conventional in their religious identity and practices. Very few are restless, alienated, or re­bellious; rather, the majority of U.S. teenagers seem basically content to fol­low the faith of their families with little questioning.” [Smith, 119-20]

So most students enter college with religious or spiritual beliefs and practices largely determined by their family. What effect, then, does the college experience itself have on the beliefs and practices by the time of graduation? We shall look at the ongoing discussion on this point in later posts.

References

HERI: Astin, Alexander, and Helen Astin. 2005. The Spiritual Life of College Students: A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose. In Spirituality in Higher Education. Los Angeles: UCLA Higher Education Research Institute.

Smith, Christian, and Melinda Lundquist Denton. 2005. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. New York: Oxford University Press.

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (1) Religious Preferences

Over the next several posts, I propose to explore two recent surveys on the religiosity/spirituality of today’s college students, one of teenagers ages 13-17, the other of first year college and university students. Given how rapidly student generations change, these results from eight and five years ago respectively may be a bit out of date but should still be suggestive.

Some questions to ponder when reading the posts: How well do your students fit the statistical profile found by the surveys? In what ways do they differ? What problems as well as opportunities might such students pose? Do these results suggest issues that we, as educators, need to address in the classroom? Are conceptual muddles regarding religious or spiritual convictions any of our business as college or university faculty? And while reflecting on the surveys may reveal about student belief and practice, we might also ponder how we faculty might have answered had we undergone such surveys ourselves.

To start out the series, let’s begin with a table that summarizes the self-reported religious preference of a large sample of the American population in 2001 and 2009 and compare these national results with the self-reported religious preference of a survey of teens in 2002-3 and of college students in 2004.

	ARIS 2001(national) %	NSYR 2002-3(teens) %	HERI 2004(college students) %	ARIS 2008 (national) %
Protestant (Baptist+ Mainline+ Generic+ Pentecostal, etc.)	50.4	52.0	45.6	49.5
Catholic	24.5	23.0	28.0	25.1
Mormon	1.3	2.5	4.0	1.4
Jewish	1.4	1.5	2.0	1.2
Jehovah’s Witness	0.6	0.6	–	0.8
Moslem	0.5	0.5	1.0	0.6
Eastern Orthodox	0.3	0.3	1.0	–
Buddhist	0.5	0.3	1.0	0.5
Pagan or Wiccan	0.1	0.3	–	–
Hindu	0.4	0.1	1.0	–
Christian Science	0.1	0.1	–	–
Native American	0.1	0.1	–	–
Unitarian Universalist	0.3	0.1	0.4	–
None/Not religious	14.1	16.0	17.0	15.0

Self-identified Christians make up about three-quarters of each population: the national population, the 14 percent of the population that are teenagers (ages 13-17), and the population of first-year students in college and university. Catholics make up about a third of the Christian segment and a quarter of the overall population, with a slightly greater proportion of Catholics attending college than Protestants. Other differences—for example, the higher representation of Mormons in college than in the national population or the greater proportion of people who self-identify as “not religious” in college than in the national population—are probably significant but may just reflect slight differences in the way the four surveys were structured and conducted.

We shall begin digging deeper in subsequent posts.

Notes and references after the jump.

How religious/spiritual is the American Professoriate? Suggested Readings (3b)

Would you be surprised to learn…

• that by self-report about 4 out of every 10 faculty would be high scorers for “Spirituality” and only about 1 in every 6 faculty would be a low scorer?
• that significantly more female faculty score high in “Spirituality” than do their male counterparts?
• that gender differences in levels of spirituality become more pronounced with age?
• that younger faculty report lower levels of spirituality than do older faculty?
• that African-American or Black faculty report the highest level of spirituality, with, however, pronounced gender differences?
• that Asian American or Asian faculty report the lowest “Spirituality”?
• that those who self-report as being “conservative” or “far right” also score as “high” in “Spirituality” at more than twice the rate than do those who self-report as being “liberal” or “far left”?
• that faculty in the Health Sciences (medical fields, nursing, and public health) and Education reported much higher levels of “Spirituality” than do faculty in the Physical or Biological Sciences?
• that faculty who have earned a Ph.D. “are notably less spiritually inclined” compared to colleagues who do not have an earned Ph.D.?

These are just some of the findings reported in Jennifer A. Lindholm and Helen S. Astin. “Understanding the ‘Interior’ Life of Faculty: How Important is Spirituality?” Religion & Education 33:2 (2006):64-90, the best survey on faculty “spirituality” currently available.

After the break, an overview of the variables and approach.

How religious/spiritual is the American Professoriate? Suggested Readings (3a)

In a previous post, I recommended Gross and Simmons’ 2009 article in Sociology of Religion as the best we currently have on professorial religiosity (or lack thereof). But what if we change the question to “How spiritual is the American Professoriate?” What do we find then?

The best overview on this question is Jennifer A. Lindholm and Helen S. Astin. “Understanding the ‘Interior’ Life of Faculty: How Important is Spirituality?” Religion & Education 33:2 (2006):64-90.

The Lindholm and Astin article is based on the 2004-2005 Triennial National Faculty Survey conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). The publication grows out of the HERI project on “Spirituality in Higher Education,” a subset of which is devoted to “Spirituality and the Professoriate.” It covers in more detail material also treated in the HERI report entitled “Spirituality and the Professoriate.”

I’ll be saying more about the Lindholm and Astin findings next week. For now I want to offer a caution about making too much of the distinction between religion and spirituality. The distinction is important but can be overdrawn.