Faith and Family

This chapter focuses on family as a key institutional setting within which religion and spirituality are formed. The authors explore how marriage and parenthood are tied to religiousness among the young people in the study. The authors first investigate the role of religion in leading young people to six different family pathways: married with children, married without children, cohabiting with children, cohabiting without children, single with children, and single without children. They then examine how these different stages of family formation affect the religious lives of the young people in the study. Of particular interest is the question of whether marriage and parenthood contribute to higher rates of religious retention among emerging adults.

Where Are They Now?

Building on the foundation laid in Chapter 2, this chapter focuses specifically on the religious lives of emerging adults. Survey responses from multiple waves of data collection are used to show changes over time. The chapter focuses on change and continuity in the religious lives of emerging adults, while also showing how different religious traditions have fared in terms of influencing the lives of emerging adults. Taken together, the survey data show an overarching story of decline; yet under the surface there is movement both toward and away from religion.

Setting the Context

Drawing on National Study of Youth and Religion survey data and interviews with emerging adults, this chapter focuses on the major themes in the lives of emerging adults as they are moving toward young adulthood. The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a broader context of the lives of emerging adults in terms of their work, friends, family, and the like, asking throughout how well they are taking on the roles of adulthood as they enter the full-time workforce, start their own families, and otherwise make their way in the world with adult responsibilities.

The Teens from Soul Searching 10 Years Later

This chapter revisits five emerging adults who were first introduced in Soul Searching, catching the reader up on the developments in their lives since that book was written. The chapter serves two purposes: (1) to update the stories of these young people from Soul Searching and Souls in Transition and (2) to provide real-life examples of the experiences, beliefs, hopes, and plans of emerging adults. The authors emphasize that these five people are not necessarily representative of all the emerging adults in the study, but their stories and their life trajectories do have things in common with the larger sample and are previews of many of the themes delineated throughout the rest of the book.

How Did They Get There?

This chapter uses growth mixture modeling to analyze the different trajectories of change in the religious lives of emerging adults. Using data from across the 10 years of the project, the authors identify six distinct religious trajectories among emerging adults and then examine the correlates of these trajectories. The chapter concludes by examining how various life outcomes relate to these trajectories. In addition to revealing the correlates and covariates of religious trajectories, the pathways examined in the chapter provide another lens through which to see the big picture of the religious lives of emerging adults. Consistent with the previous two chapters, the authors acknowledge that, taken together, there is aggregate religious decline among emerging adults in the study, as well as a smaller group of young people who are maintaining or increasing their religious commitment.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter has four related aims. First, the authors present an overview of all the previous chapters, providing in a concise format the major contours of the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults. Second, the authors take the major findings and use them to think about how young people are constructing their own religious/spiritual perspectives and to address the question of religious return for those who have left religion. Third, the authors revisit the concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which was first presented in Soul Searching, asking how this has changed from these young people’s teenage years to where they are as emerging adults. Finally, the chapter raises several questions related to the future of religion both for these emerging adults and for religious institutions.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets the context for the book, situating it in the larger National Study of Youth and Religion as the final overview book of the project, taking into account all four waves of data collection, from 2002 to 2013. The chapter lays out the basic “emerging adults” frame for understanding the stage in life of the young people in the study in Wave 4 and differentiates the book from the popular “generational” accounts such as “millennial” and other generational labels. Finally, the chapter provides a road map for each of the chapters to follow, giving a brief description of what each chapter includes and previewing the major findings of the book.

Emerging Adult Religious Commitment and Identity

In this chapter, the authors develop a four-part typology that describes the different ways that emerging adults approach their religious lives. In examining these young people through the lens of the Not Religious, Disaffiliated, Marginal, and Committed groups, the authors arrive at a few general themes that help to reveal the changing role of religion in the lives of emerging adults. Based on self-identification and religious participation, the authors show how emerging adults differ on involvement in religious organizations and on religious beliefs, practices, and experience. They also show how religion holds similar places in their lives, regardless of where they are placed in the typology presented.