Young adult attachment to religion continues to be a really rich area of study, though one that many scholars don't seem to attend to nearly as much as they should. We've known for some time that there is a potential crisis in youth affiliation with religion in America. But maybe there's more to see here in several directions.
This piece in the Guardian suggests a similar pattern of youth affiliation is appearing in the Middle East (which is not the same thing as the pattern appearing across "Islam," remember--the Middle East has many Muslims, but there are far more in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). What's interesting about this piece is that the decline in religious attachment seems to be really a decline in trust in various institutions, religious and political ones. Youth want to emigrate as well. It seems that youth see institutions in the region as having repeatedly betrayed the future in attempting to re-secure the privileges and power structures of the past, and they do not think efforts at reform are worthwhile; better simply to leave, if possible. But what will such "exit" look like? Without access to viable migration routes, more metaphorical versions of exit might be more plausible.
The idea that there is a global crisis of youth affiliation with institutions, not least religious institutions, may need more direct attention than we've yet given it.
This piece is less dramatic, but offers some really interesting details, that perhaps point in another direction. By analyzing Christian-affiliated twentysomethings in the US, they note patterns that differentiate the disparate groups. They organize members into three categories--active, nominal, and estranged. Both Mainline and Catholic youth have large numbers of "estranged" members, and their nominal numbers are slightly larger than their active numbers. But Evangelicals have a different pattern--hardly any "estranged" members: As they say, “an estranged evangelical is, apparently, a non-evangelical.”
What causes this? One possibility seems to be that Evangelical church affiliation is tightly associated with friend networks. In other words, evangelicals are friends with their church members much more intensively than either the Mainline or Catholic youth are. As the study suggests, "evangelicals were more often enmeshed in friendship networks that made locating and committing to a like-minded congregation far less complicated." Because of this, while "they viewed their church search as guided by God," it is possible that their church search is guided by their friend networks. This would suggest that Evangelicals are far more self-enclosed than Mainline or Catholics, and friend groups and church groups reinforce each other. In my anecdotal experience, this is true.
If this is so, in some ways evangelical churches might be seen to be harming the civic compact by being too ingrown. Let me explain.
In a famous paper entitled "The Strength of Weak Ties," sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that in modern societies, marked by high individual autonomy and the need for individuals to negotiate multiple social contexts, a crucial factor for success and fluidity is a person's "weak ties", the relations they have with others that are shallow, not deep. We all have close friends. But we also need to have a bullpen of innumerable people we sort of know, whose relationship with us is much lighter and often quite visibly transactional--transactional and not guilty about it--more "acquaintances" than "friends," acquaintances who might be useful to us once in a while, yet whom are not simply instrumentally valuable to us, whom we might be "shallow friends" with, whom we are friendly with, if not friends. (Non-American friends of mine think almost all American friendships are this way, shallow and transactional. They're not entirely wrong, either.) Granovetter's point is that, while we don't have a distinct category for these relationships, they are essential to modern life. (I think of this as related to earlier sociology going back at least to Simmel on the experience of city life, but that's just a shout-out to Georg Simmel, who still seems to me under-appreciated among the great social theorists, all of them already under-appreciated. But that's a topic for another post.) Without weak ties, we would not be integrated in a larger society, but rather tribal, working out of our own ethnos and never engaging in the multi-dimensional negotiations with difference that mark modern society.
Churches are typically places of "weak ties." They operate functionally as ongoing mixer parties, sociological equivalents of speed dating, where transactional relationships are baptized by moral legitimation. Churches are nodes for multiple networks, and as such, particularly fertile moments of connection. (Now, note: this may have been more true of the "mainline" churches and Catholic parishes in the age of Mainline domination, than it is today; given that the age of the Mainline ended in the 1970s or 80s, a new socio-ecclesial order is emerging now, but I don't think we know what it is yet. Another topic for another post.)
What this evidence seems to suggest, however, at least among twentysomethings (though it could easily be imagined to be broader than this), is that the evangelical churches reinforce preexisting networks, and do not diversity them. That could go some way to explaining the differences in perception of persecution among evangelicals (they feel much more persecuted than other groups, and downplay other groups' suffering), and many other broadly "tribal" affiliations that evangelical churches seem to produce. I have written about this elsewhere, and there's more links there if you wish.
That's one thing, maybe the major thing, that the study suggests. However, it has other gems. Among them is this: "the differences between these twentysomethings and their churches can be as great as their commonalities. The Catholic young adults put the most stress on the Eucharist, while mainline Protestants valued social justice, and evangelicals put a high premium on good preaching." This is a really interesting insight and warrants its own discussion elsewhere. Maybe I'll get to it, too. For now, that's enough.