Passing on the faith

Episcopal Café has a post up titled "Appealing to emerging adults." It discusses an article in Christianity Today's Books & Culture magazine about "emerging adulthood," the period from roughly 18 to 30 years of age. The original article by Christian Smith is called "Getting a Life: The challenge of emerging adulthood." Smith looks at factors that shape this period, something anomalous in most of history where children enter adulthood early and definitively.

EC looks at part of Smith's article that considers Jeffrey Arnett's interviews with over one hundred emerging adults and concludes:

The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults' religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood … . In statistical analyses [of interview subjects' answers], there was no relationship between exposure to religious training in childhood and any aspect of their religious beliefs as emerging adults … . This is a different pattern than is found in adolescence [which reflects greater continuity] … . Evidently something changes between adolescence and emerging adulthood that dissolves the link between the religious beliefs of parents and the beliefs of their children.

My first reaction is that this "something" that changes might be learning to think for oneself. Homogeneous cultures appear to place a higher value on conforming to traditional belief than a multi-cultural society possibly can. When there is one item on the menu, that is what you eat. Even if you have dozens of creative potato dishes, if potato is all there is you will be consuming potatoes, whether baked, fried, roasted, mashed, curried, scalloped, or elegantly piped à la dauphine. A larger menu with all manner of foods allows choice. If you have ever been in a cafeteria line behind someone trying to decide, you realize this is a gift and sometimes a dilemma.

Here is what I began writing to a friend in response to the EC article:

If the beliefs that parents teach are a load of irrelevant claptrap, can you possibly expect their offspring to carry it around forever? Whereas if you teach children honesty, integrity, tolerance, compassion, generosity, and openness to the world around them, might that not have a better survival rate than mythologies do? And might your mythology not survive better if it actually ties into the values mentioned above?

[I am not using "mythology" in any pejorative sense but in the more technical sense of language and stories about the divine (god-talk and tales of origin and ultimate meaning). If you are more comfortable with "creed" or "doctrine" in place of "mythology," please make the appropriate substitutions.]

We are currently going through vast cultural, technological, and historical shifts. A framework that may have been adequate for a few hundred years might not survive a decade now as the ways we conceive the world (social, physical, and technological) changes rapidly.

If we are teaching the externals of mythologies instead of the timeless internal truths and values the stories and imagery are meant to convey, then we are dealing not with something living but with hand-me-down clothes. Teaching one's children a religious faith shaped in the days of one's Victorian great-grandmother is not likely to equip them for life in a post-modern world. Inculcating in them a literal belief in a three-story universe is so totally retro that words almost fail me. [But you know I will keep typing anyway.] We use three-story language because it fits our ordinary perception and there is nothing wrong with that but we need to move beyond that limited perception, just as children move into abstract thinking and realize that the larger body of evidence shows that the world is not flat.

All of which makes me wonder what the emerging adults interviewed by Arnett were taught. What sorts of religious beliefs did they abandon and why?

I am interested because by the time I was a senior in college I was putting everything I believed up for grabs except that Jesus was Lord and I was (and remain) his. All else was on the table for examination and potential rejection. Much of what I was taught did not survive. The essential parts of Christian faith (at least by my standards) remain and inform my approach to everything. I still preach from the Bible, use Jesus' life and teachings as my standard, am assertively trinitarian, and believe (thank God) in grace. Like Grandmère Mimi, I continue to desire personal holiness. I could provide a long list of what I have junked but aren't the essentials more important?

Clearly the Global South Primates would not agree with that last rhetorical question. Their problem, not mine. I am not going to play the "we're all in this together" game when some of the players refuse to play nice, in other words: when they insist that we all play by their rules and not a larger encompassing structure we can all agree on. Frankly, it's not their football or mine, it's God's football. We had better hope the Holy One does not take that football and go home or we are all out of the game. I think it might help if we all stop acting as if the football belonged to us.

Go Bears! Go Bruin! Go Sagehens! Go Lobos!

There, that's all the rah-rah you are getting out of me this Saturday morning. Shabbat shalom!
--the BB