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This chapter explores American adolescents’ thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about and experiences of religious faith and spirituality, drawing from interviews of 267 teens in 45 states. In most cases, teenage religion and spirituality in the US can be seen as a reflection of the world of adult religion, especially parental religion. Few teenagers are rejecting or reacting against the adult religion into which they are being socialized. Rather, most are living out their religious lives in very conventional and accommodating ways.

This chapter examines three specific groups of American teenagers: “religious seekers” who claim to be “spiritual but not religious”, teenagers who identify themselves as nonreligious and who never attend religious services, and teens who are highly religiously active and devoted. It is shown that most American teenagers espouse rather inclusive, pluralistic, and individualistic views about religious truth, identity boundaries, and need for religious congregation. Parents of teenagers strongly influence the character of their children’s religious lives. Teens who are more religiously serious and active are also more likely to be involved in a larger number of other programs — clubs, hobby groups, sports, or other organized activities; less religiously active teens tend to be involved in fewer.

This chapter explores some of the major social forces and factors that shape the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. It is argued that understanding the religion and spirituality of contemporary American adolescents means framing that understanding within the larger social and institutional contexts of therapeutic individualism, mass-consumer capitalism, the digital communication revolution, residual positivism and empiricism, the structural disconnect of teenagers from the world of adults, the problems of adults, and other relevant cultural contradictions that may affect the religious and spiritual lives of contemporary youth. This is not because youth are normally consciously aware of or articulate about these big-picture social influences, but because these larger contexts are objective, structural, institutional, and cultural realities that powerfully form youth’s lives.

This chapter presents data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion. Among the survey’s findings are that three quarters of U.S. teens between 13 and 17 years old are Christians. About one-half are Protestant, and one-quarter are Catholic. Teenagers who are pagan or Wiccan represent less than one-third of 1 percent of U.S. teens. The Protestant denominations of the congregations teens attend, religious self-identities of the parents of teens, belief similarity of religions adolescents, religious tradition, religious service attendance, characteristics of religious faith, religious and spiritual beliefs and experiences, personal religious practices, religious groups activities, and teens’ evaluations of religious congregations are discussed.

This chapter explores the associations between religiosity and youth outcomes. It addresses the question of causality and selection effects, seeking to clarify whether and to what extent religiosity is associated with more positive adolescent life outcomes. It is shown that religious faith and practice can and does shape teenagers’ lives in positive and constructive ways. The story of Antwan, a 16-year-old African American Southern California boy, helps illustrate this point. His religion provides him with moral directives by which he has learned to negotiate his life in largely helpful ways.

This chapter explores the question of why U.S. Catholic teenagers seem less religiously engaged than their teenage counterparts in other U.S. Christian traditions. Several reasons were identified to explain the lack of religious engagement of Catholic teens. One is that Catholic teenagers significantly reflect the relative religious laxity of their parents. Thus, the evident “problem” of Catholic teens can be viewed in part as a larger challenge of Catholic adults generally, and parents specifically.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the lack of attention given to the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. It then provides a brief description of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project on the religious and spiritual lives of American adolescents conducted at the University of North Carolina from 2001 to 2005. This is followed by an overview of the chapters included in this volume.

This chapter presents the stories of two white 16-year-old Baptist girls, who shared their views about various topics including their families, school, religion, and sex. Their stories provide a human face to the statistics presented in this book, and highlight the central themes that emerged from interviews with various American teenagers. Among these are that American teens experience and represent in their lives various religious and spiritual beliefs, practices, experiences, identities, and attitudes; that there are many adolescents in the United States for whom religion and spirituality are important; and that religious faith and practice in American teenagers’ lives operate in a social and institutional environment that is highly competitive for time, attention, and energy.

This introductory chapter provides the background of a group of young men, referred to as the “Legendz,” who were urban American teenagers and second-generation immigrants. These young men were also self-identified and practicing Muslims embedded in a tightknit religious community. As some of the central cultural expectations associated with urban American teenage life were understood to be in tension with or even direct opposition to those locally associated with being a “good Muslim,” these young men led what can be called culturally contested lives. As such, the everyday lives of the Legendz were characterized in part by the presence of two competing sets of cultural expectations, or what can be called cultural rubrics: urban American teen culture, as manifested in their schools, peer groups, and the media they consumed; and religious Islam, as locally practiced in their mosque and by their families. Precisely how these young Muslim American men innovated and applied creative social solutions to their immediate cultural dilemmas, and how these efforts marked them as fundamentally similar to a broad range of other American teenagers, is the focus of this book.

The concluding chapter summarizes and elaborates the findings in this volume. Some recurrent themes have emerged from the analyses in this book. Among these is that religion has a significant presence in the lives of many U.S. teens today. Most U.S. teens are content to follow their parents’ religious footsteps, and most feel quite positive about religion. The religiodemographic diversity represented by U.S. adolescents is no more varied today than it has been for a very long time.

This concluding chapter argues that the story of the Legendz suggests key conditions important to the cultivation of healthy Muslim American identities. The Legendz's deep and pervasive sense of themselves as Muslims and Americans, as well as their cultivated ability to skillfully navigate the cultural rubrics of American youth culture and Islamic religiosity, are attributable to three key conditions present within their social environment. First, the adults in the Legendz's community maintained an openness and understanding that allowed the boys room to engage in some measure of American youth culture without fear of harsh punishment or communal ostracism. A second important condition seems to have been the presence of a familiar and consistent group of friends located within the same culturally complex situation. The Legendz developed a sense of their ability to manage competing sets of cultural expectations as young Muslims together. A third condition that seems to have contributed to the Legendz's ability to effectively manage their culturally contested lives was a social and physical space in which these processes could unfold and take place. An underlying theme cutting across all three of these conditions is the need for a productive overall understanding of Muslim American teenagers as being in the midst of a process of identity development, cultural negotiation, and growing up.

For the last four years, through the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), the author has been intensely researching the religious and spiritual lives of teenagers in the United States. This chapter explores some NSYR findings about the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. teenagers that have implications for the challenge of religiously socializing youth and shed light on the question of internal secularization. The guiding question is this: What are the prospects of success for established religious communities in contemporary U.S. culture seeking to induct their youth into the beliefs, commitments, and practices of their historical faith traditions in ways that will both form the lives of their youth as individuals and carry on with significant continuity those collective faith traditions into the future? The chapter begins by exploring some of the social and cultural difficulties and challenges that faith communities face in this task. It then describes one of the major results of faith communities’ general failure to successfully meet those difficulties and challenges: a pervasive, functional, religious belief system among teenagers called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It concludes by suggesting ways that, from a sociologist's point of view, faith communities might respond to this popular “alternative” de facto religious faith and better form and educate their young people.

This chapter describes the type of American teenagers called the Intrigued. These teenagers are highly committed to religious traditions but they are intrigued by the realm represented in the legends of the supernatural. The chapter describes the experiences of an Anglo-American female from mainline Protestantism, a Mexican American Catholic male, and an African American male affiliated with conservative Protestantism. It compares the Intrigued with the Traditionalists in terms of openness to the possibilities of the realm beyond that which is represented in the media.

This chapter examines the experiences of Traditionalist American teenagers and their parents in order to determine how the separation from the media influences teen interpretations of the supernatural. It explores the question of whether teenagers who expressed a serious level of religious commitment are interested in supernatural beings, power, or practices. It also analyzes the tendency of the traditionalist teenagers to be guided by an overarching concern with personal morality that framed their understanding of the media and of religion.

This chapter examines how the convergence of commerce and community through American Bandstand led to the emergence of the national youth culture. Building on Josh Kun's notion of “audiotopia” and Benedict Anderson's concept of “imagined communities,” it considers how American Bandstand's producers articulated a vision of national youth culture that incorporated different teenagers in different parts of the country but excluded black teenagers from the program's studio audience. It also explains how American Bandstand established Philadelphia as the locus of this national youth culture by drawing extensively from the creative abilities of the city's youth. Finally, it shows how American Bandstand emerged as the afternoon site of the nation's youth, including working-class Italian-American teenagers from Philadelphia.

This chapter describes a type of American teenager called the Experimenters. These teenagers are highly interested in the supernatural and they try out different ways of tapping into the supernatural realm. Each of the teenagers who fall into this category interviewed for the study identifies with a religious tradition and attempts to relate their “experiments” with the supernatural realm within those traditions. The chapter describes the stories and experiences of three teenage girls and analyzes the relationship between gender and the appeal of the supernatural.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the influence of the supernatural and paranormal on the religious beliefs and practices of American teenagers. It discusses the proposed theory called “the religion of the possible” and considers the role of the media in religious change and in the context of religious pluralism. It suggests that media education and media literacy should train teenagers to recognize the distinctions between reality and fantasy.

This chapter examines the experiences and stories of the so-called Mysticals, American teenagers who have no interest in organized religion yet who are familiar with it. It evaluates the experiences of an Anglo-American female, an African American male, and Anglo-American male. All of these teenagers have had previous experience with conservative Protestantism, but have all abandoned it in their childhood. This chapter analyzes how the differences in racial or ethnic background play a role in the interpretation of supernatural stories and their relationship with alternative spiritualities.