Are Church-Going Kids Christian?

A Strange Faith from Agape Press
by Ed Vitagliano

Our youth sit in church with us week after week. If we were asked, we would not only acknowledge that they are our political and cultural future, but that they are our religious future as well.

There is good news and there is bad news.

The good news first:

Understanding the religious beliefs and practices of the nation's youth was the goal of Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, two sociologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They examined data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), the largest and most detailed study of teenagers and religion ever undertaken.

The results of their research, which also included follow-up, face-to-face interviews with more than 250 of the youth who participated in the NSYR, were published in their book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.

While stereotypical teenagers are said to be "deeply restless, alienated, rebellious, and determined to find something that is radically different from the faith in which they were raised," Soul Searching added, "that impression is fundamentally wrong."

"U.S. youth are not flocking in droves to 'alternative' religions and spiritualities such as paganism and Wicca. Teenagers who are pagan or Wiccan represent fewer than one-third of 1% of U.S. teens."

Instead, what Smith and Denton learned from their interviews was that "the vast majority of American teenagers are exceedingly conventional in their religious identity and practices .... When it comes to religion, they are quite happy to go along and get along." {Sounds a little too close to 'live and let live' where NO moral stand is taken.}

Religious participation seems to be having a positive effect on youth.

More religiously active kids were less likely to engage in illegal substance abuse; use the Internet to view pornography; get lower school grades (i.e., usually Cs, Ds, and Fs); get suspended or expelled from school; be described by parents as fairly or very rebellious; lie to parents; or to have engaged in sex before marriage.

Less religious involvement also correlated to a poorer self-image, greater sadness and feelings of depression.

"Something about religion itself causes the good outcomes for youth. By general implication, teens who increase their religious involvement should, net of other factors, reduce their chances of experiencing negative and harmful outcomes," and vice versa.

But with probing there were troubling currents beneath the foamy whitecaps. As researchers probed deeper, what they found should shake churches to the core.

Now, the bad news:

86 percent of teenagers claimed that they believed in God. But when asked, "what is the nature of the God they embrace," 63 percent of church-going, supposedly Christian teens said they believed "Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and all other people pray to the same God, even though they use different names for their god."

In other critical areas of Christian doctrine -- e.g., the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, the reality of absolute truth -- the majority of church-going teenagers simply do not hold to views that are orthodox.

These statistics hold true, for the most part, even in conservative Protestant churches. {This explains how we see our youth at church, in Sunday school, at choir practice or a prayer meeting and then drunk at the Friday night football game.}

The sad fact is that very few of the nation's youth appear to be Bible-believing Christians.

The Barna Research Group has found much of the same thing. They asked nine questions which focus on core evangelical beliefs, such as whether or not a person believes salvation is possible by grace alone.

Using this more probing method, Barna found that only 4 percent of U.S. teens can be considered evangelicals. More distressingly, that number is actually trending in the wrong direction. That 4 percent figure "is a far cry from the 10 percent measured in 1995," he said.

How could teenagers who go to church so often know so little -- or at least believe so little -- of the historic Christian faith? And whose fault is it? {When churches themselves allow compromise to enter their doors~~for example: allowing unrepetant, practicing homosexuals to join the church or worse to be ordained by the church~~ how can they expect their youth to stand firm? What example has been set for them? None. So it should not come as a surprise that they fall away in their young adult hood. We have failed to armor them with God's Holy Word. We have failed in helping them to stand firm against evil. We have failed to give them backbones.}

"It appears that these conservative Protestant youth have not been very successfully inducted into their tradition's distinctive commitment to Christian particularity, evangelism, the need to accept all that the Bible teaches, and serious church involvement."

"One unmistakable indication of the brewing trouble comes from the response to a question concerning how likely teens say they are to attend church once they are independent," he said in Real Teens. "After they graduate from high school or move away from home, just two out of five teens contend it is 'very likely' that they will attend a Christian church on a regular basis, and another two out of five say it is 'somewhat likely.'

"What makes these figures most alarming is that questions of this type typically produce an overestimate of future behavior," Barna continued. "If we apply a 'correction factor' to these responses, we would estimate that about one out of three teenagers is likely to actually attend a Christian church after they leave home."

Unless Christian leaders want to contemplate a future -- much like that unfolding in Europe -- in which their youth abandon Christianity in droves, there must be a brutally honest re-examination of how we do church. After all, our youth are not only our political and cultural future, but they are our religious future as well.

That's a fact we might want to consider now, while those same teens are sitting in church with us, week after week.


Top of Page