U.S. Teens Share Parents’ Religion, Survey Finds

The stereotype of teenagers being rebellious may well hold true in matters of clothing, music and parental authority, but it fails to capture the religious lives of American teenagers, according to a recent nationwide telephone survey.

“Teenage religiosity for the vast majority is highly conventional,” said Christian Smith, who co-wrote “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.” The book, to be released in March by Oxford University Press, is based on findings from the National Study of Youth and Religion. “That may mean that compared to previous generations, teenagers today are more conventional and bound to mainstream values and cultures compared to, say, the ‘60s,” said Smith. “They seem pretty content just going with how they were raised.”

More than 3,000 English- and Spanish-speaking American 13- to 17-year-olds were surveyed and 267 in-depth interviews were conducted over a nine-month period in 2002-03 by Smith, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a team of researchers, including doctoral candidate and coauthor Melinda Lundquist Denton.

Three-quarters of the teens surveyed said they were Protestant or Catholic. The next-largest group, 16%, said they were not religious. Seven percent said they were affiliated with another religion, including 2.5% who said they were Mormon and 1.5% who said they were Jewish. The remainder didn’t know or declined to answer.

Smith, who belongs to the Episcopal church and has a son, 13, and two daughters, 11 and 6, said he was heartened by studies that show parents still play a key role in teenagers’ religious lives.

“After doing this research, I feel more authorized as a parent to teach my kids,” he said. “A lot of parents tell me, ‘My kid doesn’t listen to me anyway.’ It really just lets them off the hook.”

The survey, funded by the Lilly Endowment, found that teenagers are not flocking to “alternative” religions such as Wicca. Less than one-third of 1% acknowledged such affiliation. They are also not experimenting with a mixture of religions, the poll found.

Instead, three in four religious teens said their beliefs were somewhat or very similar to that of their parents. Only 6% considered their beliefs very different from their mothers’ and 11% very different from their fathers’.

Merari Ramirez, 17, identified in part with the survey results. The Sylmar High School senior was not involved in the study but said she considered her faith very similar to her mother’s. For them, that means a mixture of religions.

“Most kids stick to what their parents do because they are really influenced by them, and they feel like they don’t want to betray them,” she said in a recent interview.

Though baptized a Roman Catholic, Ramirez said she and her mother attended a Hindu temple in Pacific Palisades for a few years. When it proved too far from home, they switched to a nearby Christian church.

“Religion itself is not like a huge role,” she said. “Just the fact of believing in God and reading the Bible.”

Like Ramirez, 80% of teenagers responded that they believed in God. Thirteen percent professed a view of God as having created the world but not being involved in it now, and 14% saw God as more of an “impersonal, cosmic life force.”

For Ramirez, God is “someone that’s there for you, that can listen to you and hear your problems when no one else does, a friend that protects you and helps you out.”

Teenagers were split roughly into thirds about their relationship with God, ranging from feeling intimate to distant or somewhere in the middle.

“God functions for most teenagers as a combination cosmic therapist and a divine butler,” Smith said. “God isn’t part of history or everyday life. He is distant until you need him to solve a problem or make you feel better.”

Church attendance among teens varied, with 40% saying they attend once a week or more, 19% saying one to three times a month, 22% saying a few or many times a year and 18% saying not at all. Two-thirds said that being in a congregation isn’t necessary to be religious or spiritual.

“In American culture, there is a strong anti-institutional sentiment, an individualist approach toward religion dating back to the American Revolution. And it’s reflected in teenagers,” Smith said.

Teens fear being perceived as too religious and possibly weird, said Smith. “What they have in mind is the kid walking down the hall with two Bibles under his arm and a lot of religious patches. Every school has at least one, and they are the model of what teenagers don’t want to be.”

One of the driving forces behind the survey, Smith said, was the general shortage of information about teenagers and religion, compared with a wealth of material about adults.

One of the few other recent studies about teens was done by Chap Clark, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. In addition to conducting focus groups nationwide, Clark spent eight months as a substitute teacher at Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, observing and talking to students for his book “Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers,” which was released last year.

Like Smith, Chap also found religious ambivalence among teenagers. But he argued that the number of religious teenagers was far fewer and estimated that fewer than 10% had religion as “an important part of their everyday life.” It was “simply not on the lifestyle map,” Chap said.

He said Smith’s study methodology might have skewed the results in favor of more religious-minded teenagers. “Kids who are going to church are more likely to stay for the entire survey,” he said.

Unlike many surveyed by Smith, Eva Mata, 17, said she respected her parents’ rules but parted ways with them on religion. She was not part of the study.

“As far as my dress and my music, I just want to show them respect, not by staying up late or ditching school. I’m more rebellious in my thoughts and my beliefs,” she said in an interview .

Mata, a Sylmar High senior, was raised Catholic but began having doubts about religion several years ago. She doesn’t consider herself religious. “I think everyone should think for themselves. It’s fine for kids to believe what their religion says, but at times I feel like they are being brainwashed.”

Overall, Smith said, society tends to view teenagers as “from another planet” or “full of raging hormones and nobody could understand them.”

Religious organizations are much more comfortable with young children who, he said, are “cute and compliant.”

“But if we learn about teenagers, we can learn about our larger culture,” Smith said. “They are a very revealing picture or window to society.”