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There is good news for the church in your study. But there is plenty of bad news as well. For example, you found in your in-depth interviews with teens that a vast majority of them are "incredibly inarticulate about their faith, their religious beliefs and practices." You found very few teens from any religious background who are able to articulate clearly their religious beliefs and explain how those beliefs connect to the rest of their lives.
One way to frame this problem is to think of the language of faith as something like a second language in our culture. And how do you learn a second language? You learn a second language by listening to others who know how to speak it well, and having a chance to practice it yourself. I don't know how much teens are hearing other people speak the language well, and it really struck us in our research that very few teens are getting a chance to practice talking about their faith. We were dumbfounded by the number of teens who told us we were the first adults who had asked them what they believed. One said: "I do not know. No one has ever asked me that before."
You point out that the very idea of religious truth is attenuated among teens, but in spite of that you found that few teenagers consistently sustain any kind of radical relativism.
Very few teens are hardcore relativists. In fact, they are quite moralistic. They will confidently assert that certain things are right or wrong. What they can't do is explain why that's the case, or what's behind their thinking. And again I think they've been given very little chance to practice thinking about why things are morally right or wrong. It's just asserted. To some degree, I think, public schools don't want to get into that. So what you have is a generation of young people who don't know how to explain why they think what's good and bad is good and bad.
You argue that "what legitimates the religion of most youth today is not that it is the life-transformative, transcendent truth, but that it instrumentally provides mental, psychological, emotional, and social benefits that teens find useful and valuable."
Yes, not only for the kids but also for their parents. The instrumental good has what you might call a public health justification. If I get my kid involved religiously, he will be less likely to do drugs, he'll get better grades, and will wear his or her seat belt. And I think a lot of parents are very interested in that, quite understandably.
In the United States we have a competitive religious economy. And I think a lot of religious organizationsconsciously and unconsciouslymake that instrumental pitch to families: we'll be good for you. Now it's an empirical fact that religious kids are doing better. There's nothing wrong with celebrating that. But when that becomes the key legitimation of what religion is all about, then that's a whole different matter.
Based on our findings, I suggest that the de facto religious faith of the majority of American teens is "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." God exists. God created the world. God set up some kind of moral structure. God wants me to be nice. He wants me to be pleasant, wants me to get along with people. That's teen morality. The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good, and good people go to heaven. And nearly everyone's good.
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