Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims

Journeys of Faith: Meeting the Challenges in Twenty-First-Century America

Journeys of Faith: Meeting the Challenges in Twenty-First-Century America Nancy Ammerman The questions raised by this conference are both professional and personal for me. As a sociologist, the social changes of the last forty years have provided ample fodder for research, and I’ll attempt to tell you some of the things I think we’ve discovered in the process. But as a parent of a daughter born in 1980, I also stand before you with many of the same concerns that I suspect brought some of you here. Will our children have a faith to guide them? Will they be able to leave behind the chains and fears and dysfunctionalities of some religious traditions but without losing their sacred and moral grounding? Will they forgive the bad religious behavior of some and find common cause with others who are more admirable religious exemplars? Will our own doubts breed religious indifference in the next generation? Will this generation of independent individualists be willing and able to make real commitments to religious ideas and ways of life that may make demands on them? I worry, for instance, that my daughter doesn’t seem to have the habit of giving a regular portion of her meager and intermittent income to any church. But I rejoice that she chooses to go to church! I worry that her biblical knowledge may be a bit thin, but then she surprises me with the stories and characters and ideas she does know. She started her life in Southern Baptist churches of a progressive sort (yes, there used 38 / Nancy Ammerman to be such things), but as that tradition was overtaken by fundamentalist forces, our beloved local church in Atlanta was eventually pushed out of the denomination entirely. We are now all members of an American Baptist church in Boston. Sometimes even when you don’t set out to change traditions, your tradition itself changes! You can perhaps see why a continuing faith commitment hasn’t exactly been a given for this young woman. One morning last summer, we were doing our usual jockeying over the newspaper sections at breakfast before she headed to the campaign office of a certain presidential candidate for whom she is working. She noted that the Southern Baptists were calling on their members to vote for candidates that represented ‘‘biblical values.’’ I expected her to scoff, reading the conservative agenda between the lines. Her response, however, was: ‘‘I intend to—just not the ones they have in mind!’’ In the midst of a culture in which she has many choices about how to spend her time, in which the tradition into which she was born has been transformed, in which the intersections between faith and everyday values are contentious at best—in the midst of all that, she has staked her claim to an identity shaped by biblical values. And her mother can only say ‘‘Amen!’’ Those are formidable challenges—for all of us. Putting on my sociologist ’s hat, I want to explore two broad areas of challenge for faith in our culture, suggesting some of the ways in which faith traditions are— and aren’t—stepping up to the plate. The first area of challenge is the reality of diversity. If it ever was the case that a parent could raise a child under a single overarching sacred canopy, that is clearly not the case today. The United States remains a predominantly Christian country, but young adults today encounter compatriots from many corners of that Christian tradition, many of whom have only vague attachments to whatever tradition they may claim. About one in four young adults identifies as Catholic, but less than half of them attend church even once a month.1 Another one in four identifies as some sort of conservative Protestant, with an additional one in ten a member of the various African American Protestant denominations. More of these Protestants attend regularly than Catholics do, but even here a substantial number of people who were raised in a tradition have little ongoing connection to it today. One in six young adults identifies as one of the mainline Protestant denominations, and again, less than half of them attend church regularly. One in five Journeys of Faith / 39 young adults has no religious preference at all, but a quarter of them actually do show up at religious services occasionally. All the non...