In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change (review)

With the exceptions of religious conversion and disaffiliation, studies of intra-individual religious change have been relatively scarce in the sociological literature. Part of this is certainly due to the dearth of panel data available to properly address the subject. This is only a logistic hurdle though, and one that is likely to be overcome in the coming decades. However, there are also claims that religious belief and practice in adulthood do not merit attention because they are remarkably stable. If the religion of childhood and adolescence determines trajectories over the adult life course, then studying religious life beyond the formative years is a superfluous task. But what is meant when we say that adult religiosity is stable? While crude survey measures may show that religious practice and affiliation are fairly stable with age, what of the meanings associated with these practices? Moreover, how do broad cultural shifts such as the rise of therapeutic understandings of the self and the move away from “religious dwelling” (Wuthnow 1998) toward spiritual seeking shape individual religious pathways in adulthood? These questions are all skillfully addressed in the new book, “In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change” by Michele Dillon and Paul Wink.

The analyses presented in their book rely on the longitudinal Berkeley Guidance and Oakland Growth studies. These studies (referred together as the IHD longitudinal study), have tracked children born in the 1920s around the Berkeley area from adolescence into late life. Dillon and Wink mine interview transcripts and questionnaire responses from these respondents in order to map the multiple courses of individual religiousness and spirituality over the twentieth century.

The book is organized into three sections. The first section of the book relies primarily on interview material to paint a picture of the lived religion of the parents of the respondents, as well as the IHD participants through young adulthood. Much of what they write about in these chapters comports with other historical and sociological accounts of American religious life spanning the first half of the twentieth century. They report substantial variation in religious commitment, with many participants and their parents placing a low priority on religious socialization and some opposing it altogether. Although there is the absence of therapeutic language in the respondents’ self-descriptions, most of the quotes Dillon and Wink provide read like present-day accounts of Americans’ religious lives.

Chapters five through seven constitute the most important findings of the book. In these chapters, Dillon and Wink use their constructed variables that measure religiousness and spiritual seeking to describe life-long patterns of religiousness, the degree of stability between life phases, and the shifting meanings that are attached to these terms. Consistent with a recent study by McCullough et al (2005), they find that there are three dominant trends of religiousness over the life course: (1. a high and increasing religiousness, (2. a low and decreasing religiousness and (3. a curvilinear trend in between these. They also find that religiousness is fairly stable throughout adulthood, with approximately 6 percent of their participants shifting radically in religiousness. Despite this stability, the meanings of religiousness shift toward personal/faith concerns as the respondents age and shift away from social dimensions of religious belonging. In this same vein, Dillon and Wink find that spiritual seeking behavior increases substantially with age. In providing accounts for these shifts, they point to both maturational influences as well as cultural influences of the 1960s. These core chapters will almost certainly serve as a base reference for future researchers tracing aging patterns, cohort differences and cultural disruptions in religious understanding and practice.

The concluding section of the book focuses on religion and spirituality in late life. Using questionnaire items and scales, they cover a hodgepodge of psychological functioning, personality type, social involvement and physical health. They find religiousness tends to correlate with social and community activities, agreeableness (as a personality...