Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone from the Church by Christian Smith, et al. (review)

I

Lead author Christian Smith’s latest book on emerging adults and their religious faith continues the themes he and his colleagues explored in three previous books, Soul Searching, Souls in Transition, and Lost in Transition, but this time the entire focus is on young Catholic adults. As in those books, this one also relies on data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a three-wave panel study (2002–2003–2005–2007–2008) of more than 3,000 teens (including about 700 Catholics) as they develop into young adults. These data are at once the greatest strength as well as the greatest weakness of the book.

Smith’s key premise is that a sizable proportion of teens (ages 13 to 17) who were categorized as Catholic when they were first interviewed for NSYR in 2002–2003 became detached from that identification by the time of the final interview in 2007–2008 and are unlikely to return to Catholic practice later in life – hence, the subtitle: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone from the Church.

The book begins with a brief historical overview of American Catholicism in the period between World War II and the end of Vatican II. It describes in broad strokes some of the immense demographic and cultural changes that swept Catholics out of the blue-collar immigrant “Catholic ghettos” of the Northeast and Midwest as they assimilated into American culture and gradually dispersed to the suburbs around the country where white-collar jobs and opportunities were abundant. These assimilated, white-collar, American Catholics are largely to blame, according to Smith, for the decline in Catholic practice and identity among younger Catholic generations. This “blame the parents” motif recurs with regularity throughout the rest of the book and ends up in the conclusion as the “crucial factor” in explaining why Catholic emerging adults are “gone from the Church.”

Chapter 2 uses data from the General Social Survey, a national survey of the American population, to demonstrate differences between Catholics and non-Catholics across time in religious practices and beliefs. The author points to a decline in weekly Mass attendance over time as indicative of a decline in Catholic identity among young adults, but these Catholics display very little change over time on any of the other religious practices and beliefs that are available in that series and presented in the chapter.

The rest of the book presents data from the NSYR to make an urgent case that American Catholics have lost their youngest adult generation because their parents have failed to pass on the faith. Chapter 3 presents a statistical portrait of Catholic emerging adults. Chapter 4 offers six categories of Catholic emerging adults, constructed from 41 interviews with people who were counted as Catholic in Wave 1 of NSYR. An extended excursus between Chapters 4 and 5 devotes nearly thirty pages to the author’s categorizations in an attempt to determine who will be counted as Catholic (he rejects the social science standard of self-identification as a sufficient criterion), only to learn that “regardless of how religiously observant a young person currently is, being raised Catholic tends to have an enduring impact on religious self-identification” (145). Chapter 5 looks at the religious trajectory of Catholics as they transition from their teens (ages 13 to 17) to “early emerging adulthood” (ages 18 to 23) and Chapter 6 creates three Catholic types (practicing, sporadic, or disengaged) and compares their attitudes and behaviors to see what difference the practice of the faith makes in their lives. Chapter 7 uses NSYR data as well as supplemental data from a survey of Notre Dame college students to show that attending a Catholic high school makes it less likely that Catholics will disaffiliate later in life, a finding that Perl and Gray of the Center for Applied Research...