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

II

The field of American Catholic studies is fortunate to be joined by one of today’s leading sociologists of religion, Christian Smith. Smith began his career as a social movements scholar interested in Latin America and religion, publishing his Harvard dissertation as The Emergence of Liberation Theology (Chicago, 1991). Young Catholic America, therefore, represents an intellectual return to Catholicism, one no doubt affected by his move from Chapel Hill to South Bend and his personal journey across the Tiber (see his 2011 book, How to Go From Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in 95 Difficult Steps).

Connecting intellectual and personal interests is nothing new for Smith. A graduate of (B.A., ‘83) and former professor (1989–1994) at the evangelical Christian Gordon College, Smith published three books on American evangelicalism from 1998–2000. A hallmark of this work was its ability to speak to broader audiences of the faithful and at the same time have a major influence on the sociological study of religion.

Smith’s recent work on the religious practices of American youth is no different. The three waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) have produced considerable public interest and more high quality data than will ever be analyzed fully. Young Catholic America is Smith’s fourth book from the NSYR, and the third based on Wave 3 data collected in 2007–2008 when the respondents were 18–23 years old.

All of the Wave 3 books employ psychologist Jeffrey Arnett’s concept of “emerging adulthood.” Although the idea of a new phase of the life course between adolescence and “real” adulthood is compelling to many of us who work in higher education, I wonder to what extent emerging adulthood is a class-based phenomenon. Smith’s characterization of this stage as entailing “a historically unparalleled freedom to roam, experiment, learn, move on, and try again” (7) seems grounded in a particular middle- and upper-class habitus. Does it characterize the outlook and practices of poor or working class or immigrant Catholics?

Indeed, does it characterize the outlook and practices of many 18–23 year-old Catholics at all? Smith’s quantitative results suggest the dominant religious trajectory of Catholic teenagers is “[r]elative stability, not dramatic change” (161). If I substituted a neutral term like “young adult” for the concept of “emerging adult” to describe these subjects, I do not know how the main findings of this book would differ.

Something that has changed from Wave 1 of the NSYR is the centrality of “moralistic therapeutic deism” (MTD). In Soul Searching (Oxford, 2005), Smith and Melinda Denton argue that MTD is the de facto faith of American teenagers from 13–17 years of age. This outlook cut across various religious traditions, but was found especially where religious commitment and education were weak. Since Catholics were the least religiously engaged of Christian teenagers, we might expect MTD to be strongest among Catholic emerging adults. In Souls in Transition (Oxford, 2011), Smith and Patricia Snell argue that MTD has been diluted but not disintegrated, but in Young Catholic America it seems to have disappeared entirely. Are Catholics, then, the most lax young adult Christians in the United States, even in this tacit form of religiosity?