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

III

The Catholic Church in the United States is at a crossroads and Christian Smith and co-authors Kyle Longest, Jonathan Hill, and Kari Christoffersen tell us why: Catholic families, parishes, and schools are becoming less effective at implanting Catholic practices, beliefs, values, and spirituality in the lives of Catholic children and adolescents in a way that will sustain their faith into emerging adulthood, which they define broadly as ages 18 to 25.

The authors present a masterful historical analysis of cultural trends in the United States over the last seventy years as background for a comparison of findings regarding young Catholics from the first and third waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). Their use of complex statistical analyses is presented in a way that is accessible not only to sociologists, but also to pastoral leaders, Catholic school teachers, and parents. The result is an unrivalled presentation of the familial, cultural, and institutional factors that lead young Catholics to retain, strengthen, or dismiss their Catholic identity by their early twenties. The implications are far-reaching and cannot be overstated – this book should be required reading for all who care about the future vitality of the Catholic Church.

Perhaps the greatest omission is a balanced presentation of the worldwide trends in Catholic culture, beliefs, practices, and affiliation. The authors contend that the major cultural shifts in the United States that set the stage for the present decline in practice and affiliation among emerging adults took place prior to the 1970s – before the families of roughly a third to 40 percent of today’s young Catholics arrived in this country. Although the globalization of communications may have contributed to similar cultural shifts in their originating countries, the timing, dynamics, and consequences of those shifts play out differently from one national community to the next, leading one to ask: why was this overlooked?

While the authors should be commended for examining the generational differences among Hispanic youth and emerging adults, the data are often inconclusive due to insufficient responses, and their interpretation is often lacking depth and nuance due to the absence of an adequate presentation of historical cultural background. Even the General Social Survey (GSS) data presented in Chapter 2 is deficient due to the fact that the survey only began to be conducted in Spanish in 2006. That methodological change increased Hispanic participation by at least 50 percent,² which means that the Catholic responses considered throughout chapter 2 do not represent the full range of U.S. Catholic residents, an important detail overlooked in the book.

A third disappointment lies in the fact that chapters 5, 6, and 7 did not include frequency of talking about religious matters at home during adolescence as one of the analytic measures. Educational theorists have long known that themes that are discussed are retained much longer than those that are merely read, heard, or witnessed. Other studies on the NSYR data have shown that this one measure was far more predictive of Catholic emerging adult religious behavior than any other.³ Why was it not included?