Author’s Response

We as authors of Young Catholic America are grateful for this symposium and for the opportunity to respond to these reviews in it. The reviews raise a number of interesting and important issues, about which we offer brief commentary here, taking the reviews in reverse order.

Ken Johnson-Mondragón is correct that our book did not set the U.S. situation in global context. But exactly how problematic that is for our purposes we suppose is a question open for discussion. His observation about limits on NSYR survey measures is also correct and well taken. To keep things in perspective, however, it is worth noting that we did include six Catholic-specific survey items in our analysis, which we analyze several times (63, 71, 77–78). True, the NSYR was not designed specifically for Catholics, since it was by intention a national study. There are always difficult trade-offs to be made between research projects focused on single religious traditions, which can use many good tradition-specific questions to go into depth but which have no comparative capacities, versus research that includes many religious groups for comparative purposes but as a result must ask questions that generally work for all of them. NSYR data involve some loss at the level of tradition-appropriate survey questions. But that kind of limitation is simply built into the nature of social research. Even so, we do not think the difficulties this creates for a study focused on Catholics are quite as problematic as Johnson-Mondragón suggests. In any case, I am sure we would all agree that what we really need is somebody of real means to invest the resources needed to do the “gold-standard” study focused exclusively on American Catholicism.

Johnson-Mondragón is also correct that we ideally would have included the “religious-talk-in-the-home” variable in our analysis in Chapter 5 (though not, as he suggests, in chapter 6, which looks at life course outcomes, nor Chapter 7, on Catholic schools). It turns out in analyses we are currently running of our most recently collected fourth-wave NSYR data (in which respondents are ages 24–29) that parents talking about religion in the home during their children’s teenage years is an absolutely crucial variable associated with stronger religiousness among the same children later, when they are in their mid to late twenties. We did not include this variable probably because we were trying to consistently follow what we had done in our previous analyses. But in retrospect that was an unfortunate omission.

David Yamane raises important questions about class position and MTD. The short answer to the first is that most American emerging adults are indeed caught up in the normative culture of emerging adulthood we describe, regardless of their social class. However, some emerging adults are able to afford the “goods” of emerging adulthood more than others. And some enjoy the financial means to recover from their mistakes and bad luck, while others suffer the reality that, because of lack of resources, one bad choice may mean dead-end lives, debilitation, prison, or death. As to MTD, yes, there is still plenty of it among Catholic emerging adults, although, as we wrote in another book, Souls in Transition, the experience of emerging adulthood itself tends to complicate and thin out what during the teenage years can be a pretty simplistic and confident version of MTD.

Finally, some of Mary Gautier’s points merit briefer responses. First, the detachment of many formerly Catholic teens from Catholic faith and practice is not a “premise” of our book, but rather the clear results of our empirical analysis, which agree with those of other studies. We did not go into the study presupposing that idea but concluded it based on the solid evidence. Second, Gautier over-states the extent to which our book grinds a “blame the parents” axe. The empirical fact is that parents are hugely important influences on the religious outcomes of their children’s lives. Our book’s historical analysis shows a long-term developing context in which that has worked out across three generations of...