For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the spiritual lives of teenagers and young adults in the US in a sustained research project called the National Study of Youth and Religion. In the latest installment in this project, we interviewed a range of emerging adults about their lives, their relationships, their hopes and dreams, and even their failures. The young adults responded in articulate and insightful ways about these aspects of their lives.
But their articulateness did not extend to talking about religion or spirituality. This inarticulacy has been noted over the life of the research project, starting when the subjects were teens. In the intervening years, their ability to articulate religious teachings and exactly what they believe doesn’t seem to have improved in any significant way.
Emerging adults from some traditions—conservative Protestants and Latter-day Saints, for example—were better at articulating the teachings of their faith than were others, but even for these groups the norm was a lack of religious literacy—even regarding their own tradition. In general, emerging adults, regardless of how religiously committed they were, had difficulty expressing what they know about their religion—including their own religious beliefs, God, heaven or hell, and any number of other issues.
