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A Challenge for Churches: Adulthood Takes Its Time

2007-12-07T19:00:00-05:00

At some point during the 20th century, the United States invented adolescence. Where once there had merely been youth, there were now teenagers, with their own dress, music, magazines, books, economy, culture and expected patterns of behavior. It was enough to get organized religion, in the words of the bard,all shook up.

Now, says a leading sociologist of religion, a similarlydistinct and important stage in life, situated between the teenage years and full-fledged adulthood, has emerged.It isreshaping the meaning of self, youth, relationships and life commitmentsand religious leaders had better pay attention.

Writing in the November-December issue of Books&Culture, that scholar, Christian Smith, describes what researchers in sociology, psychology and human development are callingemerging adulthood,a time between ages 18 and 30 or so, when marriage and parenthood are often delayed, formal schooling is prolonged, job switching is frequent and parental support is extended.

Half a century ago, many young people were anxious to get out of high school, marry, settle down, have children and start a long-term career,writes Professor Smith, who directs the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Today, many young people spend more than a decade between high school and marriageexploring lifes many options in unprecedented freedom.And, it should be added, in great uncertainty.

91��Ƶ agree that the transition to adulthood today is more complex, disjointed and confusing than it was in past decades,Professor Smith writes. It is a transitionmarked by immense autonomy, freedom of choice, lack of obligations and focus on the self,a time also characterized by instability and experimentation, whenhopes and exhilaration recurrently run up against confusion and frustrationand whenties to the social institutions of civil society, including church, are often weak.

He cites research suggesting that emerging adults seem to slough off almost entirely the religious faith of their upbringing or even of their adolescence.

Of course, young people have always tended to drift from religious moorings when they leave home, and then connect with religion again when they marry or have children. But the longer that intervening period becomesand it may now be 15 or 20 yearsthe less likely the return.

Furthermore, Professor Smith says,these are crucial years in the formation of personal identity, behavioral patterns and social relationships.One returns a different person, possibly formed quite independently of any earlier faith, certainly of any participation in a religious community.

Robert Wuthnow, another distinguished sociologist of religion, explores much the same territory inAfter the Baby Boomers(Princeton, 2007), a book subtitledHow Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion.He focuses on adults 21 to 45 years old, a group that is not just the harbinger of the future but that already constitutes about half the countrys adult population.

Professor Wuthnow too finds that delayed marriage and parenthood, economic instability and the constant blitz of new information and alternative lifestyles present a new challenge to religious institutions, as did the entry of women into the paid work force.

Among adults in this age group, regular attendance at worship services has declined markedly in the last three decades, while the proportion never attending at all has increased. The change has occurred almost entirely among the growing numbers who have not married.

Unless religious leaders take younger adults more seriously, the future of American religion is in doubt,warns Professor Wuthnow, who teaches sociology at Princeton.

There are differences between the two accounts. Professor Smiths is a bold, broadly sketched essay proposingemerging adulthoodas a life stage that demands powerful responses from organized religion. Professor Wuthnows is a data-heavy volume filled with caveats about generalizing; the wordjournalistappears repeatedly in his warning against reports, maybe like this one, announcing some remarkable new development on the religion landscape.

The difference manifests itself in how the two scholars deal with sex. Both recognize delay of marriage and child-rearing as a defining feature of the new stage in adulthood. Professor Smith putssex, cohabitation and marriage(in that order) squarely on the table askey dimensionsof the changed situation. Any emerging adults who want to abide by traditional strictures against premarital sex, he says,face a very difficult peer culture in which to live.

Professor Wuthnow has a great deal to say about marriage, weddings, marital happiness and parenting, but only a page and a half on premarital sex, mostly devoted to data concerning which young adults consider it right or wrong and what percentage of the unmarried who consider it wrong nonetheless acknowledge having had sexual relations in the last year (answer: 63 percent). His index does not include the wordcohabitation.

The same difference is evident in the two authorsthoughts about how religious groups might respond. Professor Wuthnow describes modest changes in worship services and programs that might help congregations engage young adults, especially unmarried ones. Professor Smith, writing for a largely evangelical audience, jumps in with the idea that perhaps parents, who already offer their adult offspring considerable financial and caretaking support, should challenge the cultural assumption that marriage ought to await financial independence. Instead, they should provide social and financial support for marriage in the early 20s rather than the late.

Teenage marriage is the best recipe for divorce,he writes,but marriage in the 20s itself is not.He questions whether the current culture of emerging adulthood, withhooking upand serial cohabitation, is helpful preparation either for marriage or for real adulthood rather thanmere rationalization for self-indulgence and, at its worst, sheer narcissism.

A good argument can be made that true, authentic selves are made more than found,he writes.It is arguably as much or more by making and keeping promises than by dabbling and deferring that we come to know who we as persons really are and are called to become.

Where the authors converge is on the contrast between the institutional resources that both society and religious bodies have poured into the first two decades of preparing young people for adulthood and the absence of any parallel support once these young adults are launched out on their own. It is high time, they agree, to conceptualize emerging adulthood as a distinct transitional life stage, to understand the social forces generating it and to grapple with its typical characteristics and consequences.

TopicID: 26266

How should time be lived? A professor sees a billable-hours culture, and religious antidotes.

2001-12-28T19:00:00-05:00

As visions of sugarplums give way to images of Father Time bearing his scythe or of bouncing babies clad in sashes labeled “New Year,” no one is surprised to encounter religious reflections on the meaning of time.

But in a law journal? Of course, the article by M. Cathleen Kaveny in the fall issue of the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal focuses on a peculiarly lawyerly kind of time: “billable hours,” the units that big law firms use to calculate what to charge their clients.

Lawyers, it turns out, are not the only ones whose lives are shaped — or rather distorted, in the author’s opinion — by what she calls the “billable hours mentality.” That mentality, she maintains, is only an extreme version “of the view of time dominant in American life today.”

The writer is the John P. Murphy Foundation professor of law at the University of Notre Dame Law 91��Ƶ and a professor in the university’s theology department as well. She believes that religious traditions have resources to “provide a three-dimensional alternative” to the debilitating world of billable hours.

The reason so many lawyers, especially young lawyers, express dissatisfaction with their work, Professor Kaveny contends, is not just that they spend so much time at it, but also the way they understand and experience that time. That in turn is directly related to the way billing is structured: around how many hours can be charged, in a “diary sheet” always kept close at hand, to specific clients. Those billable hours often determine bonuses, promotions and partnerships.

Lawyers did not always bill clients that way, and small firms generally still don’t. But the growth of firms employing over 50 lawyers exploded after the early 1960’s, and computers gave managing partners a way to measure the productivity of young associates whom they could scarcely know personally.

“What view of the nature and purpose of time is embedded in the worldview of billable hours?” Professor Kaveny asks. “More importantly, what view of the shape of a lawyer’s life, of a human life, is fostered by that worldview?”

In her opinion, the “regime of billable hours” treats time “as instrumentally valuable, rather than intrinsically valuable.” What counts are the extrinsic goals of winning advantages for the client and profits for the firm. Intrinsic satisfactions like doing good work, nurturing younger associates or contributing to the community cannot be translated into billable hours.

The habit of treating time as a commodity with a price tag can seep into other aspects of lawyers’ lives, Professor Kaveny says, so that nonwork activities and even personal relationships are viewed in financial terms. Time spent with family or friends is calculated in terms of “trade-offs” and lost opportunities.

Worst, the worldview of billable hours treats all time as interchangeable: “An hour worked on Monday afternoon is treated the same as an hour worked on Friday night; logically speaking, 10 p.m. New Year’s Eve is no different from 10 a.m. Groundhog Day.”

How is one to treat the insight that comes in a split second? Or the hours of nonspecific reading or mulling that lie behind it? The billable hours framework levels all time, Professor Kaveny warns, flattening out its rhythms into a kind of “endless, colorless present.” Life is experienced as monotonous extension.

The regime of billable hours not only alienates lawyers from events “that draw upon a different and noncommodified understanding of time, such as family birthdays, holidays and volunteer work,” she argues, but ultimately erodes their sense of self and even isolates them from fellow lawyers.

Of course, she does not imagine that this grim culture affects every lawyer in every big firm in the same way or to the same degree. “My point is not one of logical necessity but of gravitational force,” she writes.

So what alternative can a religious tradition provide? Although Professor Kaveny makes reference to the Jewish Sabbath as well as to Islam, she uses the example of Roman Catholicism to illustrate the richer perspective on time that can be found in the doctrines and practices of a religious tradition.

For Catholics, time is not one long stretch but the medium in which the history of humanity’s salvation is played out and individual moments of decision and conversion occur.

Most obviously, the alternation of fasts and feasts, the liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmastime, Lent, Holy Week and Eastertide can inculcate in the faithful a wholly different sense of time: “Unlike billable hours, time as qualified by the liturgical year is not freely exchangeable; Catholic Christians ought not to fast on the birthday of Christ nor feast on Good Friday.”

Professor Kaveny writes as a Catholic, but not, she insists, “to proselytize.” She hopes that thinkers in other religious traditions will develop their own, richly textured, countervailing views of time; indeed, she hopes for “nonreligious alternatives to the billable hours perspective” as well.

Professor Kaveny may underestimate how secular holidays like Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and New Year, or even the secularized versions of religious holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, can insert a skip, hop or pause in the incessant march of billable hours, or how inventive people can be in asserting the rhythms of nature and family life against the logic of the time clock and the workweek.

But these are only defensive skirmishes that offer temporary relief, she would argue. Resisting the billable hours worldview demands regular practices of reflection, ritual and renewal, practices embedded in an alternative view of life’s purposes that is shared and supported by a community of people, whether religious or secular.

In other words, watching the ball drop in Times Square and singing a wistful “Auld Lang Syne,” however invigorating, are not enough.

TopicID: 398

Study finds many young Catholics stay with the church despite disagreeing on some issues

2001-08-24T20:00:00-04:00

Young Catholics are different. Everyone has been saying that for years, and with good reason.p. Roman Catholicism has undergone enormous changes since the early 1960’s when the Second Vatican Council authorized major changes in rituals and a recasting of venerable practices and teachings. Common sense dictated that Catholics coming of age since then would be different.p. But how different? In what ways different? Roughly 20 million American Catholics are in their 20’s and 30’s — 40 percent of the adult Catholic population - and most opinions about them have been based largely on anecdotes and impressions.p. From now on, those opinions will have to be checked against “Young Adult Catholics,” recently published by the . Using the records of urban, suburban and rural parishes, four scholars identified individuals who as adolescents had been confirmed in the Catholic Church in the 1970’s and 80’s and, by 1997, would be between the ages of 20 and 39.p. They tracked down a representative sample of more than 800 of these men and women and interviewed them about their religious histories and their beliefs and practices. And in view of the swelling number of Latino Catholics, the sampling was designed to allow accurate comparisons between Latinos and non-Latinos who had been confirmed.p. The authors offer an important proviso: Probably 30 percent to 40 percent of non-Latino Catholics and 60 percent to 70 percent of Latino Catholics in this age group were never confirmed. Despite the book’s title, then, the sample does not represent all young adults who were reared Catholic but rather a group that appears somewhat above average in education and exposure to church life.p. Some of the results were surprising. “Since we had read so much about Latinos leaving the Catholic Church, we expected that more Latinos than non-Latinos would have left,” the authors write. “But this is not the case. The rates of leaving were nearly the same.”p. In fact, the rates of leaving for both groups were relatively low- approximately 10 percent.p. “The vast majority have remained Catholic and probably will stay Catholic,” the authors conclude, “even if they’re unhappy and even if they’re disconnected entirely from parish life.”p. At least compared with the confirmed mainline Protestants that one of the authors had previously studied, “Catholics have a kind of glue holding them closer to their church.”p. Furthermore, when it came to core beliefs about the divinity of Jesus, the presence of God in the sacraments and a life after death involving judgment, reward and punishment, 80 percent to 90 percent of these young adults adhered to the church’s traditional teachings.p. Indeed, most of those who no longer considered themselves Catholic had not gone in a secular direction. They were actually more religiously observant and more traditional in their beliefs than those who remained Catholic. Generally, they had left Catholicism not because of objections to it but because of intermarriage or an attraction to another church.p. The study also found that these Catholics overwhelmingly supported expanded roles for women and lay people in the church— more or less the liberal position in many church disputes— and that this was even more true of those who attended church regularly, were active in their parishes and held more traditional beliefs than of those who did not.p. Active and inactive alike, these Catholics tended to give their parishes high ratings, which surprised the researchers, who had heard many complaints about parishes in focus groups and intensive interviews.p. But other findings augured less well for the future of American Catholicism, especially considering that the group surveyed is above average in its religious upbringing.p. The study confirmed evidence of widespread disagreement with church teachings on sexual issues and of distancing from church authority and parish life. Many of these young adults echo the popular mantra of being spiritual but not religious. They are not angry at the church, but detached.p. Most fundamentally, only about one in five of these self-described Catholics was attending church weekly, raising the question whether their adherence to Catholic emphasis on sacraments was more theoretical than real.p. The authors estimate that only 10 percent of their sample constitute “core Catholics,” who attend Mass regularly, pray daily, are involved in their parishes, take papal teachings seriously (even when sometimes disagreeing with particulars) and do not separate their spirituality from the institutional church, its symbols and disciplines.p. Many others continue to hold their Catholicism as “something very special” without seeming able to identify that “something” or provide much evidence that they can hand it on to their children.p. The authors are not passing judgment. They note the turmoil that has affected the church internally and the pressures in the United States to affirm all faiths as equally true and good.p. The result, they conclude, is that “many young adult Catholics have a difficult time articulating a coherent sense of Catholic identity.”p. While these young Catholics like being Catholic, the authors continued, “they are not sure what is distinctive about Catholicism.”p. “Young Adult Catholics” is rich in other findings, not a few of them seemingly contradictory and hard to interpret. Perhaps because there are four authors— Dean R. Hoge and William D. Dinges from Catholic University of America in Washington, Sister Mary Johnson from Emmanuel College in Boston and Juan L. Gonzales Jr., from California State University at Hayward— the text sometimes swings between seeing the glass half-full and half-empty.p. In a phone conversation this week, Professor Dinges, who teaches religious studies (the other authors are sociologists), admitted to belonging to the half-empty school.p. “Our study is a flashing yellow light,” he said, a warning to the church to pay more attention to the young.p. Maybe their findings— and that warning— can be captured in a paraphrase of the line made famous by Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “Young adult Catholics never leave; they just fade away.”

TopicID: 396