Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice & Young Catholics at the New Millennium: The Religion and Morality of Young Adults in Western Countries - Book Review

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by James C. Cavendish

Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice by DEAN R. HOGE, WILLIAM D. DINGES, MARY JOHNSON, S.N.D., and JUAN L. GONZALES, JR. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, 288 pp. $40.00 (Cloth), $19.00 (Paper).

and

Young Catholics at the New Millennium: The Religion and Morality of Young Adults in Western Countries, by JOHN FULTON, ANTHONY M. ABELA, IRENA BOROWIK, TERESA DOWLING, PENNY LONG MARLER, and LUIGI TOMASI. Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2000, 193 pp. $69.95 (Cloth), $29.95 (Paper)

The works of Hoge et al. and Fulton et al. are among the most insightful and penetrating studies of the beliefs, attitudes, and practices of young adult Catholics to appear in recent years. Because it is this generation of Catholics who represent the future vitality of the Catholic Church, these books are a "must read" not only for Church leaders and pastoral ministers, but also for social scientists wishing to understand the effect of late modernity on the young adult cohort.

At first appearance, there is much that unites these two books. Both books, for example, seek to understand contemporary culture's influence on young people by asking them how they live and maintain their Catholic identity in today's world. They also arrive at very similar answers: The lives of young adult Catholics have been affected in profound ways by postmodern globalism, individualism, and free-market capitalism. More than any generation preceding them, these books report, young adult Catholics value free choice and experimentation in the religious context to the point that spirituality has become uncoupled from religion. They remain highly spiritual, but they are less religious in terms of Mass attendance and personal devotions, less committed to the institutional Church, and more likely to embrace religious and moral ideas that are incompatible with the Church's teachings, particularly in the areas of sexuality, lay involvement in the Church, and the role of women in society.

Although these hooks share these common questions and conclusions, there is much that distinguishes these two books. In order to highlight these differences, a short description of each is in order. The initial chapters of Hoge et al.'s book do an excellent job of summarizing previous research on young Catholics in the U.S. and placing these studies, along with their own, in the context of the larger literature in the sociology of religion. Chapters three through nine present the survey's central findings with respect to religious beliefs, practices, and identity. Here, readers discover that only a small percentage of young adults have left the Catholic community and that rates of leaving are about the same between Latino and non-Latino Catholics, despite the prevalence of antidotal accounts of Latino defections. Readers also learn that young adults value their parishes more for their feeling of community and social life than for their spiritual help, and they support higher levels of social action and lay involvement. The chapters on identity, which I found particularly engaging, show that young Catholics attach importance to their faith only if they feel that it has been spiritually beneficial and relevant to their lives, thereby confirming that this generation is much less committed to the institutional church and much more in search of individual spiritual fulfillment.

Methodologically, Hoge et al.'s research is an excellent example of successful triangulation. The researchers start out with a nationwide phone survey of 848 American adults aged twenty to thirty-nine years old selected by careful sampling of parish confirmation classes. They then conduct a series of in-depth interviews with 80 young adult Catholics, followed by six focus groups with particular categories of people. Clearly one of the chief strengths of their approach is their use of a parallel Latino sample to better understand the distinct features of this booming population. While I agree that a detailed examination of Latino Catholics is necessary, I wondered how African American and Asian American Catholics might respond to this focus, especially when the researchers lump these populations into the same group as European Catholics and label the category "everyone else" (p. 2). While the Church definitely needs to understand the characteristics of the Latino Catholic population as it swells in numbers, one could also argue that the Church needs equally to understand the characteristics of its populations that do not appear to be growing in numbers. It is these populations, one might argue, that are more in need of the Church's efforts of evangelization, and treating them as if they were the same as European Catholics neglects to acknowledge their distinctive features.

The most obvious way in which the work of Fulton et al. differs from Hoge et al. is the former's multinational focus. Instead of focusing solely on the United States (as do Hoge et al.), Fulton et al. bring together the research of six investigators working in six different modernized countries in the West--Malta, Ireland, Poland, Italy, the United States, and England. By far the best chapters of the book are the two theoretical chapters that frame it--chapters 1 and 8--in which the primary author treats readers to an eloquent summary of the literature on postmodernism and late modernism and raises the question "To what extent do 'young' adults respond morally to the condition of modernity?" The six empirical chapters, which form the center of the book, present an interesting and diverse selection of cases, all unified in their central finding.