Rhetoric Race and Religion
When I saw that you study at Notre Dame, I thought it was interesting, because you all have in house sociologist Dr. Christian Smith, who I believe has the largest data set on youth and religion surveys in the country. He was at UNC Chapel Hill and I think he left and went to Notre Dame and brought along his survey set. He’s written books like Soul Searching and Souls In Transition, and does a lot with youth and religion.
I actually wrote an article not too long ago called “Habits of the Heart” that was featured in [a special issue on Race, Religion, and Late Democracy of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science] and I sent it to him, but I never got a response. But my research actually shows the opposite of what he’s doing with youth and religion. I lean way to the left on the youth and religion stuff, he leans a bit to the right. Most of his work on youth and religion is motivated by different interests — whether they’re conscious of it or whether they make it explicit in the work itself — of saying that religion among young people is drastically changing, that there’s a sharp decline. When they say that what they mean is that there’s a sharp decline in youth participation in institutional religion. So that is to say, ‘Well if young people aren’t going to church, then what are they doing?’ and then scholars such as Christian Smith might suggest ‘Well, they’re on this postmodern individual quest for spirituality but it doesn’t look like any religion we know and we don’t know how to categorize it.’
So it’s just interesting because what motivates that type of scholarship is this conservative concern about how to keep churches in business, how do we maintain that market maintenance of the church. My research shows that those kind of studies are flawed because of what they study as ‘belief’ — they’re actually studying primary processes of socialization. So in other words, if I were to study what you believe about religion, I might ask you questions about growing up, or your parents’ religion, what kind of church you go to, and more often than not, your answers to my questions about your religion are going to say more about your primary socialization than what you actually do in your every day practices currently. So there’s that disconnect between the two. So I try to focus not on claims to belief but on what young people do in their everyday lives like how do they deal with Christianity, reject religion, how do they remake it into something that is not yet captured in studies. So I’m on the other side of where Christian Smith is at.
Kelsey Manning: So what you’ve said is that this book is calling for a redefinition of what religion is — is that correct?
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