“Yes you can! You just have to do your dreams!” was the encouragement I recently received when I voiced doubt about my ability to complete something. Inspiring. But, I wondered, where did she learn that phrase? I have spoken with her about dreams, but usually in the context of convincing her to sleep. I wondered if she derived it from “It’s okay to dream big”, a statement in her book It’s Okay. Where else would she have learned about following your dreams? Who else has been encouraging her? Does she tell this to herself? Does she encourage herself to follow her own dreams? And what are those dreams? What aspirations does my two-years-old daughter have?
Such modes of wondering have also inspired my research. Before I delve into some of the personal, reflexive history that has shaped my methodology, the reader might prefer that I jump ahead to the present and the purpose of this publication. For years I have been answering the common question of “what are you studying” with the terse response “the religious socialization of children in a new religious movement”. With those ten words I will either sufficiently cause the inquirer to cease their questions if they are not actually interested, or compel them to inquire further. I will assume that the reader would ask me to elaborate. I am interested in how kids engage religion. By what processes do kids learn about religion or a particular religion? It seems such a simple question, with perhaps a simple answer available – if one looks to the dominant literature. You would be forgiven for assuming a simplistic answer – that kids learn from their parents and religious education. That is what the literature tells us about religious socialization. It seems a fairly straight-forward process: religious institutions transmit their particular forms of religion to the next generation of kids via explicit education programs and / or parental instruction. Kids, for their part, absorb the teachings provided and eventually internalize that religious worldview. If kids seem less religious now than “before”, it is because of the secularization of society, the loss of religion in the home, the decline of religious education programming, and other such perceived institutional ills. I will not dispute that such things affect how kids encounter religion, but such a response tells us little about the processes by which kids learn about religion.
Popular discussions about youths and religion assume that parents are no longer teaching religion, youths are no longer attending churches, and most youths don’t care about religion at all – being too wrapped up in technology and consumerism. However, as national research projects such as the American National Study of Youth and Religion (Smith and Denton 2005; Smith and Snell 2009; Dean 2010; Pearce and Denton 2010) and Project Teen Canada (Bibby 2009) have effectively demonstrated, youths in North America are more religious than they are given credit for. It would be a mistake to assume that religion is no longer important to youths or that the study of the religiosity of youths is insignificant. In the last decade, the study of youth religiosity has been taken up with increased intensity internationally, as evidenced by the most recent edited international collection of articles on Religion and Youth (Collins-Mayo and Dandelion 2010). Whether youths are more, less, or equally religious than before is a topic of concern with particular pertinence within religious communities seeking to transmit their religious traditions, but it is also pertinent to the study of religion and society.
The question of whether kids are more or less religious and more or less inclined to affiliate with their parent’s religious group; children’s images of God; children’s spirituality and religious development; the psycho-social benefits of religious affiliation for adolescents and youths; and the pedagogy of religious education dominate the literature concerning children, adolescents and religion. Most of these studies are derived from studies of Christians, but occasionally other world religions are featured. Many of these studies have an explicit or implicit concern with the maintenance of a religious tradition. For example, studies of children’s religious development (using developmental models of childhood), including images of God, are typically employed to refine religious education programs to appropriately align teachings with the perceived understandings of children. Studies of psycho-social benefits of religion for youths encourage the development of religious youth groups, particularly insofar as religious association is expected to reduce delinquency. The volume of such studies are too numerous to list; I literally found hundreds in my review of journals devoted to the study of religion and journals devoted to the study of children and adolescents – from every discipline. The examples I found date back to the nineteenth century and I have continued finding articles until the present (2010). At one point I attempted to chart my findings by journal, by year, and by topic, but the volume was unwieldy – I didn’t have the software to handle it[1] and as I continued to find additional material I realized my charts were continually outdated and my extensive efforts were, ultimately, a side project to the real work of my thesis.
Here is a sample of the findings. Although I would not assert these numbers to be “hard”, they are demonstrative of relative trends. Studies of the psycho-social benefits of religion among youths constitute a larger portion of the research in the last 50 years. The category of “religiosity, spirituality, and faith development” includes a variety of studies which I have grouped together because they share a concern with the development of children in relation to religion (and/or spirituality). Studies of spirituality are more recent. Typically these evaluations contain a pedagogical element. Explicitly pedagogical articles were excluded from this sampling of research because entire journals, dating back over a century, have been dedicated to this topic of how to effectively teach children. Much of Religious Education literature applies studies included here on children’s development; thus the inclusion of RE literature would skew the results and greatly inflate this category without adequately representing actual research. The study of parental influences frequently overlaps with studies of religious development and studies of religious understandings, but I include it here to demonstrate the prominence of such concerns in research. The items included in this count explicitly focus on the role of parents. The category of religious understandings includes studies of religious knowledge as well as children’s conceptualizations of religion. The category of religious affiliation indicates studies explicitly concerned with adolescents’ attendance and stated affiliations. The category of identity includes studies of how religion is connected with other forms of identity and personality. The family life category indicates interest in how religion impacts family life; these studies are not about children or adolescents directly. The final category includes articles explicitly referencing religious socialization or transmission of beliefs.
I realized, eventually, that all the time I had spent exploring this large volume of research, desperately seeking studies similar to my own that were interested in the processes of religious socialization among children, would be but a small paragraph in this dissertation. I thought that I should properly document the other literature so as to appropriately locate my own research (and its relative uniqueness), but the volume of research I gathered better lends itself to generalized statements at this point. Studies of particular relevance to my research are addressed throughout this dissertation where appropriate.
The question you may be asking yourself, now, is where does my research feature in this milieu? In the first chapter I will elaborate upon research on socialization, and religious socialization in particular, and my critique of the dominant models of research in this field. I shall here make a positive statement concerning what my research is without yet addressing what it is not. I have engaged in an interactionist study of religious socialization that considers the social environments in which the process of religious socialization is engaged, the primary external agents in this process, the social interactions that influence individual and group understandings, and the religious identities of children and adolescents. The religious group I am studying, in order to develop a qualitative study, is contemporary Paganism. I chose this religious group for many reasons, some of which will be addressed below as they contribute to my methodology. As a case study example, I chose Paganism because it is a new religious movement and I desired to explore how children being raised in a NRM that is not a totalist group perceive the religion of their parents in relation to their awareness of other mainstream forms of religion and how they develop their own religious ideas. Given my awareness that many Pagan parents elect to not “indoctrinate” their children with any religion, I wondered how their children learn about and understand religion. Although some parents do provide explicit teachings concerning Paganism in conversations with their children, others do not – and yet, I wondered, in what ways do they nevertheless model a religion for their children, if at all. I also wished to further examine the ways in which a new religious movement composed primarily of adult converts negotiates the presence of children within the movement, and how this impacts the process of religious socialization for the kids. Finally, I wondered about the religious identities of these kids given their affiliation – either directly or by association through their parents – with a NRM that is stigmatized as being ‘different’ from mainstream religions. Early on, as I developed my research proposal, I hypothesized (for the sake of hypothesizing) that association with a stigmatized NRM would increase the salience of religion for kids. That hypothesis was not supported by my research findings.
Methodology...
[1] I am now using Zotero to organize my collection, but the process of tagging and categorizing this extensive collection is very time consuming. I also managed to delete, with one mis-aimed click of the mouse, an entire sub-folder containing all the research on children/adolescents and religion. Fortunately the actual entries remained in my master library and this happened after I printed out the 194 pages of entries (shrunken down to 33 printer pages), but I have not had the time to sort these hundreds of items from the more than 1200 entries in my collection.
