The authors challenge the characterizations of religiously unaffiliated emerging adults -sometimes called 'religious nones'- as undercover atheists. Religion is like an app on the ubiquitous smartphones in our back pockets: readily accessible, easy to control, and useful-but only for limited purposes.ĭenton and Flory show that some of the popular assumptions about young people and religion are not as clear as what many people seem to believe. Emerging adults don't seem so much opposed to religion or to religious organizations, at least in the abstract, as they are uninterested in religion, at least as they have experienced it. Yet, there is also a parallel trend in which a small, religiously committed group of emerging adults claim faith as an important fixture in their lives. What have we learned about the changing shape of religion in America?īack-Pocket God explores continuity and change among young people from their teenage years through the latter stages of 'emerging adulthood.' Melinda Lundquist Denton and Richard Flory find that the story of young adult religion is one of an overall decline in commitment and affiliation, and in general, a moving away from organized religion. Now, with Back-Pocket God, this mammoth research project comes to its conclusion.

They tracked these young people over the course of a decade, revisiting them periodically to check in on the state -and future- of religion in America, and reporting on their findings in a series of books, beginning with Soul Searching (2005).

More than a decade ago, a group of researchers began to study the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers.

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