Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church
by Kenda Creasy Dean
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kenda Creasy DeanEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2010-07-15
ISBN: 0195314840
Number of pages: 264
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church
Book Review: A Well Intended Book That Falls Well Short of its Aims
Summary: 3 Stars
Any culture that strives to make an impact on society and leave a lasting legacy ought to be concerned with how it transmits its main ideas and values to the next generation. Religion is much more than a culture, and cannot be reduced just to its traditions, but it is beyond doubt that it has the greatest impact on society through its cultural aspects: the messages that it conveys, the vocabulary that it utilizes, and the practices and symbols that it employs.
"Almost Christian" is a book that addresses the way that religion (primarily Christianity) is understood today by the youth in the United States. It is based on the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), to which the author was an important contributor. NSYR had several interesting and somewhat surprising findings: despite what is sometimes presented in the media, the young people in America have a very positive outlook on religion, and a majority of them find their religious affiliation to be an important aspect of their identity. However, once one looks beyond these surface manifestations of religiosity, the picture that we get is much less rosy. The religiosity of the youth is in many cases only skin deep and we get a sense that they have not truly internalized the precepts of their religion. Even if they had, the young lack the means of expressing those precepts. NSYR also found that different religious groups manifested different levels of religiosity - from Mormon youth having the highest levels of commitment, followed by the Evangelicals; with Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews coming at the bottom.
In this book Kenda Creasy Dean aims to show in some detail what sorts of religious expressions and convictions young people hold to. She suggests that instead of orthodox Christian faith many Christian young people cling to a set of beliefs that have been absorbed from the local non-religious culture, and she terms this set of beliefs "Moral Therapeutic Deism." Dean aims to explore the roots of this set of beliefs, and claims that the young people are just reflecting the set of beliefs that their churches already espouse. In other words, it's all the fault of grownups and the watered-down theology that has been promulgated for a while in many churches. A better part of the book tries to give answers to how to combat these unfortunate developments, and imbue the youth with a sense of meaningful, living Christian faith. All of these aims are noble and well intended, but regrettably I found that this book falls way too short in its stated aims.
A big issue that I have with this book is that it seems to be purposefully blind to the obvious explanation for the reasons behind the differences in religious commitment on part of different groups. It's painfully obvious that more socially conservative a religious group is, more likely it is to put higher demands on its members in terms of articulating their faith and applying it in everyday situations. While reading this book I got an impression that Dean is so concerned that she doesn't come across as one of "those" Christians (close minded, judgmental, bigoted, etc.) that she doesn't make a single concrete example of where Christian ethical criteria can make a significant impact on society.
Furthermore, all the pages of this book that are purportedly devoted to addressing the ways that churches may increase the level of religious participation and commitment to the core values of Christian faith by the youth seem to lead nowhere. They are filled with rhetorical and theological flourishes that seem to have very little connection to the everyday lives of the young people (or anyone else for that matter). There is only one example in the whole book that deals with an actual impact of young people's faith on a social event - a decision of a Christian high school in Texas to have half of its fans cheer for a visiting team of juvenile inmates. How is this action related to the core Christian beliefs is not very clear. I don't see why a high school of devout Moral Therapeutic Deists might not have done something similar. This book had a feel of a book that was, for instance, extolling superiority of French over Spanish, or a book written by an English Lit teacher who was bemoaning the fact that today's kids don't read poetry as much as they used to.
All this hemming and hoeing makes this, I am sorry to say, a very boring book to read. The only parts of the book that I found interesting were the ones that actually presented the findings of NSYR, which means just the introductory chapters and the appendices. Everything else was so fatuous that I was able to leave this book for couple of weeks, pick it up again and continue reading like nothing had happened. The book alerts all concerned Christians to the shallowness of the faith that is being preached these days, but it totally fails in addressing the ways in which this could be remedied.
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