Social Attachment to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church among Young Adults

Abstract

As part of a ten-year longitudinal study on youth retention in the church, 755 young adults with Seventh-day Adventist backgrounds were surveyed to explore factors that relate to social attachment to the religious community. The sample was distributed throughout the United States and Canada. A reliable Social Attachment Scale was constructed from six items measuring commitment to Jesus, religious faith, the local congregation, and the denomination as well as frequency of attendance at worship services. Attachment was found to be predicted by perceptions of the religious education program in the church, personal involvement in congregational activity, lack of conflict in church areas, and remembrances of childhood experiences with local church leaders. The first two areas proved to be the most important as demonstrated by multiple regression analysis. It is iKM unusual for religious communities to see young people reared in their fellowship drop out of the body of believers as they move through adolescence and into early adulthood. In his study of church dropouts based on a Gallup survey of unchurched Americans, Roozen (1980) estimated that about 46% of Americans drop out of church participation at some time in their lives, with the peak dropout rate occurring during the teenage years. In a classic study on church growth and decline, Hoge and Roozen (1979) concluded that the downturn in membership of mainline denominations during the 1960s and 1970s was not caused by the departure of large numbers of older adults from the churches. Rather, it resulted from the failure of young adults within mainline Protestantism to become committed members and thus replace the faithful older numbers. Wuthnow (1976) in reviewing Gallup poll data from the 19S0s through the middle 1970s found that the greatest decline in church attendance after 1957 was among those under 30 years of age. He concluded that the downward shift in religious commitment was at least partly attributable to the emergence of the youth counterculture of the 1960s. Roof (1981) also found that the defections from churches were disproportionately high among young adults. He agreed with Wuthnow that significant cultural changes were in large part responsible for this trend. This is especially true among college students. Yankelovich (1981) pointed out that a large array of lifestyle values shifted during the 1960s and that this movement was led by college-educa ted young adults. Extensive