Youth and Religion: The Gameboy Generation Goes to ``Church''

Abstract

Using the secularization theory and the Marxistnotion of religion as masking class conscienceone would expect the importance of religion andreligious involvement today to wane and belimited to lower class members. To challenge thisexpectation, using a representative nationaltelephone survey of 2004 youth (ages 11–18) andtheir parents, we attempt to answer thefollowing two questions: How religious areteenagers, and what may explain variation inreligious perception and involvement amongteens. Findings suggest that religion remainsperceived as very important by most teenagersand parents report that about two-thirds ofteenagers attended a place of worship at leastmonthly and that two out of five attended asocial group sponsored by a religiousorganization. These findings do not support thesecularization theory. As expected, parentalattendance of religious worship, teen's age,and teen's ethnicity and gender weresignificantly associated with three variablesof religious behavior and attendance. Incontrast to the Marxist notion of religion,measures of socio-economic status indicatethat, in the contemporary United States,religious participation, but not beliefs, islargely the domain of the middle-upper classes.