Keeping the faith: Study outlines young adults' struggle with religion

Amee Garcia is a senior at the University of Utah. She is active in the Catholic students' Newman Center and works a table for the center during freshman orientation.

Garcia says some parents light up when they see her table. They'll grab their freshman and exclaim, "Look! You're Catholic! Here's a place for you to get involved!"

Garcia always responds pleasantly, even as she fights the urge to say, "From now on it will be your child's own personal decision about how to practice spirituality."

During the last four years, Garcia herself has pulled away from church — and always come back. As she sees it, every young person has a duty to question. Garcia says, "We have to make sure we test ourselves, to really know what we believe."

If parents see college as a place where atheist professors make fun of God, their fear is unfounded, says Mark Regnerus, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas, who has just completed a study of young adults and religion.

But if they worry that their children will slip away on their own — becoming less active in church or synagogue — well, Regnerus says, that fear is valid.

Regnerus' study (with Margaret Vaaler and principal author Jeremy Uecker) appeared in the spring issue of the journal Social Forces. At the time, the Texas sociologists had not broken out data on members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But last week they took another look at their research and told the Deseret Morning News that LDS young adults are much more likely than those of other faiths to attend as often as ever.

The University of Texas study measured three factors among young adults:

• Decline in attendance at religious services.

• Feeling that religion is less important to them than it used to be.

• Complete abandonment of religion.

In a telephone interview from his office in Austin, Regnerus said 70 percent of American youths who went to religious services regularly during high school will attend less often in their late teens or early 20s, "for at least a while."

He adds that skipping services does not equal abandonment of faith. Only one-fifth say religion is less important to them than it used to be. Only one in six abandons religion completely.