Smith, C. and M. Denton. 2005. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. New York: Oxford University Press.
This book presents the results of a nationwide survey and in-depth interviews with adolescents aged 13-17. While it does not deal with the religious engagements of undergraduate students directly, it provides an outstanding portrait of the religious engagements of high school students in the early 2000s. Smith and Denton find that religion is important in the lives of teenagers, but that their religious commitments are remarkably conventional overall. They do not find much evidence that teenagers engage in “spiritual quests”; rather, it is parents who provide the strongest influence on teens’ religious and spiritual lives. Many teenagers’ faith rests at a rather superficial level, what the authors describe as “moral therapeutic deism.” Despite teens’ apparently weak engagement with their religious traditions, Smith and Denton note “sizable and significant differences in a variety of important life outcomes between more and less religious teenagers,” including academic success, likelihood of drug use, sexual behavior, and civic engagement.
