by: James N. Gilmore, Malaysia Barr, Eliza Moore, and Marie Quaranta
For this blog series, our second of the Fall 2021 semester, we decided to write about young adults and religious organizations. We were motivated by two related things: First, a Gallup poll in 2020 which found that “Americans’ membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade trend.” According to Gallup, 47% of Americans belonged “to a church, synagogue, or mosque.” Second, that all members of the Collaborative this semester identify as religious people. As undergraduate students, Malaysia, Marie, and Eliza have all had very different relationships to organized religion, and they have all been part of and witnessed in their friends the conventional “negotiation with religion” that many religious young adults experience between 18-22. A questioning of the values associated with one’s upbringing, the institutions to which one devotes time, and the communities in which one lives and acts, is a relatively common thing.
We wanted to approach this from a cultural perspective, as well as use our own individual experiences as the basis for this exploration. Two scholars in particular inspired us. Raymond Williams’s essay “Culture is ordinary” uses his own upbringing and experience to identify culture as a way of life, hinging on the accumulation of experiences. Culture and lived experience entail both known and unknown directions, where our everyday lives and understandings of the world are built on this tension. Williams inspires us to think about religion, community, and culture from the vantage point of our own lives. To do this, we talked about using our own experiences as “data,” motivated in part by autoethnographic writers though thinking more about the scope of our lived realities and how to use them as a way to think about larger trends. James W. Carey’s essay “A cultural approach to communication” was useful for its insistence on a “ritual” view of communication emphasizing how people maintain bonds over time using ritualistic practices within their communities. Carey uses religious services as an extended metaphor to explain his approach, and we ran with that in our pieces.
As we discussed how to organize and analyze our own lived experiences against the backdrop of a decline in church attendance, we decided to create a triangle of interconnected concepts: culture, subculture, and counterculture. Each piece considers how young adults negotiate religious identity and practice from one of these vantage points.
Malaysia’s post, “Your Path: Religious Choice Points for the Young Adult,” begins our series by positioning her upbringing in an organized church as a culture, a way of life full of values and practices meant to create community solidarity. While Malaysia’s post begins with a reflection on her childhood and her space in the church, she spends most of the post reflecting on why young adults negotiate with the church of their upbringing. She considers three themes: that finding yourself means omitting God in some cases; that branching out means more than foundations; and that collective traditions of the church do not serve the individual. Malaysia reflects on these as a negotiation with culture, as evidence of the tension between known and new meanings and directions in individual life.
Eliza’s post, “A relational approach to religion,” focuses on her experiences with the Christian non-profit Young Life. In this post, Eliza discusses her dissatisfaction with the formal practices of church, and how this organization inspired her to see religious practice as relational—about building and maintaining connections to other people (especially young people) in her teenage years. For Eliza, this has been a subcultural space; one that exists in relation to the church, but apart from it and containing its own practices which are in some ways imagined as quite distinct from formal worship. In particular, Eliza’s post points to how youth cultures often look for spaces to carve out as distinctly their own in relation to dominant cultural spaces, and sees Young Life as trying to provide such opportunities.
Marie’s post, “Astrology rising: Why young people are drawn to the stars,” takes us away from church and to astrology. Detailing her own dissatisfaction with what she saw as the hypocrisy of her childhood church, Marie explains how astrology provides a space for young people to bond over different kinds of meaning-making practices and consider the world from a less institutional perspective. Astrology, in Marie’s reading, acts as a set of countercultural practices for many people. Drawing lines from 1970s counterculture to today, Marie suggests a deep distrust of institutions continues to fuel young peoples’ behaviors, and astrology’s cultural resurgence might be understood in this lens. To that end, she also examines different astrology-focused Instagram profiles to examine how they use strategies from youth media cultures to make astrology look more appealing.
These posts need to be understood as deeply intertwined. We conceived and executed them together, and even though each post comes from a student’s personal lived experiences, we discussed and developed these ideas through conversation and dialogue, drawing on our goals as a Collaborative space. Fundamentally, we found ourselves concerned with questions of how young adults make meaning, how religion has historically offered itself as a space of meaning and community, and how different young people negotiate religious communities of different sorts in their own lives. We hope you enjoy reading these pieces over the coming weeks!
