Soul Searching: Reflections on Teenagers
Biblical and Theological Education
Welcome to the President’s Reading Room. This is a place of reflection and conversation on books that have made a difference in my life and in the work here at Seattle Pacific University. My inaugural posting asks you to comment on Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. I found this an incredible book, written by the distinguished Notre Dame sociologist of religion Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton (a 1996 SPU graduate). In it are powerful statements regarding what teens in America believe about God and faith and religion in their lives. So powerful, in fact, we wanted Smith to join us on campus for our annual Day of Common Learning.
The end result? In a bold new initiative, we intend to address what Smith has found to be a disturbing trend in believing youth: an inability to articulate their religious beliefs and widespread biblical illiteracy.
Right now we are in the planning stages to launch a new Center for Biblical and Theological Education. What a marvelous venture this has become. What a critically important vision lies behind this endeavor. There is huge excitement for it all across campus, and we are currently awaiting word on a major grant proposal to fund the first four years of this initiative.
Why is this important to Seattle Pacific? Why should such a center be established at a first-rate university such as ours? After all, we are a university and not a church. Why should we care so much about biblical and theological education?
One of our five signature commitments says We will be a place that embraces the Christian story, becoming biblically and theologically educated. We mean by this that our graduates will be equipped with the competencies of biblical understanding and theological sophistication. We mean as well that while we are guided by the faculty of the School of Theology in all of this, we aspire for our faculty across all disciplines to be equipped in this way, and for our staff and our trustees and our alumni to be equipped as well. We regard this signature commitment as critical to achieving our vision to make the world a better place for all of God’s children. We believe there is no other way to engage the culture effectively as Christians than to know our own story well.
But where did this commitment come from? Well, it comes out of a lot of reflection and discussion about the state of biblical understanding in our world today. But in part it also comes from having Soul Searching author Christian Smith on our campus for the fourth annual Day of Common Learning, and subsequently from watching together the documentary of this research called Soul Searching: Teens And God.
The disturbing and challenging news Smith has to report goes something like this: Teenagers do believe. There is a great deal of belief in God among American teenagers, and their faith traditions are fairly traditional overall. But they clearly don’t know how to articulate that faith. And clearly they do not know much about the Scriptures. Even more to the point, they are not being taught a language of faith. The communities of faith that surround them are letting them down. We are not teaching the Scriptures in the broader Christian community or in our churches. This is the primary finding that drives us to form a Center for Biblical and Theological Education at Seattle Pacific.
“The point here is not that U.S. teenagers are dumb or deplorable. They are not,” Smith says. “In the end, many teenagers know abundant details about the lives of favorite musicians and television stars or about what it takes to get into a good college, but most are not very clear on who Moses and Jesus were.” To be sure, “nobody expects adolescents to be sophisticated theologians,” but when we listen in as they tell their story of faith, their understanding of religion and the Scriptures, we get the picture pretty quickly that they do not have the handles on their faith. It's clear that we are the ones who are failing them, failing miserably to provide them with anything close to the appropriate tools to negotiate a commitment to faith in a world that is indifferent at best and inhospitable at worst to any truth claim that comes from the Christian faith. “Our distinct impression,” Smith says, “is that very many religious congregations and communities of faith in the United States are failing rather badly in religiously engaging and educating their youth.”
This is the disturbing news that drives us to be on the leading edge of biblical and theological education at Seattle Pacific. It is our deepest of convictions that in order to make a difference in the lives of our students, and in order to make a difference in our decidedly secular culture, we must know how to embrace our own Christian story, and this requires of us the tools of theological understanding of our own holy Scriptures. There is no other way.
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read this book. As you do, I suspect you will be saddened and challenged, as we have become at Seattle Pacific. There is a huge responsibility here and an equally huge opportunity. I encourage you as well to write to me with your thoughts about all of this. I would love to hear from you. We are trying to do this right and do it with excellence. We would love your partnership.
Phil Eaton
Tell me what you think.
What has been your experience with
teenagers and faith?
About the Co-Authors of Soul Searching
Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion and culture, is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith’s research focuses on religion in modernity, adolescents, American evangelicalism, and culture. Smith received his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University and his bachelor's degree from Gordon College. He was a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 12 years before his move to Notre Dame.
Melinda Lundquist Denton is an assistant professor of sociology at Clemson University. Her research and teaching interests are marriage and family, religion, adolescents, and culture. In addition to Soul Searching with Smith, and articles in such publications as Sociology of Religion and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, she is working on another book about religious change in the lives of American teens.
