The Wall Street Journal‘s Naomi Schaeffer Riley reviews Souls in Transition, a new book by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, which examines the religious and spiritual lives of 18- to 24-year old “emerging adults” in America:
Mr. Smith notes that the persistent use of “feel” instead of “think” or “argue” is “a shift in language use that expresses an essentially subjectivistic and emotivistic approach to moral reasoning and rational argument.” He concludes that such young adults “are de facto doubtful that an indentifiable, objective, shared reality might exist across and around all people.”
By contrast, young religious people have been made to think seriously and speak publicly about Big Questions from a young age. They do believe in a reality “out there” that can be studied and apprehended. Their answers to the study’s questions are crisper and surer than those of their nonreligious counterparts. Amanda, a young woman from a conservative Christian denomination, tells her interviewer: “First and foremost, I believe that there is a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, who created the whole universe. I believe what the Bible says about him.”
The core of reality for students like Amanda is of course religious, but their belief in the very possibility of a nonrelativistic truth may well give a boost to their classroom seriousness, not to mention their verbal clarity.
Read the entire review here.