Over at Christianity Today, Christian Smith peers into the black hole forming in American churches…

Note that some of the statistics about emerging adulthood today are not historically unique. For example, young Americans in the 19th and very early 20th century, when society was more rural and agricultural, also married later in life than they did in the 1950s. Nevertheless, changes in the larger culture and social order in late 20th-century America make the experience of emerging adulthood today very different from the young adulthood of a century ago.

What then are some of the specific issues that this new life phase might raise for church and culture? First, we might consider the content and texture of the religious faith of emerging adults. Having grown up in whatever religious traditions, congregations, and families of faith they have, and having participated in whatever youth groups and Sunday School and catechism classes they have, what then becomes of the religious faith of youth ages 18 to 30? At a recent University of Southern California conference organized by scholars Don Miller and James Heft, in which I participated and which served as the basis of the edited volume Passing on the Faith, discussed below, the central image animating discussion was of young adulthood as a mysterious "black hole" in the life of the American church. Quite a dramatic idea. Does research bear it out? Two authors in the other books noted here address this question in some depth. Their answers, while not definitive, will not be particularly reassuring for Christian churches, educators, and parents.

Jeffrey Arnett explored the religious beliefs and practices of the more than one hundred emerging adults he interviewed in various locations around the country. Here is what he concluded:

The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood … . In statistical analyses [of interview subjects’ answers], there was no relationship between exposure to religious training in childhood and any aspect of their religious beliefs as emerging adults … . This is a different pattern than is found in adolescence [which reflects greater continuity] … . Evidently something changes between adolescence and emerging adulthood that dissolves the link between the religious beliefs of parents and the beliefs of their children.

Although the transmission of religious faith is not a central concern of Arnett’s, he still finds this observation startling. He writes, "How could it be that childhood religious training makes no difference in the kinds of religious beliefs and practices people have by the time they reach emerging adulthood? It doesn’t seem to make sense … . It all comes to naught in emerging adulthood? Yet that seems to be the truth of it, surprising as that may be." Need I say that these findings raise serious questions? To be sure, Arnett is not working with nationally representative data, and so his findings must be viewed with some skepticism. Even so, the very possibility should make Christians sit up and notice.

(Emphasis mine)  How could it be that childhood religious training makes no difference in the religious beliefs and practices of young adults?  Let me hazard a guess.  Because when you demand that people believe the bible over clearly observable facts that even a concrete block can grasp then religion starts looking less and less like a spiritual relationship with your creator and more and more like a self inflected lobotomy.  What happens between adolescence and adulthood is you leave the nest, go out into the world and then you encounter reality.  And reality never looses.  You can’t walk away from it.  You can only take your mind, your heart, your conscience, and ultimately your soul, around behind the barn and shoot them.  Like this poor lost soul did…

It’s impossible to feel sorry for the hacks who promote intelligent design, especially after you hear the evidence presented at the famous Dover trial (if you haven’t watched it yet, NOVA has its complete Judgment Day episode up online—I recommend Chapter 11, in which the roots of ID are located in a Supreme Court decision rejecting the teaching of creationism in schools).

IDers clearly know they’re misleading the public, if not with regard to their beliefs, then at least with how those beliefs are described and marketed. It’s infuriating.

But I am not so cruel that I can’t see the tragedy in today’s New York Times Magazine article about young-earth creationists who have also earned legit PhDs. Their cognitive dissonance is heartbreaking:

Given the difficulty of their intellectual enterprise, the creationist geologists often have a story about the time they nearly gave it up. For [Kurt] Wise the crisis hit when he was a sophomore in high school. He was already an avid fossil collector who dreamed “an unattainable dream” of going to Harvard to study paleontology and then to teach at a big university. But as he told a friend, he couldn’t reconcile the geologic ages with what he read in his Bible. So he set about figuring this out: every night, for months, he cut out every verse of the Bible he’d have to reject to believe in evolution. “I dreaded the impending end,” he writes in a collection of essays called “In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation.” “All that I loved to do was involved with some aspect of science.”

When he was done, he tried to pick up what was left. But he found it impossible to do that without the Bible being “rent in two,” he writes. “Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible.” In the end, he kept his Bible and achieved his unattainable dream. But it left him in a strange, vulnerable place. “If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.”

[…]

If Wise still has doubts, or unhappiness, he has learned to put them aside. When consulting for the Creation Museum, he considered his most important duty to be presenting a “coherent story line about the earth’s history,” he said. “Even if it’s wrong, it’s a starting point. We use coherence as a criteria. It ought to fit together not as a set of random processes but something coherent orchestrated by God.”

From searching for truth to fumbling after coherence. It’s so sad.

But if God is that which created all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be, then it is not those of us who are willing to let nature speak for itself who have turned away from God.  The bible may be the testament of Moses, of Mark, Paul, and all the other authors who made the cut over the ages.  The universe is the testament of God.  It is the original manuscript.  Everything else is commentary.

If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. 

No.  The universe is the word of God.  The rock that cradles the fossil is God’s handwriting.  And if beholding that little two-hundred and fifty million year old trilobite cradled in Paleozoic stone makes you feel very very tiny in a universe that is immense and strange and sublime so far beyond your ken that just trying to grasp it all makes you feel ridiculous, there’s probably a reason for that.  And if you’d rather flee from that universe into the embrace of an idol made of paper and ink because that idol cuts the universe down to a size small enough that you can imagine you’re the center of it and God made it all Just For You…there’s probably a reason for that too.  For all the fundamentalist posturing that they’re simply bowing down to the will of God, fundamentalism is a very, very arrogant religion.  And increasingly in an age where knowledge is literally at everyone’s fingertips, the cost of worshiping that idol is more then many want to bear.  Young adults, raised in the age of computer technology and the Internet, just don’t see throwing their ability to reason away, and along with it their conscience, their self respect, their dignity, and their very soul, as being a normal part of having a spiritual life.  If anything it is completely destructive to having a spiritual life.  An empty vessel waiting patiently for some authority figure to give it meaning contains no spirit…it is just a blackboard waiting helplessly for someone to scribble something on it.  But that’s exactly what the religious right wants us all to be.

And there’s Christian Smith’s black hole.  It isn’t age.  It isn’t that parents are more indulgent.  It isn’t that society is more permissive.  It’s that fundamentalism has put itself on a path diverging ever more and more away from reality, and if an adult knows anything that a child does not it’s that reality always wins in the end.  Someone who really believed in standing humble before the will of God might actually appreciate how that works. 

There is a signpost next to that black hole.  It reads: When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.