Contrary to “widespread and persistent stereotypes,” most American adolescents are not alienated from or hostile toward organized religion, and as much as two-thirds of those youth closely agree with the religious beliefs of their parents, a UNC-Chapel Hill study says.

The findings, released Jan. 7, are part of a four-year research project, the National Study of Youth and Religion, based at the university’s Odum Institute for Research in Social Science.

Data for the study was culled from a national survey of 12th-graders, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, which covered “core areas of demographic information.” The NSYR analyzed responses on the wide-ranging survey to questions such as “How closely do your ideas agree with your parents’ about religion?” and “How good or bad a job is being done for the country as a whole by churches and religious organizations?”

The authors of the study, Dr. Christian Smith, Robert Faris, and Melinda Lundquist Denton, said their findings refute the notion of a “storm and stress” stereotype found in old clinical sampling biases and popular books on youth. They said more recent “solid” studies “of nonclinical adolescent populations… emphasiz[e] instead the diversity of adolescents’ experiences, the lack of inevitability in any youth outcome, and the relative low levels of intense turmoil in teenagers’ lives.”

Smith, director of the NYSR, and his coauthors reported that “only about 10 to 20 percent of adolescents manifest severe emotional disturbance,” which they said mirrors the adult population.

In addition, the sociologists cited other studies which determined that “only between 5 and 10 percent of families see a dramatic decline in the quality of parent-child relationships during the teen-age years.”

The NYSR analysis of survey responses found that 67 percent of the sampling of 12th-graders said their religious beliefs were mostly similar to their parents’. Only 21 percent said their beliefs were mostly different or very different from their parents’.

The survey also asked what youth thought of the influence and performance of churches in the United States. Only 10 percent said churches were doing a poor job for the country, while 23 percent said religion was doing a fair job, and 49 percent believed religion was doing a good or very good job.

Most adolescents in the survey also said they would like to see the degree of influence on society by religious institutions increase or stay the same. Twenty-eight percent wanted religion to maintain its current level of influence, while 41 percent said they would like religion to exert more influence on society.

NYSR also broke down responses demographically, and found that black youth were more positive about religion than were whites or other races. The authors said also that adolescent girls were “statistically more likely than boys to desire more social influence for churches…”

Analysis also determined that Baptist and Mormon youths “appeared to be the least alienated from organized religion,” while nonreligious and “other”-religion youth, “and to some extent Jewish youth, appeared to be comparatively the most alienated from institutional religion.”

The study can be viewed on the Internet here.

Paul Chesser is associate editor of Carolina Journal.