originally published 12/1/2009

Christian Smith, author of Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, on the aimless cultural world of emerging adulthood and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible; Sociologist Christian Smith discusses his book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, the sequel to his earlier book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. This study follows up on the same cohort of American young people who were teenagers when described in Soul Searching. Sociologists have come to describe this new life stage occurring after the teenager stage but before young adulthood when the subject is typically between 18-29 years of age as “emerging adulthood.” Smith characterizes this period of emerging adulthood as being a time of exploration, opportunity, transience, confusion, openness and experimentation. Developing out of changes in the social, educational and economic structure of society, it is accompanied by new and particular expectations and norms. Emerging adults realize that some time in the future they will have to settle down, but now is the time for doing whatever they want to do and exploring different things, trying to have fun, and managing all the transitions they are facing while keeping their options open. But they face these choices and experiences in life without the aid of concrete and authoritative cultural forms, structures and pathways; instead, they operate out of vague and amorphous scripts largely disconnected from a sense of objective moral reality beyond themselves. With the loss or deep skepticism of belief in objective moral order, the emerging adult tends to lack motivation for anything apart from their subjective interests. Most, though not all, of these cultural forces shaping the emerging adults tend to work against a settled membership and life in a tradition or church community. The interview ends with a discussion of the various subgroups within emerging adults documented in Smith’s study. This interview was originally published on Volume 100 of the Journal.

17 minutes

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