The conservative but thought-provoking TitusOneNine blog quotes a posting about how teenagers drop out of Sunday school in the eighth grade. I added the following comment:
I realize this will touch off more flame wars, but I’ve long thought that one of the main reasons young people stop going to church – apart from normal adolescent rebellion – is that they can’t reconcile orthodox Christianity with everything else they learn in school and in life. For example, in other areas of life we try to teach kids to be critical thinkers. But then in the area of religion, we answer many of their questions with “because Scripture said so, and Scripture is the Word of God” (begging the question, how do we know that?) It’s no wonder so many young people are skeptical of nonresponsive answers like that, especially after their early experiences with what we told them about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. See this posting for a more-extensive commentary.
Here’s a couple of anecdotal data points, which of course do not a trend make, but they’re interesting:
1) Several years ago, my teen-aged son declined to be confirmed with the rest of his Sunday-school class. He explained that he simply didn’t believe the doctrines that he was being asked to profess. (A year later, he announced out of the blue that he was ready, and was confirmed with the next adult Discovery class.)
2) When I taught high school Sunday school at our parish, I asked the students to write down any questions they had about their faith and to hand them in anonymously. The most frequently-asked question was, in various forms: How do we really know there’s a God?
I’m not so foolish as to say that if we changed our approach to teaching the faith to our young people, that they’d then flock back to church. (Hah!) But doing so would at least remove some significant obstacles to faith. (See also this posting and this sequence of postings for more thoughts.)
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