"While 79 percent of Americans believe there is a God, only 66 percent are absolutely certain of it. Nine percent do not believe in God and 12 percent aren't sure. And weirdly, not everyone who calls himself or herself a Christian or a Jew actually believes in God.  ...Ten percent of Protestants, 21 percent of Roman Catholics, and 52 percent of Jews do NOT believe in God."

(Source: "Guess Who Doesn't Believe In God?" Netscape News/CNN; http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/package.jsp?name=fte/notbelieveingod/notbelieveingod)  

"[T]he percentage of freshmen who attended religious services frequently or occasionally during their last years in high school [fell] to 80.4 percent, its lowest point in 35 years. Although this reflects a small drop from last year's figure of 81.9 percent and a significant decline from the record high 91.7 percent reported in 1968, it is clear that overall levels of religious service attendance remain high."

(Source: Shaena Engle, "Political Interest on the Rebound Among the Nation's Freshmen, UCLA Survey Reveals," January 26, 2004, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/03_press_release.pdf; press release for: Sax, L.J., Astin, A. W., Lindholm, J. A., Korn, W.S., Saenz, V. B. and Mahoney, K.M., "The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2003," Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, 2003)

It has long been part of American folk wisdom that "The family that prays together stays together." Sociologists at the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Chicago look at things from a different angle: in a study of adolescent religiosity recently published in Youth & Society, social scientists from these two institutions report that when families stay together, they pray together - teenaged children included. These researchers further conclude that when families break up, prayers often stop - at least for the adolescent children involved.

Parsing nationally representative data collected from more than 80,000 eighth-, tenth-, and twelfth-grade students, the authors of the new study scrutinize "current patterns, recent trends, and sociodemographic correlates of religiosity among American adolescents." In simple single-variable analysis, the researchers find that family structure predicts the likelihood that a teenager will belong to a faith community and the likelihood that he will actually attend services: "Across the three grade levels," they report, "frequency of attendance at religious services is higher, and nonaffiliation is lower among students who live with both of their parents as compared to those who live in other family configurations."

But living in an intact family does more than put adolescents on church rolls and in the pews: it significantly increases the likelihood that teens will personally regard religion as an important part of their lives. In a sophisticated multi-variable data analysis, the Michigan and Illinois scholars limn clear evidence that adolescents "who live with both of their parents are more religious than their peers who do not live with both parents." The intact-family teens judged "more religious" differ from less religious single-parent peers not merely in frequency of church attendance but also in the importance they attach to religion. The researchers find higher levels of "religious importance" among teens from intact families than among peers from one-parent homes in all three grades (p< .01 for all three grade levels).

Though its effects do not appear as pervasive as those of family structure, maternal employment also appears to significantly affect the religious lives of adolescent children - at least 12th-grade adolescent children. More specifically, in the researchers' multi-variable statistical model, "12th graders whose mothers worked outside of the home (full- or part-time) report that religion is less important to them, attend religious services less frequently, and are more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than those whose mothers did not work."

The authors of the new study see in their findings little evidence "to confirm a simple secularization hypothesis - the notion that religion is on the decline among U.S. young people." However, their findings do suggest that religion is fading among teens who see their families disintegrate.

(Source: John M. Wallace, Jr. et al., "Religion and U.S. Secondary School Students: Current Patterns, Recent Trends, and Sociodemographic Correlates," Youth & Society 35 [2003]: 98-125.)