AMERICAN ADOLESCENT RELIGION IN SOCIAL CONTEXT

(Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives
of American Teenagers)

Therapeutic Individualism

The cultural ocean in which American adolescents swim saturates them in the ethos of therapeutic individualism. Therapeutic individualism is not so much a consciously and intentionally held ideology, but rather a taken-for-granted set of assumptions and commitments about the human self, society, and life’s purpose that powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the contemporary United States.

Therapeutic individualism defines the individual self as the source and standard of authentic moral knowledge and authority, and individual self- fulfillment as the preoccupying purpose of life. Subjective, personal experience is the touchstone of all that is authentic, right, and true. By contrast, this ethos views the “external” traditions, obligations, and institutions of society as inauthentic and often illegitimate constraints on morality and behavior from which individuals must be emancipated. James Nolan observes, “Where once the self was to be brought into conformity with the standards of externally derived authorities and social institutions, it now is compelled to look within. . . . No longer is society something a self must adjust to; it is now something the self must be liberated from. . . . Where once the self was to be surrendered, denied, sacrificed, and died to, now the self is to be esteemed, actualized, affirmed, and unfettered.”

In a society governed by therapeutic individualism, the traditional authority and functions of priests, pastors, parents, and lawmakers are largely displaced by a new authoritative class of professional and popular psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other therapeutic counselors, authors, talk show hosts, and advice givers. In the process, many activities and behaviors once defined as moral failures— alcoholism, drug abuse, financial debt, domestic violence, gambling, family neglect, obesity, sexual promiscuity—are redefined as either perfectly legitimate “lifestyles” or as psychological and medical dysfunctions, diseases, syndromes, codependencies, or pathologies. The latter are then, for better or for worse, treated with therapy, medications, self-help seminars, support groups, and rehabilitation programs. Meanwhile, the self increasingly comes to be viewed as the victim of abusive or oppressive personal pasts and current social experiences that violate the self’s right to personal health and fulfillment. Members of therapeutic individualist cultures are encouraged in various ways to “get in touch with their honest feelings” and to “find” their “true selves”— presuming that they have essential, self-originating emotions and selves that are distinct from any social formation and lost or hidden from everyday awareness. Moreover, moral duties, pain, and suffering are not seen, as they traditionally often were, as an inevitable part of life to be endured or perhaps through which one should grow in personal character and spiritual depth. Rather, these are largely avoidable displeasures to be escaped in order to realize a pleasurable life of happiness and positive self-esteem.

Moral decision making in therapeutic individualism is always profoundly individually self-referencing. Right and wrong are determined not by external moralities derived from religious teachings, natural law, cultural tradition, or the requisites of collective social functioning. Rather, clearly unaware that feeling itself is profoundly socially formed, individual subjective feeling establishes for individuals what is good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust. In general, therapeutic individualism significantly displaces substantive reason and rational analysis with personal sentiments and emotions as the grounds of knowledge and morality.

In a therapeutically individualistic culture, the reasoned arguments, assertions, and professions implicit in the phrases “I think that . . .

” and “I believe that . . .” are increasingly supplanted by the personal expression “I feel that . . .” Therapeutic individualists come to feel, for example, that murder is wrong, that the Bible teaches the deity of Jesus Christ, that a particular tax policy will stimulate the economy. Moreover, people shaped by this ethos are loath to claim that their own beliefs and morals necessarily apply to anyone else, for other people may have different feelings about matters, and no one person has the right to violate any other person’s subjective sentiments, which are, after all, what determine what is truly authentic and real for each individual. In the end, the most assertive of moral arguments are expressed as “Poverty sucks,” “For me, it is wrong when . . . ,” and “I’m not trying to impose this on anyone, but that’s how I personally feel about it.”

Therapeutic individualism did not drop out of the sky, nor is it the spontaneous creation of its individual advocates and adherents. Ironically, given its emphasis on individual autonomy, subjectivity, and self-creation, therapeutic individualism is the collective cultural product of a historical complex of social and institutional forces that generated and sustain its ethos.
-At one level, therapeutic individualism is a reaction against the impersonal, bureaucratic, rationalized, instrumentally utilitarian institutions of modern public life. Its ethos provides a way for moderns to rescue some sense of individual uniqueness, spontaneity, and meaningful emotion in the face of a massive, proceduralistic, mechanistic, and alienating public sphere.
-At another level, therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment–oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings, a point elaborated in the following section.
-In yet another way, the rise of therapeutic individualism corresponds to the secularization of the U.S. public sphere as the decline of the authority of religious traditions over the institutions of public life. Publicly irrelevant pastors and priests are, for good or ill, displaced by their functional equivalents, therapists and psychologists, who are taken to be very relevant and authoritative. Then again, therapeutic individualism is also a by-product of modernity’s cultural pluralism, in which increased frequency of routine interaction with “the other,” who may be quite different from oneself, may problematize objectively main- tained shared epistemological and moral orders. What then becomes collectively shared is a much thinner ethos of personal subjectivity, feeling, and self-fulfillment.

Whatever its social and institutional sources, therapeutic individualism is, now pervasive in American culture and society, both in many people’s personal lives and increasingly in public institutions themselves. Its assumptions and commitments infuse every level of the educational system; practices of courtship, marriage, family life, and divorce; some public social programs; key cultural elements of the economy, such as the advertising industry and mass media, entertainment, and recreation; the health care sector and public health system; very many elements of religion; and, increasingly, the justice system and the government itself. Most every youth growing up in the United States today, perhaps Amish youth excepted, will receive some significant exposure to therapeutic individualism. Many will receive very heavy and consistent doses of socialization into its assumptions, precepts, and ethos, even as its social pervasiveness renders it natural, intuitive, and invisible to most people being inducted into its worldview. Therapeutic individualism thus seems to be the obvious way things are.

All of this appears to have had important influences on the character of the religious and spiritual lives of American adolescents.

As therapeutic individualism has institutionalized itself as a natural dominant framework not only for much of social life around religion, but in American religion itself, we expect youth’s assumptions about religious teachings, faith, church, and spiritual development and experiences to be transformed. Religion as an external authority or tradition that people encounter and that makes authoritative claims to form their believing, thinking, feeling, desires, and living becomes increasingly inconceivable. Therapeutic individualists instead seek out religious and spiritual practices, feelings, and experiences that satisfy their own subjectively defined needs and wants. Faith and spirituality become centered less around a God believed in and God’s claims on lives, and more around the believing (or perhaps even unbelieving) self and its personal realization and happiness.

The very idea and language of “spirituality,” originally grounded in the self-disciplining faith practices of religious believers, including ascetics and monks, then becomes detached from its moorings in historical religious traditions and is redefined in terms of subjective self-fulfillment. Spirituality is thus renarrated for all comers as personal integration, subjective feeling, and self-improvement toward individual health and personal well-being—and no longer has anything to do with, for example, religious faith and self-discipline toward holiness or obedience.

Mass-Consumer Capitalism

People normally think of the economy and religion as two separate spheres of life that affect each other very little. In fact, however, American religion and spirituality, including teenagers’ involvement in them, may be profoundly shaped by American mass-consumer capitalism. Capitalism is not merely a system for the efficient production and distribution of goods and services; it also incarnates and promotes a particular moral order, an institutionalized normative worldview comprising and fostering particular assumptions, narratives, commitments, beliefs, values, and goals. Capitalism not only puts food on the table, it also powerfully defines for those who live in it in elemental terms both what is and what should be, however taken for granted those definitions ordinarily may be.

Consider, for example, how mass-consumer capitalism fundamentally constitutes the human self. There are many ways to conceive of what the human person is and should be: a fundamentally morally responsible agent, an illusion of individuality destined to dissolve into cosmic unity, a sinner being divinely redeemed and sanctified, and more. As an institution with a specific historical and social location, mass-consumer capitalism constitutes the human self in a very particular way: as an individual, autonomous, rational, self-seeking, cost-benefit calculating consumer. This, of course, is not what human selves have always been, nor what they inevitably must be. This is also not the definition of the human self that most American religious historical traditions have sought to constitute in their adherents. But it is the human self that the moral order of mass-consumer capitalism constitutes, that its institutions and practices very powerfully bring into being, promote, and reinforce. Note that we are not simply talking here about particular ethical problems that the capitalist market may pose for religious teenagers, such as whether or not to buy and smoke cigarettes, but fundamental, taken-for-granted presuppositions about what is real about the world and ourselves, which, once established, are difficult to recognize, much less resist.

One of the possible consequences of this capitalist constitution of the human self is the way it can reshape the character of religion itself over time. The more American people and institutions are redefined by mass-consumer capitalism’s moral order, the more American religion is also remade in its image. Religion becomes one product among many others existing to satisfy people’s subjectively defined needs, tastes, and wants. Religious adherents thus become spiritual consumers uniquely authorized as autonomous individuals to pick and choose in the religious market whatever products they may find satisfying or fulfilling at the moment. And the larger purpose of life comes to be defined as optimally satiating one’s self-defined felt needs and desires, as opposed to, say, attaining salvation, learning obedience to God, following the Ten Commandments, achieving enlightenment, dying to oneself and serving others, or any other traditional religious purpose. Where does this profound shift, this novel approach to religion originate? Not from the individuals who end up espousing it, for they are themselves profoundly formed by larger historical transformations and social structures. It comes instead in good measure from the life-defining power of the pervasive and deeply rooted moral order and institutions of mass-consumer capitalism.

One way to describe this process is as a shift, which happened concurrently with the historical expansion of mass-consumer capitalism, from tradition-centered to individual-centered religion. The central question here is: In what does religious authority reside? Who or what has authority to define religious truth, to adjudicate religious differences and conflicts? In a mass-consumer capitalist-shaped society, authority increasingly resides not in the church nor in millennia of tradition, the prayer book, theological experts, or the scriptures.

Rather, authority resides in the individual human self. Religious knowledge and authority thus become increasingly privatized, subjectivized, customized, and therapeutically psychologized around the controlling authority of individual selves, and not religious communities, traditions, and institutions. The historical, dynamic tension in living religions between the received traditions and interpretations and the ongoing human collective experience living and interpreting those traditions in new times and contexts increasingly collapses into mere one-dimensional subjective individualism. People then less frequently say, “I do not fully understand it or naturally agree with it, but because my religious tradition teaches thus-and-such, I embrace it and try to better understand it.” Rather, people shaped in the image of capitalism’s moral order and into the human self it constitutes personally decide on and define for themselves what they are willing and able (and not willing or able) to believe and practice religiously—based on what feels comfortable to them, what resonates with their personal subjective experience, what meets their personally felt needs. Although this is a relatively new situation historically, for some readers this version of religion may be so pervasive that it is hard even to recognize as other than entirely obvious and natural. (The irony in all of this apparently nonconformist, strong individualistic, selective acceptance of religious traditions’ teachings and practices in order to suit one’s own preferences, tastes, comforts, and subjective moral judgments is that it in fact is a major act of conformity to the larger moral authority of mass-consumer capitalism—whether any of its subjects realize that as such or not.) In this way, the religious assumptions and options available to American adolescents are shaped by the larger context of the reigning economic order.

Another way of understanding mass-consumer capitalism’s influence on American adolescents and the religious and spiritual terrain they inhabit is by examining the morally charged appeals that its most obvious promotional arm, the advertising industry, persistently and pervasively advances. Many Americans complain about “the culture,” “the media,” “television,” and “Hollywood” for the evident roles they play in generating teenage problems. But if we think systemically, we see that these are for the most part euphemisms for mass-consumer capitalism. For what drives television, the media, and Hollywood? What are they really about? They are often both commodities for sale themselves and the means of gathering and organizing buying
audiences of consumers to whom to sell other products. Commercial television, for instance, is not ultimately about entertainment, but about delivering segmented purchasing audiences to advertisers who want to sell products. There was once a time in earlier days of market capitalism—up until the early twentieth century—when increasing production was more important than increasing consumption. But eventually, increased production required increased mass consumption to move the new masses of more efficiently produced goods. The inherent, internal logic of mass-consumer capitalism is the drive of an impersonal profit motive and perpetual capital accumulation. Capitalism as a system must ever grow or it will die. The intrinsic problem in capitalism’s logic, however, is that actual human needs are somewhat limited and modest: it takes only so many goods and services to sustain a healthy, potentially satisfying human life. For mass-consumer capitalism to forever grow, therefore, it must constitute masses of people as consumer selves who misrecognize new wants as essential needs, whose basic sense of necessity always expands. Consumer demand thus must always escalate if capitalism is to succeed. And because this does not necessarily happen naturally or automatically, it must be actively and intentionally promoted. This is the job of the $240 billion-a-year American advertising industry.

What is evident about the advertising industry’s efforts when it targets youth is that to accomplish its goals it often appeals to what has always and pervasively been understood to be some of the worst of human potentials: insecurity, envy, vanity, impulsiveness, pride, surface images and appearances, the sexual objectification of others, emotional impulses habitually trumping rational thought, short-term gratification, and so on. How many successful youth ad campaigns appeal to, say, contentment, self-control, humility, rationality, inner character, selflessness, or any other traditional virtue? Playing to the darker side of human nature seems to be, for whatever reason, often easier and more successful in selling products than appealing to humanity’s brighter side.

All of this becomes tremendously important for our purposes when understood in light of American adolescents’ immense purchasing power, which makes them a prime advertising target. Industry experts estimate that American teenagers spend about $170 billion of their own dollars annually and influence upwards of $500 billion of their parents’ spending. American teenagers thus have an immense amount of money to spend in the market. In addition, they are both highly brand-sensitive and brand-flexible. This means that, while they will spend extra money to purchase a particular product brand that is in fashion, their brand preferences are often not firmly established. Brand loyalties become firm later in life. In an effort to line up potential lifetime consumers behind allegiances to particular product brands while they are still open to switching, therefore, advertisers especially target youth with massive promotions campaigns. Thus, a massive and powerful advertising industry expends immense amounts of resources on very sophisticated efforts that shape the basic assumptions, feelings, desires, and commitments of American youth. This is not because they care a hoot about
the well-being of teenagers, but because they want the dollars that are burning holes in teenagers’ pockets. In short, the consciousness of American adolescents is being powerfully formed by expert agents with enormous resources motivated not to achieve youth’s good but rather to acquire youth’s money. And what it often takes for them to acquire that money turns out to be not very good for youth, at least from most historical religious perspectives.

If we conceive of the culture as distinct moral orders competing for the attention and allegiance of its members, and if the elemen- tal assumptions and moral commitments of traditional religions and mass-consumer capitalism are often at odds, as described above, then American religious communities are in fact up against overwhelming competitors in their efforts to shape the lives of youth. The average American teenager watches 21 hours of television per week and views 360,000 television advertisements before graduating from high school; furthermore, 65 percent of 8-to 18-year-olds have television sets in their bedrooms. That kind of exposure dwarfs the exposure to religious influences that even the most religiously active American teenager might encounter. Aside from this simple volume of exposure, the elementary assumptions and expectations shaped by mass-consumer capitalism that youth bring to religion, as described above, also affect their interests in and responses to religion. And in America’s religious economy, these consumer “preferences” over time shape the available religious “products” on the market, for American religions tend to some degree to accommodate the transformed definitions of self, faith, and purpose to avoid becoming culturally outmoded. Exactly how different religious traditions, denominations, and congregations negotiate this process inevitably shapes both the larger character of American religion and ways that different kinds of youth engage religious beliefs and practices.

The Digital Communication Revolution

Critical in working out the dynamics described above and in shaping the religion and spirituality of American teenagers are recent, profound transformations in technologies of communication. Radio revolutionized mass communication in the 1930s, and television in the 1950s and 60s. But the emergence of digital communication technologies—computers, the internet, email, digital video recording, cellular telephones, and so on—have dramatically transformed the character of human communication in recent years. Pre-digital communication technologies tended toward centralization, the authority of gatekeepers, and fixity of location. Television programming was provided by a handful of networks, well-capitalized record labels controlled most music distribution, and telephones were attached to kitchen walls. The digital revolution, by contrast, has not only vastly expanded the amount of available information and imagery, but also diffused access to media production and consumption, promoted the mobility of individual communication, replaced centralized channels with dispersed networks of communication, and integrated technological links between different media forms. Many American youth now talk on their own cell phones day and night, email and instant message any number of friends and strangers at any time, download hundreds of music CDs onto portable hard-disk jukeboxes, and access a world of unregulated information and images with a few keystrokes.

Many theorists of these new technologies suggest that they bring with them important social, psychological and cultural consequences. For one thing, the digital communication revolution, especially its visual side, accelerates the trend begun with the advent of television away from typographic-based, linear, rational thought and discourse toward non-cognitive, image-based, entertainment-centered public discourse. The new communication technologies also seem to produce a world of information and images that is more disjointed and fragmented, that does not hang together as an organized whole. Anyone can, for instance, post for global consumption almost whatever content on the internet, unregulated by traditional standards gatekeepers, without having to account for its relation everything else on the internet. Stated differently, the new technologies open up greater opportunities for unfettered authorship, for more reciprocal flows of information, and for multiple horizontal connections through hyperlink structures instead of the more linear and hierarchical structures of traditional texts and producers. Authority over standards of knowledge thus becomes radically democratized and decentralized, filling the open market with a congestion of ideas and information that have not been reviewed, judged, and sorted by evaluating authorizes. Thus, internet searches on any subject—on the nature of God, for example—produce many thousands of hits with no built-in means to sort through which information among those hits is more valid, reliable, or authorized by the institutions that once controlled that knowledge. Discernment is left up to the individual. All of this not only increases the amount of information publicly available, but more important, embodies for and promotes among its users a new epistemology—a novel definition of human knowledge and interaction per se—that represents an alternative model of what the very world itself is and how the world itself works. The new world of knowledge, and perhaps the human consciousness that flows from it, is, for better or worse, increasingly visual, decentralized, unclassified, disjointed, unregulated, fragmented, and unevaluated. Alien to it, therefore, are many of the continuities and organizing principles of historical tradition, canon, authority, rules of order, systematic doctrine, and many other other features that have historically defined American religions. Youth socialized into the new digital order may therefore find the substance of historical religious traditions difficult to assimilate.

On the other hand, American youth now have easy access to masses of information about an endless array of religious systems and spiritual practices that might broaden their religious horizons and kindle new spiritual interests. Furthermore, many traditional American religious communities are capitalizing on the novel communication technologies to reach new audiences, increase communication efficiency within and between congregations, raise funds, experiment with new worship styles and visuals, enhance religious education programs, train ministers from a distance, and much more. Not all American religious groups are behind the curve on social and cultural change, for good or ill. There are many conceivable ways that the communication revolution can and does serve the purposes of American religious communities. Finally, historically rooted religious traditions may provide a grounded counterbalance to what may feel lacking or unsettling in the new digital age, making religion more attractive to the youth. What matters for our purposes in all of this are the multiple consequences of the digital revolution at various levels on the youth who do and do not engage religion and spirituality, and on the texture and character of the religious ideas and organizations they may engage.

Structural Disconnect from the Adult World

Throughout most of human history in most societies, the lives of youth were closely integrated into the world of adults. One need not hold a romanticized view of “traditional society” to see that, in premodern social settings lacking modernity’s radical splits between public and private, production and consumption, education and work, at relatively early ages youth typically were important contributors to the tasks of survival and economic production. They participated in herding, gathering foods, planting, irrigating, and harvesting, hunting, fishing, fending off predators, running errands, transporting and selling goods, assisting in crafts, caring for animals, and much more. Children and youth were also tightly integrated into the workings of domestic life of families, clans, tribes, villages. Early on in life they took on such responsibilities as tending fires, food preparation and cooking, spinning and weaving, childcare, the construction of shelter, and the disposal of wastes. As recently as 175 years ago, for better or worse, many American boys at the age of 12 were sent away from their families to become apprentices working long days under the eyes of craft masters in whose homes they lived out their teenage years. The days of most American girls at that age, if not younger, consisted of helping older women accomplish household chores and perhaps, in certain times and places, taking in some home-based book learning. Young people in many cultures have often carved out for themselves some minimal degree of distance from the adult world. But the much more striking reality is that the lives of most youth in all but recent generations have generally been closely involved in the productive activities of and supervised by the watchful eyes of adults.

All of that was profoundly changed by the Industrial Revolution and the rapid technological and social transformations that followed in its wake. America’s nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution separated work from home, production from consumption, and public from private life. In larger, related processes, domestic nurture was differentiated from national economic advance, and the education of youth was increasingly formalized and detached from household life. In the early Industrial Revolution, many children and teenage boys and girls worked long hours in the factory under the foreman’s discipline. In due time, however, economic production by youth increasingly came to be viewed, often rightly, as pernicious and exploitative child labor, which was gradually suppressed by social reforms. Throughout, childhood and adolescence were being culturally redefined as particular developmental phases of life profoundly different from adulthood.

Further social changes in the twentieth century accelerated the structural disconnection of youth’s lives from the adult world. The invention of the automobile provided teenagers with a mobility and privacy they had never known before. Commercial movie theaters, dance halls, and other entertainment centers had similar effects. Most important of all, however, was the near complete institutionalization of universal public education. In fact, it was not until the 1930s that the majority of American youth of high school age became school students. Comprehensive national child labor laws were finally put into effect in 1934, and state and local governments made major efforts to get youth into schools. This new crackdown on truancy was fueled in part by the need prompted by the Great Depression to remove youth from the labor force so they would not compete with adult men for scarce jobs. With little work to be done, mandatory schooling for teenagers became a means to keep youth off the streets and from being drawn into “hobo jungles” and other worrisome places and activities.

A mere 70 years ago, then, the majority of teenagers were for the first time in history gathered up together for most of the day, for most days of the week, with relatively few adults around to supervise and intervene into the details of their lives. Mass schooling was the perfect incubator for a new, distinctive youth culture, which blossomed in the following decades. The word “teen-ager” was coined during WWII, and by 1945 it had become a widely used label naming a cultural reality newly come into being. Postwar prosperity, a widespread perceived “return” to the traditional nuclear family, and the desire of the Depression- and war-weary parents to provide their children all the good things they had never enjoyed provided the resources and attitudes further enhancing adolescents’ free time, mobility and privacy—in short, autonomy from adults. Peer groups now become significant new and powerful sources of knowledge and influence in the lives of youth, competing with parents and other adults in teenagers’ socialization. The postwar GI Bill also helped rapidly to expand American higher education, further postponing entry into the adult world for millions of young college students and further fostering the evolution of a distinct American youth subculture. By the 1960s, the civil rights, student, free speech, and anti-war movements—in all of which youth played major roles—signified new levels of youth independence from the control of the adult world. The trend continued. Macroeconomic changes after 1970 accelerated the entry of women, including mothers of adolescents, into the paid labor force. The no-fault divorce revolution of the 1970s and other social forces significantly increased the number of single-parent households in which teenagers lived. These and other related factors left youth increasingly on their own, both alone and with other youth, for growing numbers of hours of the day and night. The high degree of youth autonomy has become the normalized reality for very many adolescents among working poor, middle-class, and upper-middle-class families alike.

Interacting with this structural disconnect is our society’s cultural construction of adolescence as an incredibly long wait for full participation in genuine adulthood. In American culture adolescence can begin at age 10, 11, or 12; at the latest, official teenage status begins at age 13. On the other end, many youth do not pass the symbolic cultural markers of full adulthood—school graduation, full-time work, financial independence, marriage—until the age of 18, 22, 25, or, for some, even in their late 20s and early 30s. Thus, American youth live for between five and 20 years in a kind of socially constructed developmental limbo, ever waiting, delaying, anticipating, preparing for the day when they will take on and enjoy the freedoms and responsibilities of being real grown-ups. The cultural message to youth is that they are not mature or prepared enough to enter the adult world and so must continue for years to wait, even as other powerful, contradictory messages implore them to act fully responsibly, be self-directed, and make very good choices as individual decision makers. Furthermore, even as improved nutrition (and perhaps the increased use of hormones in some farm products) lowered the age of the onset of puberty by about three years during the twentieth century, extended educational expectations, career startup requirements, and increasing lifestyle consumption expectations postponed the average age of marriage for young men and women from the years 1950 and 2000 by an extra four to five years. Part of adolescents’ incredibly long wait, then, involves the tension of being psychologically able and hormonally very interested in activities that make babies, while normally lacking the emotional, relational, and financial capacity to parent babies.

Adult American culture, working through the media, schools, and other institutions, thus sends its youth the conflicting messages that sex is one of the greatest and most important experiences in life, that youth should abstain from sex until marriage, that boys will be boys (and, increasingly, that girls will be girls) and cannot be expected as teens not to party wildly, that youth should practice “safe” and “responsible sex,” and so on. The wait is therefore not only incredibly long but often very confusing. The larger situation this can create for many youth is a widespread gnawing relentlessness and frustration, underlying tension with parents over continually renegotiating boundaries of freedom and responsibility, and sometimes a feeling of uselessness and inertia. Teenagers are forever waiting, continually preparing, perpetually coming of age, and are meanwhile for the most part socially superfluous. Thus, they experience a disconnect from the adult world not only in the structures of their routine activities and schedules, but also through the many years of limbo through which they must hang in suspension before passing into full-fledged adulthood.

The degree to which specific, individual adolescents today are connected to or disconnected from the adult world is of course highly variable. Some American teens do have close ties to many adults. But viewed in broad historical perspective, contemporary teenage autonomy from adults is unprecedented and astounding. Significant numbers of teens today live their lives with little but the most distant adult direction and oversight. They spend the greater part of most weekdays in schools surrounded almost exclusively by their peers. Their parents are working and otherwise busy. Members of their extended families live in distant cities. Their teachers are largely preoccupied with discipline, classroom instruction, and grading. Their neighbors tend to stay out of each others’ business. These teens may have their own cars, cell phones, spending money, and televisions in their bedrooms. Or they may simply spend their free time hanging out with friends and associates at the mall, on the streets, at friends’ houses, or other places away from home. In any case, when school lets out, it may be hours before a parent gets home from work. If the teen works, his or her coworkers are mostly other teenagers who are also flipping burgers or working cash registers; their supervisors may be adults, but few teens have relationships with them beyond taking orders and collecting paychecks.

The structural disconnection of many contemporary American adolescents from the adult world has potential important ramifications for the character of their religious lives. If a teenager defines serious religion as mostly an adult affair, as many do, then religion comes automatically to feel distant to them, or something that they may “get into” someday when they are older, but not now; this feeds into the age-appropriate life course scripts mentioned in the previous chapter. Furthermore, when teenagers have little daily experience socializing with adults generally, they likely find it more difficult to form meaningful relational ties with members of their congregations who are not their peers. Some youth may demand religious expressions and experiences that resonate with the symbols, images, language, and practices of popular youth culture. This may, in turn, shape the religious programming that religious institutions offer to youth, potentially altering the texture of the religious tradition itself. In addition, our culture’s structural disconnect between youth and adults has fostered among some religious adults an insecurity about their ability to “relate to” youth, a lack of confidence in their capacity to teach and train youth well in matters of faith, a reluctance to speak to teenagers about spiritual or theological issues with direction and authority for fear of coming across as square, boring, or irrelevant to teenagers’ real lives, in which many adults are not very involved.

The Conditions of Civilization - Will Durant

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

A people may possess ordered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms of art, like the American Indians; and yet if it remains in the hunting stage, if it depends for its existence upon the precarious fortunes of the chase, it will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization. A nomad stock, like the Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may display high qualities of character like courage, generosity and nobility; but without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization. The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security-a reliable supply of water and food-he builds his huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and domesticates the dog, the ass, the pig, at last himself. He learns to work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of his race.

Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city. For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and industry multiply comforts, luxuries and leisure; in the city traders meet, and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the cross-roads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to creative power. In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in the peasant's hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns.

There must be political order, even if it be so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every tum. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity. And finally there must be education-some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe-its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts-must be handed down to
the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.

The disappearance of these conditions-sometimes of even one of them-may destroy a civilization.

A geological cataclysm or a profound climatic change; an uncontrolled epidemic like that which wiped out half the population of the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or the Black Death that helped to end the Feudal Age; the exhaustion of the land, or the ruin of agriculture through the exploitation of the country by the town, resulting in a precarious dependence upon foreign food supplies; the failure of natural resources, either of fuels or of raw materials; a change in trade routes, leaving a nation off the main line of the world's commerce; mental or moral decay from the strains, stimuli and contacts of urban life, from the breakdown of traditional sources of social discipline and the inability to replace them; the weakening of the stock by a disorderly sexual life, or by an epicurean, pessimist, or quietist philosophy; the decay of leadership through the infertility of the able, and the relative smallness of the families that might bequeath most fully the cultural inheritance of the race; a pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive revolutions, and financial exhaustion: these are some of the ways in which a civilization may die. For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.

Economic Organization

Trade was the great disturber of the primitive world, for until it came, bringing money and profit in its wake, there was no property, and therefore little government. In the early stages of economic development property was limited for the most part to things personally used; the property sense applied so strongly to such articles that they (even the wife) were often buried with their owner; it applied so weakly to things not personally used that in their case the sense of property, far from being innate, required perpetual reinforcement and inculcation.

Almost everywhere, among primitive peoples, land was owned by the community. The North American Indians, the natives of Peru, the Chittagong Hill tribes of India, the Borneans and South Sea Islanders seem to have owned and tilled the soil in common, and to have shared the fruits together. In Samoa the idea of selling land was unknown prior to the coming of the white man. Professor Rivers found communism in land still existing in Melanesia and Polynesia; and in inner Liberia it may be observed today.

Only less widespread was communism in food. It was usual among "savages" for the man who had food to share it with the man who had none, for travelers to be fed at any home they chose to stop at on their way, and for communities harassed with drought to be maintained by their neighbors. The hungry Indian had but to ask to receive; no matter how small the supply was, food was given him if he needed it. Among the Hottentots it was the custom for one who had more than others to share his surplus till all were equal. White travelers in Africa before the advent of civilization noted that a present of food or other valuables to a "black man" was at once distributed; so that when a suit of clothes was given to one of them the donor soon found the recipient wearing the hat, a friend the trousers, another friend the coat. The Eskimo hunter had no personal right to his catch; it had to be divided among the inhabitants of the village, and tools and provisions were the common property of all. The North American Indians were described by Captain Carver as "strangers to all distinctions of property, except in the articles of domestic use. They are extremely liberal to each other, and supply the deficiencies of their friends with any superfluity of their own." "What is extremely surprising," reports a missionary, "is to see them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one does not find among common people in the most civilized nations. This, doubtless, arises from the fact that the words 'mine' and 'thine,' which St. Chrysostom says extinguish in our hearts the fire of charity and kindle that of greed, are unknown to these savages. "I have seen them," says another observer, "divide game among themselves when they sometimes had many shares to make; and cannot recollect a single instance of their falling into a dispute or finding fault with the distribution as being unequal or otherwise objectionable. They look upon themselves as but one great family."

Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we, with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups. Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as "so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than the idle, they plant less every year.” Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming civilized; or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their equality.

Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none.

Communism could survive more easily in societies where men were always on the move, and danger and want were ever present. Hunters and herders had no need of private property in land; but when agriculture became the settled life of men it soon appeared that the land was most fruitfully tilled when the rewards of careful husbandry accrued to the family that had provided it. Consequently-since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups-the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose. Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began. As the pressure of population increased, and older lands were exhausted, such reclamation went on in a widening circle, until, in the more complex societies, individual ownership became the order of the day. The invention of money cooperated with these factors by facilitating the accumulation, transport and transmission of property. The old tribal rights and traditions reasserted themselves in the technical ownership of the soil by the village community or the king, and in periodical redistributions of the land; but after an epoch of natural oscillation between the old and the new, private property established itself definitely as the basic economic institution of historical society.

Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the menial work. The men alternated between the excited activity of hunting or war, and the exhausted lassitude of satiety or peace. The characteristic laziness of primitive peoples had its origin, presumably, in this habit of slowly recuperating from the fatigue of battle or the chase; it was not so much laziness as rest. To transform this spasmodic activity into regular work two things were needed: the routine of tillage, and the organization of labor.

Such organization remains loose and spontaneous where men are working for themselves; where they work for others, the organization of labor depends in the last analysis upon force. The rise of agriculture and the inequality of men led to the employment of the socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities. Once slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was extended
by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate criminals, and by raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war.

Probably it was through centuries of slavery that our race acquired its traditions and habits of toil. No one would do any hard or persistent work if he could avoid it without physical, economic or social penalty. Slavery became part of the discipline by which man was prepared for industry.

Indirectly it furthered civilization, in so far as it increased wealth and-for a minority-created leisure. After some centuries men took it for granted; Aristode argued for slavery as natural and inevitable, and St. Paul gave his benediction to what must have seemed, by his time, a divinely ordained institution.

Gradually, through agriculture and slavery, through the division of labor and the inherent diversity of men, the comparative equality of natural society was replaced by inequality and class divisions. In the primitive group we find as a rule no distinction between slave and free, no serfdom, no caste, and little if any distinction between chief and followers. Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak. Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively conscious of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red thread through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace.

Political Organization

In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government; and so on.

The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan-a group of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many groups had no chiefs at all, and many more seem to have tolerated them only in time of war. Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the cap of our own age, it appears at its best in several primitive groups where such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed. The Iroquois and Delaware Indians recognized no laws or restraints beyond the natural order of the family and the clan; their chiefs had modest powers, which might at any time be ended by the elders of the tribe. The Omaha Indians were ruled by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many tribes bound themselves-and honored their pledge-to keep the peace,
and one sees no great gap between these "savages" and the modern states that bind themselves revocably to peace in the League of Nations.

It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these that make war. In the intervals of peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kingship developed as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined-and derived from-the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.

How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful; and the Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt one another like seals and steal one another's land. Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with intermittent war. Hunters fought for happy hunting grounds still rich in prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves-certain hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized, certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the Iroquois maintained the "Great Peace" for three hundred years. But for the most part war was the favorite instrument of natural selection among primitive nations and groups.

Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace.

(How many railroads today begin in strategy and end in trade!) Above all, war dissolved primitive communism and anarchism, introduced organization and discipline, and led to the enslavement of prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the growth of government. Property was the mother, war was the father, of the state.

II. The State

"A herd of blonde beasts of prey," says Nietzsche, "a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless… such is the origin of the state. "The state as distinct from tribal organization," says Lester Ward, "begins with the conquest of one race by another." "Everywhere," says Oppenheimer, "we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state." "Violence," says Ratzenhofer, "is the agent which has created the state." “The state,” says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished.” "The state," says Sumner, "is the product of force, and exists by force.”

This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group by a tribe of hunters and herders. For agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day's toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modem ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.

The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of written history. For it presupposes a change in the very principle of social organization-from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber's grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.

The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depend not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore require an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example: it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state, ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of the thousand conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.

What an interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from the behavior of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering everywhere. "Without autocratic rule," as Spencer said, "the evolution of society could not have commenced.”

A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination-the family, the church, the school-to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for that docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the "subject" sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State.