Another Myth...

Emerging adults behave similarly whether religious or not.

"Actually, emerging adults devoted to religion are significantly more likely to give money, volunteer for community service, decline alcohol and drugs, and abstain from pornography and premarital sex.  For example, 35 percent of non-married emerging adults who are devoted to religion have had sexual intercourse, compared to 67 percent of emerging adults only regularly involved.

"Trouble is, only 5 percent of emerging adults are so devoted to their faith that they attend religious services weekly or read Scripture as much as once or twice per month.  And that group includes Mormons, Muslims, Jews, and all Christian denominations.  Another 14 percent regularly attend religious services a few times per month.  But their behavior often resembles the irreligious more than the devoted.  They practice a different creed: so long as you don't hurt others, almost anything goes.  And since every single person is different, different rules apply, depending on the situation.

"'This, it seems, is not merely basic American individualism,' write Smith and Snell.  'It is individualism raised on heavy doses of multiculturalism and pumped up on the steroids of the postmodern insistence on disjuncture, difference, and differences 'going all the way down.''"

Taken from The Leadership Journal article by Collin Hansen titled, "5 Myths about Merging Adult Faith."