Teens and Religion

While I was reading through the last chapter of Material Christianity I was caught by one small section that talked about teens and their faith.

"Teenagers can wear T-shirts to witness to Christianity's importance in their lives even if they can only awkwardly articulate their feelings."

This caught me because I was one of those teens not too long ago. I can remember participating in church, sunday school classes, and youth groups with the church. I was a heavily committed in the Christian faith, I knew that for some reason it was important for me to follow the religion. I guess you could say that the promise of eternal life, free donuts after service, and happy parents played a large role in why I continued to follow God. It seems that I was not the only one just trying to please my parents, according to the National Study of Youth and Religion ,"religion really does matter to teens". In a study 71% of teens in a telephone survey said that they were in some degree close to god. One thing I can remember is Soul Fest. Its a Contemporary Christian music festival that spans over 4 or 5 days. Hundreds of people flock to this event annually every summer. The music spans just about any genre you can think of. The popularization of this music is what kept helped me keep my faith, even some of my non-Christian friends thought the music was enjoyable. By this point I was so into the religion that my faith was mostly built out of the faith of others. I was only 15 years old and I didn't want to pick up the bible and structure my faith out of words I could barely understand, I could just go on with my parents knowledge, my popular Christian music, and my friends at church who barely conversed amongst one another about anything religious. It was easy to be Christian, wait, it was easy to be labeled a Christian and provide no explaination. And even easier if you had a "Jesus is My Homeboy" t-shirt. My question to you is, if religion wasn't stressed by older generations to the youth do you think its popular culture would exist? 

Works Cited

McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity Religion and Popular Culture in America. New York: Yale UP, 1998.

"Study: Teens serious about religion - U.S. news- msnbc.com." Breaking News, Weather, Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Travel, Science, Technology, Local, US & World News- msnbc.com. 17 Apr. 2009 .