Moral Religiosities: How Morality Structures Religious Understandings during the Transition to Adulthood

Abstract

Religiosity remains an important sociological concept, from assessing religion’s effects on various outcomes to describing large-scale religious change. And yet conceptualizing religiosity—as a measure of intensity of religious practice—requires accounting for how respondents understand religious practice. Drawing on four waves of longitudinal interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), this paper examines the religious understandings of young Americans as they develop over 10 years. I find that respondents’ religious understandings are shaped by deeper moral orientations that broadly structure their lives. From these moral orientations, I theorize four ideal types of religious practitioners that help explain complex patterns of religiosity in America—the Congregant, the Believer, the Spiritualist, and the Metaphysician. Recognizing the moral orders that structure young Americans’ religious understandings opens new pathways for theorizing religion’s influence and change over time.

Linking Religious Upbringing to Young Adult Moral Formation

“…Existing research confirms the relationship between religious traits and moral ones, showing more religiously committed people to have higher levels of the binding moral foundations as well as values related to tradition, conservation, and conformity (Graham and Haidt 2010;Schwartz and Huismans 1995). We should thus expect a close, dynamic relationship between the religious domain of experience and the development of moral beliefs and sensibilities (Rotolo 2021).…”

“…Social scientific research, popular perception, and intuitive understanding all support the proposition of a strong link between religion and morality (e.g., Rotolo 2021;Smith, Ritz, and Rotolo 2019). Work applying conceptualizations of morality from social psychology, namely, moral foundations and values (Graham et al 2011;Schwartz 1992), has shown religious identification, belief, and behavior to relate to binding and communally oriented moral boundaries and ends (Graham and Haidt 2010;Schwadel and Hardy 2022).…”

“…On the other hand, research on religious transmission has emphasized the family rather than the congregation as the most influential site of religious socialization in the modern United States (Smith 2021;Smith and Snell 2009). If religious and moral socialization occur in dynamic relation to one another (Rotolo 2021), this would point to a stronger role of family-based practice for moral formation.…”

“…This combination of empirical and theoretical factors favors an account of religious socialization as an exogenous influence shaping moral dispositions. At the same time, it is important to recognize that moral and religious traits are deeply and dynamically intertwined (Rotolo 2021), and contain reciprocal links extending across the life course. Future research should explore the bidirectionality of these links.…”

“…This work focuses on religion as both predictor and outcome, however, rather than examining determinants of morality per se. Other recent work establishes a close link between religious and moral worldviews, but does not focus on their trajectories or antecedents (Rotolo 2021).…”