What does young people’s religiosity look like today? And what can be learned from studying it? The Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG) project focused on young people’s religiosity in a large number of countries, but it was not about young adults as such. Young adults were seen more as an opportunity to better understand contemporary religiosity. They often have social and cultural resources that give them access to a wide range of influences. And, as Peter Beyer writes, they possess a reflexive subjectivity that is expressed in how their “religious identities overlap with the glocal context in which they are practised, a context that reinforces and probably enables the diversity they exhibit” (Beyer 2019, 280).

To familiarise yourself with the results of YARG, I refer you to the volumes The Diversity of Worldviews among Young Adults (Nynäs et al., 2022), Digital Media, Young Adults and Religion (Moberg & Sjö, 2020) and Researching Global Religious Landscapes (Nynäs et al., 2024), the special issue “Introduction: Theorising Religious Socialisation” (Klingenberg & Sjö, 2019) and the articles “Putting a Q into the study of religions” (Nynäs 2022) and “The Faith Q-Sort” (Nynäs et al., 2021). Here, I would like to make a few general observations from YARG and what our project made me think about the fundamental question of researching and understanding religion today.

Young adults from several countries were included in our research: Ghana, India, Israel, Canada, China, Finland, Peru, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States. Conducting cross-cultural research on religion is demanding. Different contexts may require different approaches, and it is challenging to find a focus that is clearly valid across cultures. This is made more difficult by the fact that the study of religion has been shaped by and is rooted in Western research. For YARG, a mixed method and, in particular, David Wulff’s (2019) new method, Faith Q-sort (FQS), provided added value. FQS is a new tool for identifying larger patterns of religiosity, as opposed to relying on simple individual measures. The method provides greater sensitivity to how religion is perceived by individuals themselves. When used as part of a mixed method, the same thing can be examined from different angles.

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When we analysed the FQS data from a bird’s eye view, we were able to identify five distinct ways in which young adults can be ‘religious’: (1) Secular Humanist; (2) Active Confident Believer; (3) Noncommitted Traditionalist; (4) Spiritually Attuned; and (5) Disengaged Liberal. There is not enough space here to describe the typology in detail (see Nynäs 2022) in the way that FQS allows, but I will make a few general observations.

Although we can identify five distinct types, they can also be viewed as two separate families: (1) Secular Humanist; (4) Spiritually Attuned; and (5) Disengaged Liberal types are positively correlated and form a more secular family, while (2) Active Confident Believer, and (3) Noncommitted Traditionalist are positively correlated with each other (and lack a positive correlation with the secular types) and appear to be religious. In other words, being religious or secular is still a meaningful distinction for many young adults today. Our survey also confirmed that these two families tend to have different core values. Universalism, benevolence and self-direction are more typical of the secular types and expressions of the core categories of openness and self-transcendence. The religious are closer to the opposite category of conservation, which is expressed in a concern for tradition, power, security and conformity. The religious-secular divide thus interacts with the value divide between conservation and openness/self-transcendence, which are basic categories in Schwartz’s theoretical model (2017). This is reinforced by the fact that the two families are divided on other attitudes and tend to have different views on issues such as abortion and same-sex relationships.

Taking a bird’s-eye view is like painting with few colours and a coarse brush. The whole picture is rarely that simple. A direct example of this is (5) Disengaged Liberal. They are too busy with other things in their lives to engage in ‘big questions about life’ and do not see themselves as religious, secular or spiritual, except when the situation requires them to. This type challenges our tendency to place all people in either the religious or secular category.

There are also significant national and cultural differences that often undermine attempts to make general conclusions. The Q method is fundamentally qualitative and is used on a small sample: its validity is not based on representativeness. However, a large sample and comparative approaches can still add value when using the Q method. In YARG, we saw that the number of types varied when we did country-specific analyses. In some countries (Finland, Peru, and Sweden), we found a simpler typology of three types that reflected the three-way division of secular, religious, and spiritual, even though there were important differences in how they were expressed. In other countries, we found up to eight types. Here, too, the characteristics of being religious, spiritual and non-religious were reflected, but to varying degrees and with even greater differences in expression. As a whole, on closer inspection, these types exhibited a kind of theme with variations, but with considerable diversity. In musical terms, one could say that other genres and orchestrations came into play and required sensitivity on the part of the researcher. Sometimes there were also elements of dissonance, i.e. the types could include what we tend to see as contradictory or incompatible elements in relation to ‘pure typologies’.

This shows that we need to examine how we understand the categories and typologies we use. On the one hand, they play a fundamental role in science and in our dialogue about the world, but on the other hand, they tend to be emptied of meaning today due to the composite nature with which they are associated. This requires conceptual caution on our part, and instead of thinking in terms of strict categories, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s term “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein 1998) may offer a sensible alternative. It captures the dynamic interplay of theme and variations that we found in YARG: how different positions are determined by overlapping common features or dimensions that recur without all of them necessarily being central to all variations. These kinds of conceptual nuances can make a difference, and we need to continue the conceptual discussion of our central concepts in order for them to remain relevant.

Graffiti on the campus of Jadavpur University in Kolkata.

When we leave the bird’s-eye view and zoom in, other things emerge. This can also be exemplified by the (1) Secular Humanist, which was prominent in our study and with which many young adults identified. The survey also confirmed that they saw themselves as part of a process of moving away from religion: they considered themselves less religious than the family they grew up in. At the same time, elements from the interviews show that such an attitude can accommodate openness to spirituality and religion, and the survey reveals that young adults today can think of themselves as having multiple identities: they can be both non-religious and belong to a religious tradition. This shows that we lose something important in our understanding of contemporary religiosity if we stop at a numerical aspect. It is insufficient to point out that one type or another is growing or shrinking. What is the nature of what we are studying when we take a closer look? What gains more space when something else decreases? When young adults today reclaim their religion, it may be about something completely different from what it first appears to be. Similarly, the term ‘non-religion’ is often empty and misleading. In our study, it could be about ecological activism shaping one’s lived reality or “I don’t want to speak in tongues, I want to talk about human rights ‘, as one of our respondents explained.

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Young adults’ religiosity is multidimensional, complex and open; it is characterised by heterogeneity and mobility, and it is shaped as a lived reality in the borderland between universal human conditions and specific contexts and living environments. It was therefore important in YARG to use methods that were sensitive to ambiguities, fluid boundaries and simultaneities in how religious subjectivities are formed, and that could provide a basis for systematic comparative approaches. We could see that an adequate mixed method was an important prerequisite.  Research in religion is rich in methods, and mixed methods provide more nuanced data and results, creating critical opportunities. David Wulff’s FQS, in particular, was a valuable addition, an example of the importance of the ongoing development of research methods. Methodological mobility can be crucial to the knowledge we create. The view is not the same regardless of where we are.

Young adults are a highly heterogeneous group, especially from a cross-cultural perspective, but there is a risk that we overlook this when we study them as a cohort, for example (Klingenberg et al., 2022). Empirical mobility is as important as methodological mobility, and we must increasingly avoid a narrow focus on WEIRD populations (western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) (Henrich et al., 2010) and, as Sakshi Ghai (2021) underlines, actively strive to highlight the diversity in people’s lives. Our research showed that this is also crucial for an adequate understanding of religion that is not limited or distorted, something we are continuing to work on in our new Centre of Excellence in research “Religion and Social Exclusion”. In this project we have chosen socially excluded people as our focus. Life and the world appear different if you are a young adult in prison, if you belong to a marginalised indigenous people, or if you are a stigmatised sexual minority.

Given perspectives and categories in the study of religions were often insufficient in our study of adults today, and there is a need to decentralise these (Bender et al., 2013). Does this also apply to the concept of religion? Ninian Smart (1981) emphasised in “The Philosophy of Worldviews — that is, the Philosophy of Religion Transformed” that the concept of worldview should be given an overarching role. His idea was not new, and several researchers have also subsequently emphasised the relevance of the concept of worldview (e.g. Kurtén 1997; Droogers and van Harskamp, 2014; Taves 2019; Stenmark, 2022). I draw the same conclusion. When studying young adults’ ‘religiosity’, it has been difficult to write comprehensively about the complex diversity we encounter today without using the concept of ‘worldview’. An emphasis on the concept of worldview may fundamentally challenge the study of religions, but YARG also shows that the long tradition of research on religion can contribute quality to future worldview research. Just as the study of religions needs the worldview perspective as a conceptual category, the worldview perspective needs the empirical, methodological and theoretical wealth created within the study of religions. These cornerstones are a prerequisite for relevant, valid and meaningful knowledge about worldviews in the future as well – but perhaps it is worldviews we are talking about and studying.

References:

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