Today’s Washington Times had an article about this survey report. If you can’t read the whole report (it’s a 52-page pdf), read at least the executive summary (pp. 5 - 7 of the pdf). Here’s a taste, on which I’ll offer a few comments:

Particular points of note in the report: • Most diverse generation in history. Generation Y is the most diverse generation in the nation – only 61 percent call themselves white compared to 84 percent among Americans older than 65 years. Fueled by waves of new immigration and birthrates in immigrant communities, this generation is on the vanguard of transforming the nation, which will be majority non-white by mid-century. (page 8)

• Denominationalism on the decline and pluralism on the rise. The country remains majority Christian with a plurality belonging to Protestant denominations such as the Baptists or Methodists. There are important changes afoot, traditional denominationalism is on the decline and there is a concurrent rise in the number of people unwilling to align with a denomination. In fact, many young people cannot identify what faith tradition or denomination they belong to and fully 23 percent do not identify with any denomination at all. (page 9)

• Faith expressed in highly personal, informal ways. While many young people continue to attend worship services on a regular basis, just as many – if not more - practice their faith informally. Young people simply believe it is possible to be “religious” or “spiritual” without belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque. On a monthly basis, 68 percent talk about religion informally with friends; 64 percent of pray before meals and 55 percent read religious books, newspapers or magazines. (page 10)

• Social circles diverse. Regardless of religious tradition or intensity of religious commitment, youth are fully integrated into diverse social networks. While previous generations often lived in homogeneous religious communities, among Generation Y, only 7 percent of youth report that all of their friends are the same religion as themselves. Even the most religious youth maintain diverse networks of peers with only 9 percent of the Godly saying that all of their friends are the same religion. Among the God-less, at least half of their friends are not of the same religion. (page 12)

• Religious teens are more self-aware. Despite assumptions we might make about youth’s disengagement from faith and community life, religion remains a core component of young people’s identity. Moreover, religious youth have a distinctive worldview and approach to life; they are more connected to family and community, have higher self-esteem and a sense of self and hold more traditional views about family, sex, and marriage. (page 15)

Of course, 18-25 year olds tend to be less settled and consequently less connected to any formal institutions. The question is whether the habits formed at this time will persist into adulthood. Will those who at the moment can’t identify with a denomination always be unable to do so, will they return to the churches of their parents, or will they migrate in a particular religious direction? The survey suggests that the less religiously committed include substantial proportions of young Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, men, and immigrants, among others. In some cases (like immigrants), detachment from (old) religion may be part of assimilation and acculturation. In others, it may be the result of a failure of a denomination to communicate in a compelling way; this, for example, may be part of what’s going on in the long-term decline of liberal Protestantism. Those who are detached from mainline Protestant churches may end up either unchurched altogether or in more spiritually and morally fulfilling (and demanding) evangelical churches. And some of those men who are detached from religion may return to the pews after marriage and fatherhood (assuming that the first precedes the second).

There’s a lot to chew on in this report, and it’s easy to overreact. But it’s also worth considering what’s at stake, not only from a religious, but from a civic point of view. One of the (unsurprising) points that the report makes is that those young people who are involved in a religious tradition have greater stores of social capital: they’re more engaged in their communities and more likely to vote and to volunteer. They are inclined to give more and in a position to receive more. They constitute, the report says, 27% of the young people surveyed (as do the "Godless"). 46% are in the "undecided middle," somewhat connected with faith traditions, but more less "institutionally" or formally, much more casually and informally. If this connection between civic and religious embeddedness persists into adulthood (as I suspect that it does), then for both religious and civic reasons it is important to reach out to this "undecided middle." The report, of course, helps, describing the population and calling our attention to a variety of efforts to "speak to it."

For a slightly different view, go to this article, discussing a study about which I posted way back here. On the basis of this study, I’d suggest that one of the principal sources of the problem is the failure of denominations and individual churches to engage in any serious religious or theological education. It may be that some really have nothing signficant to say. Others may be unable or unwilling to say it. But the kids clearly need it.

Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard and Bloomberg News writes a nice column about my annual effort to debunk the enviro-doomsters,here..

Just to piggyback a little on Peter’s post regarding the WaPo article about college counseling, here are a couple of links.

The first is from Stanley Kurtz over at NRO. His response to the WaPo article is to praise Princeton’s James Madison Program as "a model for solving the political-correctness problem in the academy as a whole." I think that the program is wonderful, but so is, of course, the Ashbrook Center. We need beachheads in the Ivy League, but perhaps what folks like Goodman should be doing as well is directing students and their parents to consider alternatives that are genuinely alternative. If market sentiment changes, departing from conventional sources of prestige, then not only might programs like Ashbrook have to beat kids away at the door (or hire piles more faculty), but places like Harvard and Columbia might have to come to their senses.

A friend sent me this article describing some of the fall-out from Davidson College’s decision to distance itself a tad from its Presbyterianism. Bottom line: some big, long-time donors are leaving the board, though, oddly enough (actually, it’s not so odd) two Presbyterian ministers on the Board of Trustees asserted that "opening the board to non-Christian members was in step with the teachings of their denomination." (I’ll refrain from commenting on the slow death, thanks to its "openness," of the PCUSA.)

I’ve posted on this subject before here, and you might expect eventually to see something more about this here.

I mentioned this Steven Roy Goodman WaPo piece on education yesterday. I want to get back to it. This Goodman piece is worth reading because he brings out (in a more public way than is normal) a great problem parents and students have in looking for a good college: they are quite fed up with the political correctness they encounter and wonder whether it is worth investing over a hundred grand to send their sons and daughters to be guided some left-wing ideologues in their formative years. It is also worth reading because although Goodman recognizes part of the problem, he has no understanding of how to get beyond it (note the bad advice he gives to the Eagle Scout!). He also spends time warning us that the sheer cost of a college education is forcing consumers to re-think the value of their investment.

Here is is his conclusion:

Maybe we can learn from recent campus incidents. Maybe we can ask ourselves what we would like our universities to actually do. Maybe university communities can engage in real soul-searching to figure out how they can benefit both their students and the country in ways that the broader public can support. If they don’t at least try, the university as an institution may have seen the heyday of its influence.

Tomorrow night PBS will run something on Karl Rove. This is their description:

President George W. Bush called him "the architect" of his reelection victory and he has been the president’s chief strategist from the beginning. But Karl Rove is much more than a political guru, he is the single most powerful policy advisor in the White House. FRONTLINE and The Washington Post join forces to trace the political history and modus operandi of the man who has been on the inside of every political and policy decision of the Bush administration, including the current battles on Social Security, taxes, and tort reform. For Rove—observers say—enactment of the Bush agenda is a way to win the biggest prize of all: a permanent Republican majority.

I only ride naked bikes. My first ride of the season today reminded me why. The temperature, I’m guessing, is in the mid-seventies. But that doesn’t describe the soft air and the warm wind in your face, the smell of recently overturned fields ready to be planted. On my return I did have to clean my leather of a couple of dozen splattered yellow bugs, and wash my face and brush my teeth, but this just proves that I was moving through something coming to life. Just a hundred miles, but great fun.

I stopped at a lake to have a smoke. A lonely old fisherman just pulled in a big one as he spotted me. "Look at this big ol’ carp, I didn’t think they would bite yet." "Have you ever been wrong before," I asked. "Of course, plenty," he said as he threw the big fella back. A big fish on a soft day and the old man was happy.

Stephen Moore admits that Bush’s scheme to save Social Security is "now officially floundering." But,

even though personal accounts may go nowhere this year, reformers can still take heart. Here’s why. First, the policy debate is completely commanded by conservatives’ ideas, not the left’s. That’s a political victory in itself. Second, if Republicans lose the fight this year, they have in many ways further imprinted in voters’ minds the message that the Democratic party is reactionary and devoid of ideas. Republicans, by pressing boldly for personal accounts, have succeeded in demonstrating again that they are the party of reform. To most Americans, the main DNC/Brookings Institution/AARP talking point on personal accounts--that the program doesn’t need fixing--is almost laughable.

Finally, and most important, losing the first round of the battle, if it comes to that, doesn’t automatically discredit the idea. Consider the transformational policy milestones of recent decades. It has taken more than 20 years from the time President Reagan announced SDI, to almost universal skepticism from the intellectual class, for the missile shield program to become a (mostly) accepted component of our defense strategy.

Many of the "news analysis" articles showing up in the media about the "dilemmas" facing the Catholic Church suggest what is likely to come if the next Pope is a conservative. Secular criticism of Pope John Paul II was always muted because of his great moral authority from having stood up against the Nazis and then the Communists. And then there was his enormous personal popularity.

The next Pope will not have these advantages. If the next Pope is a conservative, look for an early and ferocious attack on him from the Left. The news media is already preparing the ground for it.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this post, responding to this column by Jay Mathews. Well, Mathews reports, most of his email was, to put it mildly, quite negative. As befits the civil tone of most NLT readers, those who took me to the woodshed for agreeing with Mathews were thoughtful about it. There was a huffy comment over at the Education Wonks, a site devoted to--what else?--education. (The comment, to be clear, was not by the bloggers, but by a reader.)

So where am I now? This morning--I’m a slow learner--I read a very long piece entitled "No Faith in Science" in today’s Globe and Mail (not available on-line for free, but once again, don’t give these guys any money). Covering three full pages in the "Focus" section, it was devoted to a litany of complaints about anything that could be remotely construed as connnected with the Bush Administration’s science policy (including, for example, abstinence education). While the author did quote some defenders of the Bush Administration (from outside as well as inside), it was not, ahem, fair and balanced, as they say on a network I don’t generally watch (I don’t watch any other network either). Among other things, it turns out that questioning the funding of research or refusing to fund research is kind of like McCarthyism. But that’s not the fish I want to fry here.

The title--"No Faith in Science"--is unintentionally telling. The headline writer wanted to call attention to the allegedly faith-based ("fundamentalist") influence on the Bush Administration’s science policy. But in the article itself, I discovered that science is also an object of faith. Here are some of the relevant paragraphs:

When the Traditional Values Coalition prepared its list of "questionable" research projects, it proudly described the endeavour as targeting a "sacred cow." That sentiment hints at a larger problem--a signficant conversion in a society that once seemed to embrace science as tantamount to a new religion.

From the Second World War to the close of the millenium, miracles seemed to spring from laboratories--moon landings, heart transplants, commercial jets, the polio vaccine, nuclear power, computers, antibiotics, and a decoded human genome (a feat Mr. Clinton likened to learning the language of God).

But now all around are mysteries it struggles to solve, from cancer to mad cow disease.... Wonder drugs have been exposed as killers. Cold fusion has flopped. Even the flu looms as an insurmountable foe. People are losing faith.

"Science is not viewed as nearly as infallible as it once was," said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It just so happens that the paper I delivered at the conference here touched on these themes, albeit somewhat tangentially. It dealt with Tolkien’s treatment of human finitude and the longing for immortality, focusing on his narrative of the downfall of Numenor. I suggested that Tolkien provides us with an analysis of the psychological and intellectual dynamic connected with efforts to extend life indefinitely (that is, to achieve immortality), which we’re approaching when we regard every death as a failure of medical science and hence every death as in some way "optional." (For background, go here, here, and here.) While there are economic, political, and sociological arguments against seeking immortality (arguably the modern project since Bacon and Descartes), Tolkien calls our attention to the religious dimension of this issue, i.e., the fundamental impiety of trying to play God.

To make an already too long story short, I’m tempted to argue that what the emotional reactions to Mathews’ column reveal is that many understand science as a kind of orthodoxy that they’re not willing to have challenged. This is--how shall I say it?--not a scientific attitude toward science. And those who worry about whether such issues can be handled in high school seem to me to be worrying about whether "enlightenment" is possible. If they’re right, if all we can do is indoctrinate, then science does not deserve the high (because neutral or "scientific") ground that they claim for it. What the schools are doing--if they’re right-is establishing the "religion" of science. Now, anyone who has read my Ashbrook op-eds or my posts must be aware that I’m not in principle opposed to government support for religion, but I would favor "multiple establishment," support for all religions (not just one to the exclusion of others, and only for the sake of and conditioned on legitimate government purposes). So if high school science education is in fact a form of religious indoctrination, then I’d favor teaching the conflict over merely foisting one dogma on the students.

Anyone out there provoked?

Update: Do read the comments: they’re interesting, civil, and contain a clickable link to the G & M article I excerpt above. For my own part, as far as science education is concerned, I’d actually be happy with a course in the history and philosophy of science, as a result of which students learned something about the way in which modern science and modern politics are inextricably linked, and about how both are connected with (perhaps even dependent upon) a peculiar and peculiarly unorthodox understanding of revealed religion. This wouldn’t necessarily require teaching Intelligent Design, nor would it involve even the "multiple establishment" of "religion" I mentioned above, but it would provide an understanding of science that would deprive it of any pretenses to be neutral or non-partisan. Of course, this, too, is probably too much to ask.

Win Myers has more on The King’s College here and (for deeper context) here.

Win also posted a long "Letter to the Columbia Trustees" from Candace de Russy, the Democracy Project’s Chairman. If you scroll down the DP site, you’ll find more on anti-Semitism at Columbia.