Beliefs and Religion
What religions or religious groups do youth belong to? How often do young people attend religious services? How important is faith to young people? How often do they pray? These are some of the questions that the NYS attempts to answer.
Table 1: Religious Affiliation
According to answers from the most recent NYS survey data (Wave 2), many of our participants who are between the ages of 16-20 are either Protestant (40%) or Catholic (21%). This shows that most of our participants identify themselves as Christians. Christianity, in other words, is more numerically prevalent than other religious traditions at the level of teenage religious affiliation. This matches what other studies find in the U.S. adult population. The next largest group is the 16 percent who said they have no specific religious affiliation. The rest affiliate with another religion, like Mormonism (3 percent) or Judaism (1 percent), or with various other religions.
| Religion of NYS Participant |
| Protestant |
40% |
| Catholic |
21% |
| Jewish |
1% |
| Mormon |
3% |
| Hindu |
0.2% |
| Muslim |
0.1% |
| Other Religious Affiliation |
18% |
| No Religious Affiliation |
16% |
Table 2: Attendance
To evaluate change over time, we can look at how answers to specific questions differ in Wave 1 and Wave 2 for the same study participants. In the Wave 1 and the Wave 2 surveys, participants were asked how often they attended religious services. The table below illustrates that between Wave 1 and Wave 2 there is a 14 percent increase in the number who report attending religious services never or just a few times a year. Alternately, we see a 13 percent decrease in the number who report attending weekly or more than once a week. This tells us that, overall, as American youth move from early to late adolescence they are attending religious services less often.
|
W1- Attendance |
W2- Attendance |
Change |
| Never or a few times a year |
31% |
45% |
14% |
| More than a few times a year and less than weekly |
27% |
26% |
-1% |
| Weekly or more than once a week |
42% |
29% |
-13% |
Table 3: Importance of Religion
In addition to where and how often young people attend religious services, we are also interested in how important or not important religious faith is to American youth. When asked how important religious faith is in shaping their daily lives, 45 percent of our participants reported, in the most recent telephone survey (Wave 2), that religious faith is extremely or very important, 30 percent said that it is somewhat important, and 25 percent said that it is not very or not at all important in their daily lives.
Table 4: Prayer
Another aspect of many young people's religious lives is prayer. As shown in the table below, over half of our participants reported in Wave 2 of the survey that they pray once a week or more.
