When we compare 18- to 29-year-olds across the last 30 years, we do not see a marked decline in their religious beliefs and practices; they are pretty stable. So, emerging adults are not more secularized than in the past.

However, when we study different age groups at the same time, including today, we see that 18- to 29-year-olds are among the least religious Americans. Emerging adulthood is a phase in the life course that is associated with the relatively least religious faith and practice. Certain features of emerging adult culture and experience help to explain that, including a great deal of transience and mobility, identity differentiation from parents and family, college lifestyles that make going to religious services more difficult, and an interest in partying and perhaps hooking-up that emerging adults know is frowned upon in most religious traditions.

We expect from previous experience, however, that some (but not all) emerging adults will eventually find their way back into stronger religious faith and practice when they get married and have children—at least if the future is similar to the past.

Christian Smith is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Souls in Transition.