A recent study by a BYU professor sheds new light on the sacrifices young people make.
David C. Dollahite is a professor in BYU's School of Family Life. In the November 2009 issue of Journal of Adolescent Research he published an article entitled "Giving Up Something Good for Something Better: Sacred Sacrifices Made by Religious Youth" wherein he examines the types of sacrifices made by youth and young adults from a wide swath of faiths and their motivations for making those sacrifices. This study was conducted by Professor Dollahite and his coauthors including fellow BYU faculty member Howard Bahr and current or former BYU students Emily Layton, Anthony Walker and Jennifer Thatcher.
In an interview with Church News, Professor Dollahite extrapolated the results of his research to Latter-day Saint-centric issues such as the frequency with which youth in the Mormon Church are asked to sacrifice relative to their age-group peers of other religions; how age affects the motivation for sacrifice; how youth and young adults in Utah face a different set of challenges unique and apart from those youth in places where Mormons are the minority; and the rubber-meets-road importance of youth having their own testimonies.
Benefits of believing
Before authoring "Giving Up Something Good for Something Better," Professor Dollahite was already keenly aware of the great divide separating the attitudes about divinity of devoutly religious adolescents and teens from those who do not actively engage in religion. He cited research by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton as being illustrative of the fact that, although most teens profess a belief in divinity, a prevalent form of casual Christianity requiring no personal sacrifice and amounting to what Smith and Denton call "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" engulfs a large chunk of young adults.
"For many adolescents, their faith is about having a kind of 'cosmic butler' to meet their needs and answer their prayers and take care of them when they're in trouble," Professor Dollahite said. "A lot of youth and young adults in America take their faith fairly casually and are focused on themselves. Not surprisingly, their approach towards religion tends to be, 'What can religion do for me?'
"The good news is, religion does a lot of good for kids. Kids who are religious tend to do better in a lot of areas."
Professor Dollahite's new research seeks to understand how religious youth are sacrificing for their faith and what their feelings are about the nature and consequences of those sacrifices.
"I was interested in what kids were willing to give for their faith and what types of things different faith groups asked kids to give up for their religion," Professor Dollahite said. "What I found is that religious kids in general are actually sacrificing more than what many adults might realize. These are kids who take their faith seriously; kids who don't take their faith seriously are probably not going to willingly make sacrifices."
Data came from 55 married couples living in either New England or Northern California and their 77 adolescent and young-adult children. The religious affiliations of the families interviewed for the study include Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim and LDS. Professor Dollahite found that youth said they made sacrifices in five areas: Societal Expectations (e.g. aspiring to be a mother); Popular Culture (e.g. dressing modestly); Comforts and Pleasures (e.g. paying tithes and offerings); Time and Activities (e.g. attending religious meetings); and Peer Relations (e.g. rules and restrictions for dating).
The article's conclusion notes that religious youth recognize "their religiously motivated sacrifices are often inconvenient, sometimes difficult, and frequently set them apart from friends and neighbors who take their faith less seriously or follow different ideals. However, the cost of sacrifice did not seem to deter these youth from continuing to make those sacrifices in many domains of their lives."
According to Professor Dollahite, a common theme expressed by study subjects regarding their willingness for making sacrifices stemming from their religion was that they valued a self-identity interwoven with religious observance.
"What was interesting to me," he said, "was that a lot of kids focused on how living their faith gave them a sense of identity and a sense of confidence. They knew that they were doing things differently from what other kids were doing, but they were OK with that. They felt pretty happy about their unique religious identity that came largely through their sacrifices."
LDS youth stand apart
Professor Dollahite notes in his article that the National Study of Youth and Religion, conducted in 2005, asked more than 3,700 respondents aged 16 to 21 whether they had "fasted or denied self something as spiritual discipline" within the past year. Far and away the highest rate of "yes" responses to that question came from Mormons, who answered in the affirmative 68 percent of the time; the next-highest frequencies were 49 percent for Jews and 29 percent for Roman Catholics.
"The empirical data from that large survey shows that LDS kids are asked to give up more; they tend to be sacrificing quite a bit for their faith. … The [Lectures on Faith] say, 'a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.' In other words, Joseph taught that religion needs to ask for its adherents to sacrifice something. Otherwise, it doesn't build faith."
Motivations evolve
From Professor Dollahite's data, it's clear that the impetus for making sacrifices can be very different for a deacon as opposed to, say, a priest.
"Some of the older kids I interviewed said that when they were young, before they learned for themselves the benefits of sacrifice, a big part of their motivation was that it's what their parents were asking and expecting of them," he said. "That's what they saw others doing, and that's what they knew was expected.
"When they got a little bit older, then they started being able to compare the negative consequences experienced by some of their peers who were not living the same standards they were such as being on drugs, having a baby out of wedlock or dropping out of school. In the middle teen years most of the kids come around to realizing that they're better off with sacrifice as a part of their lives. They came to realize it was something like a heavenly investment."
Being in the minority: pros and cons
LDS youth in places where the Church is a minority are forced to cope with different circumstances than their peers who live in places like Utah and parts of Idaho and Arizona where there are more Mormons.
For example, a significant positive reinforcement for youth to consistently sacrifice is the sense of identity that arises out of religious observance. Because that kind of self-identity is more easily derived when the religion in question pegs the adherent as a minority, LDS youth inside of Utah could be harder pressed to acquire it than those outside the Beehive State.
"There is something about being the minority in a place that does actually tend to encourage a sense of identity and greater commitment to that faith," Professor Dollahite said. "Outside of Utah, assuming that you've got some good LDS peers that are your friends and who are also making those same sacrifices, then to some extent being in the minority can be beneficial."
However, youth in Utah may enjoy the benefit of myriad more positive peer examples of making the sacrifices associated with living the gospel.
"For LDS kids in Utah," he said, "in some ways it might be easier for them to make those sacrifices because it's the norm; they see a lot of their peers doing that."
Professor Dollahite and his wife Mary have seven children, ages 9 to 24. They currently live in the Orem Utah Cherry Hill Stake but lived in New England for a time. As a result, Professor Dollahite has been privy to seeing how his own children respond to the circumstances associated with being LDS both in and outside of Utah.
"When we lived in New England, my kids attended early-morning seminary," he said. "They were tested and pushed in certain ways that they weren't used to in Utah, and they did talk about how in some ways it was easier to identify with your fellow Latter-day Saint youth even though that was different from what might be the norm around you."
'That changes everything'
An overarching finding of Professor Dollahite's study is that youth and young adults of all religions are much more likely to make sacrifices if they have an intensely personal attachment to their faith.
"This is as applicable to the Jewish kids as it is to the Christian kids: if they felt like they really believed in what they were doing, then they were happy to do it," he explained. "If they're just going along to get along, just doing what their peers or their leaders or their parents are asking, they are probably going to struggle at some point with some of the sacrifices that they are asked to make for religious reasons."
In the Church, having that kind of personal connection to religion equates to owning a testimony.
"My overall point for Latter-day Saints is, if a kid has a testimony of the gospel — in other words, if he or she has had personal spiritual experiences — then they're willing and almost happy to make sacrifices for the faith. If they've felt the Spirit, if they've felt a witness, that changes everything."
