Hardwired to Connect

A national report by a blue ribbon commission says:

A ... significant body of research also shows that people are ``hardwired" for meaning, born with a built-in capacity and drive to ask the ultimate questions about life's purpose: Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? How should I live? What will happen when I die?

Across time and cultures, this distinctively human pursuit has been closely connected to spiritual seeking and experience and to religious belief and practice. Using brain imaging, neuroscientists Eugene d Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg's have found that the same part of the brain that underlies the human need to seek answers to what is true about life's deepest questions also underlies many spiritual and religious experiences. In other words, the pursuit of meaning appears to be physiologically linked to spiritual and religious seeking.

To date the influence of religion on U.S. young people has been ``grossly understudied," according to Byron Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania. However, existing research is highly suggestive.

For adolescents, religiosity is significantly associated with a reduced likelihood of both unintentional and intentional injury (both of which are leading causes of death for teenagers. Homicides, suicides and accidents account for 85 percent of all deaths among early to late adolescents).

Religious teenagers are safer drivers and are more likely to wear seatbelts than their less religious peers. They are less likely to become juvenile delinquents or adult criminals. They are less prone to substance abuse. They are less likely to endorse engaging in high-risk behavior or the idea of enjoying danger.

On the positive side of the coin, religiously committed teenagers are more likely to volunteer in the community, to participate in sports and student government, to have high self-esteem and more positive attitudes about life.

Much of this research is based on large national studies. One religious quality that appears to be especially beneficial, in terms of mental health and lifestyle consequences, is what some scholars call personal devotion, or the young person's sense of participating in a ``direct personal relationship with the Divine." Personal devotion among adolescents in associated with reduced risk-taking, more effectively resolving feelings of loneliness, greater regard for self and for others, and a stronger sense that life has meaning and purpose.

These protective effects of personal devotion are twice as great for adolescents as they are for adults. This last finding clearly reinforces the idea, found in many cross-national studies, that adolescence is a time of particularly intense searching for, and openness to, the transcendent. Here is how Lisa Miller of Columbia University puts it: ``A search for spiritual relationship with the Creator may be an inherent developmental process in adolescence." For this reason, the Commission is recommending that our society as a whole, and youth advocates and youth service professionals in particular, should pay greater attention to this aspect of youth development.

This task will not be easy, the Commission's warns in its report. Because we are a philosophically diverse and religiously plural society, many of our youth-serving programs and social environments for young people will need to find ways respectfully to reflect that diversity and pluralism. But that is a challenge to be embraced, not avoided.

One of the many problems with the avoidance strategy is that denying or ignoring the spiritual needs of adolescents may end up creating a void in their lives that either devolves into depression or is filled by other forms of questing and challenge, such as drinking, unbridled consumerism, petty crime, sexual precocity, or flirtations with violence.


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