Across the spectrum of social sciences, theology, and religious studies, relatively little academic attention has been paid to spiritual development for children youth, despite its appearing to be an important facet of human development. One way to document the lack of academic attention to this issue is simply to count what’s published in the academic literature. In 2003, investigators Peter L. Benson, Eugene C. Roehlkepartain, and Stacey P. Rude, did this in both the social science literature and in religious or theological studies, and the results are striking.
They first searched two broad social science databases, Social Science Abstracts and PsycINFO, to determine the extent to which religion and spirituality were being addressed in published studies between 1990 and 2002.
The Gap in Scientific Literature
Even with the use of broad criteria and no effort to screen for quality or depth of analysis, less than 1% of the articles cataloged in the two databases addressed issues of spirituality or spiritual development among children and adolescents. Furthermore, when “spiritual development” was compared with other areas of development (such as cognitive, psychosocial, moral, and emotional), spiritual development hardly registers, with about 11 times more attention paid to emotional development than to spiritual development.
The team also analyzed the articles catalogued in the ATLA Religion Database, the main library database used to find books and articles in theology, religious studies, and related fields. Of the 305,498 articles, books, and dissertations catalogued, only 2,705 include child as a key word, and only 977 use the key word youth. Furthermore, only 120 entries include the three key words of child, youth, and spiritual; many of these entries are book reviews or are practice-oriented articles concerned with religious socialization.
In other words, if you were to randomly pick 1,000 academic articles in theology or social science published over the past 10 years, chances are good that you’d only find about 10 articles that deal with young people’s spiritual development.
Why the gap and inattention? Explanations include the skepticism of empiricists and scientists about religion and spirituality and the pressure in academia to study and publish on “serious” topics. One of the core goals of the Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence will be to initiate new examinations of this essential part of human development in the first two decades of life.
