By Eugene Roehlkepartain, August 2005
Spiritual development appears to be at a “tipping point” for becoming a major theme in child and adolescent development. A growing number of scholars in various disciplines have invested themselves in this field, even with little support. Practitioners are seeking answers in a changing world. The public seems interested and attentive. This is the sense one gets from the field-mapping project that Search Institute undertook from 2003 through 2004, with support from the John Templeton Foundation.
In this project, Search Institute worked with more than 100 scholars around the world to write two major books that will map the current knowledge base on spiritual development in childhood and adolescence from both theological/religious and social science perspectives. We also contracted with Fuller Theological Seminary to conduct interviews with key leaders in the field about issues, challenges, and needs.
As this work has progressed, several themes have emerged about the strengths and gaps in the field. Some of these issues—-which reflect the process of developing the books and conducting the interviews rather than the substance of the books themselves—-are presented here to stimulate additional reflection and conversation about the state of the field.
The Pressing Societal Need
Though the world has always been religiously diverse, ours is a time when the world’s peoples and religions are intermingled through migration, media, and geopolitical engagement. This contact can—-and sometimes does—-breed suspicion, mistrust, hatred, and violence. Or this contact can—-and sometimes does—-cultivate new levels of dialogue and mutual understanding that not only deepen respect and cooperation, but also provide the opportunity for each tradition to become more articulate and intentional about its own beliefs and practices. The urgent and long-term social need is to develop a sense of mutual interest and responsibility that transcends national border, religious ideology, or cultural heritage in ways that contribute to the common good and the healthy development of all young people.
High Interest Across Disciplines and Settings
Networking with a wide range of scholars and practitioners confirms the strong interest in the area of child and adolescent spirituality as well as the broad approach being taken by this initiative. Perhaps most important, the initiative has been able to connect with scholars from many different disciplines and perspectives who have not previously been connected to the discipline- and tradition-specific collegial networks but who have been conducting important research or exploring religious perspectives that will, through the publications of these books, greatly expand the accessible research and theoretical basis for the field.
Major Knowledge Gaps
Despite consistent evidence that spiritual development plays an important role in young people’s lives, all recent major reviews of spiritual and religious development research identify significant weakness in multiple areas of scholarship and typically both admonish the behavioral sciences for marginalizing this sphere of development and call for a dramatic advance in knowledge. These gaps cover many areas, including the following:
- Definition and theory—8A fundamental challenge in this field is a definitional issue, knowing that how the subject is defined not only sets boundaries on the areas of scholarship but also influences whether it is deemed legitimate in the academy. Closely aligned with the definitional challenge is the imperative to craft a comprehensive theory of spiritual development.
- Methods and measurement—-Depending on their discipline and orientation, scholars are divided on the relative value of qualitative and quantitative data. But they consistently agree that a great deal of work is needed to create research methods and measures that shed light on both the commonalities and differences in spiritual development.
- Culture and context-—One of the most widely lamented limitations of current research on spiritual development is that it pays little attention to either culture or context. The result is a relatively homogeneous research base that primarily represents majority-population young people in the United States who are part of Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Hence, the spiritual pathways of the majority of the world’s young people are grossly understudied, and theoretical models are largely Western and monotheistic in their assumptions.
- The intersection of spirituality and religion—-A persistent challenge in the field (more broadly than just with children and adolescents) is untangling the relationship between religion and spirituality—-including the definition and scope of each term. This issue is complicated by the dominance of current research and theological exploration with children and adolescents that focuses on issues of religiosity, with little intentional focus on spirituality, per se. Thus, building a knowledge base on spiritual development requires extracting spirituality themes from research that has typically been previously formulated as a subset of the study of religion or religious development.
- Less scholarly attention in religious studies—-Although faith traditions have been nurturing the spiritual lives of children and adolescents for many millennia, there appears to be relatively little scholarly attention among theologians and other religious scholars into the particular issues of nurturing spirituality with young people. Identifying diverse religious scholars who are working on these issues requires extensive networking, since their work is not yet published in the mainstream, English-language journals of religious scholarship. However, numerous scholars who have been contacted about this work recognized the importance of an intentional focus in religious studies on these issues.
Isolation of Scholars within the Field
One of the major challenges in the field of spiritual development is that there is no cohesive, integrative center of activity. Instead, it largely consists of individual scholars, educators, and other leaders working on fairly narrow projects and initiatives with limited constituencies. Because this complex domain of human development crosses multiple disciplines within the scientific communities (psychology, sociology, health, anthropology), the theological and philosophical communities (divided among disciplines and traditions), practice disciplines (e.g., youth work, education, social work, as well as religious traditions within each of these disciplines), and different parts of the world, it is rare for the diverse range of scholars and practitioners to learn from each other or to learn from other literatures—even though they share common interests in young people and their spiritual lives.
Multiple factors contribute to this lack of connection, including logistical and language barriers and—perhaps more important and challenging—competing ideologies, politics, disciplinary commitments, and other dynamics. Furthermore, there is a lack of a shared understanding (even suspicion) of the value and importance of creating a broad commitment to young people’s spiritual development that transcends ideological, national, and religious boundaries. This fragmentation inhibits the creation of a sustained learning agenda and makes it difficult to communicate clearly to the broader public about this important, but neglected, dimension of life during the formative years of childhood and adolescence.
Raising the Profile of the Field
Underlying the concerns of many in the field is a persistent lack of external validation or support for exploring child and adolescent spiritual development. In some senses, this domain has two strikes against it. First, it deals with a domain (spirituality) that has historically been marginalized in the academy. Second, it deals with children and adolescents, who have historically received less scholarly attention (in all the social sciences but particularly in religious studies) than adults in society. This lack of attention has led to two dynamics that seriously undermine the field:
- Respect in the academy—-A perennial concern is that spirituality and spiritual development is often not valued in research and higher education.
- Inadequate funding—-Although a small number of foundations have long histories of investing in religious and spiritual issues, the vast majority of funders have kept the issue at arm’s length. It is not surprising, then, that funding was the most frequently noted requirement for field building.
The Challenge of Broad Engagement
Search Institute’s approach to this field is intentionally and uniquely designed to be broad, exploring the issues of spiritual development through study that is interdisciplinary (social sciences and theological/religious studies), interfaith (including many of the world’s religious traditions), and international. The process of seeking to identify scholars—-along with the scientific research and theological groundings-—has underscored the limitations in the currently available literature. The networks of scholars interested in this field that have been most accessible have tended to be in North America and Europe and primarily within the Judeo-Christian traditions. Outreach to other continents and religious traditions has begun to surface important scholars and networks of interest that are being integrated into the initiative. Furthermore, there is great interest in being part of such a broad and unique learning network.
