Columnist David Brooks reports that during the summer of 2008, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith and others have been conducting on the state of America’s Youth.

Smith and his colleagues asked the young adults they survey about their moral lives, and their answers would distress those who have a Christian perspective. Brooks writes, “It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18-23 year olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.”

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. Apparently, the young people they interviewed really struggled to say anything sensible in response to the questions. For example, when asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

In the book, “Lost in Transition,” Smith and his co-authors wrote, “Not many of them had previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked.” When asked about wrong or evil, most of the young people agreed that rape and murder are wrong. But beyond those extremes, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. One interviewee said it like this, “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often.”

Most of the interviewees responded over and over again that moral choices are just a matter of individual preference. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?” In regards to responding to authority, most of the interviewees responded by saying, “I would do what I thought made me happy or by how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Smith and his colleagues found an atmosphere of extreme moral relativism among the young adults they interviewed, but believe that the study says more about adult America than it does about youthful America. The study doesn’t indicate that today’s young adults are more naturally immoral than they have been in years past. It simply means that young people have not been given the resources – by schools, institutions and families – to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, and to check behaviors that may be degrading. In other words, the moral values of the young adults of our day have been shaped by the moral relativism they see at home in the lives of their parents, on the television programs and movies they watch, and in the schools they attend.

The outcome of Smith’s study reminds us that we must raise our children in the very best of Christian atmospheres so they will have good and godly values as they grow into adulthood. What should be some of our responses to the “Lost in Transition” study? One, we must involve our children in the Children’s and Youth ministries of our church, even when they don’t want to attend. In those ministries they will learn godly values at their level of understanding, while being connected to godly peers. Two, we must either enroll our children in Christian schools that teach and portray Biblical values (like our own Crescent City Christian School), or communicate with them regularly about what they are learning in their schools, being sure to affirm over and over Christian values and beliefs as opposed to secular society’s values and beliefs. Three, we must live out our Christian faith and beliefs on a daily basis in front of our children. We must provide them with the godly examples, education and encouragement they desperately need from the most influential people in their lives if they are to have good and godly values in today’s ungodly world. When we fail to “live out” in front of our children what we profess to believe and value, they will reject the beliefs and values we say are so important to us and should be important to them. So that means that we adults must not be content to be weekend church attendees, but we must become devoted and dynamic disciples of Jesus, involved in the church and connected with other Christian. We must immerse ourselves fervently in what we believe and value if our children are to have the right kind of values as they grow to adulthood.

I had lunch this week with a man I greatly respect, who was telling me about his children’s response to the teachers and leaders of their well-respected school. His children basically said, “Our teachers and school leaders profess to be Christians, but they’re not like you and mom.” What those children were saying was, “We see the presence and power of the Lord in your lives mom and dad.” May every child in our church have the opportunity to say and think the same thing about their parents.