Abstract
Current research indicates that younger Americans, driven by socioeconomic shifts and cultural trends prioritizing self-actualization, are increasingly disinclined toward traditional communal organizations. Yet a search for self-actualization may, in fact, lead religiously inclined young adults to traditional communal organizations, which are characterized by relatively strict organizational norms. To explore how such organizations respond to the tension between self-actualization and communal practices, this paper describes a multi-method study of an urban Jewish congregation that experienced a large influx of young adults. The paper demonstrates two related outcomes of the resultant tension: first, the strategic integration of self-expressive content into traditional organizational practices, in a manner that allows these practices to become vehicles for self-actualization; second, the leveraging of these young adults’ transience, in both formal and informal ways, in order to maintain organizational stability. These two seemingly paradoxical outcomes contribute to our understanding of how some communal organizations respond to young adults’ self-actualizing inclinations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Individualism connotes a focus on individual experience, as opposed to a focus on the social group. Self-actualization specifies a quest for personalized authenticity, self-expression, and an agentic identity; it may be linked to a form of intensive individualism that involves rigorous self-examination, as well as external practices, based on expert opinions or authoritative texts, that are aimed at self-improvement and personal fulfillment.
In this paper, communal organizations indicate social associations that revolve around shared values and practices. Traditional communal organizations observe long-time practices more strictly, sometimes utilizing hierarchies of authority to preserve it; some, but not all, traditional communal organizations are religious, and may be referred to as traditional congregations.
The concept of emerging adulthood was first developed by Arnett (2000), a psychologist. It was further explored in sociological research by Smith and Snell (2009), and by Fischer (2011: 6), who links it to the decline of traditional social bonds. “Late adolescence” and “young adulthood” are alternative terms (Bois-Reymond 1994; Heath 2004), but I found that emerging adulthood was the most clearly defined conceptualization of this life-stage.
This applies both to young adults in higher socioeconomic brackets, who travel for educational and employment opportunities, and to those facing economic challenges, whose diminishing job and marriage opportunities may alienate them from local institutions (Putnam 2015).
For more on how the disciplining process of embodied religious practices shapes a gendered agentic identity, see Griffith (1997) on Evangelical women.
Modern Orthodox differ from ultra-Orthodox Jews, who integrate a selective avoidance of secular culture into their strict observance of Jewish law. Both Modern and ultra-Orthodox Jews have many sub-groups, with varying degrees of observance and cultural distinctions.
This extends Finke’s (2004) claim that religious groups can successfully preserve core teachings while innovating on organizational and less essential issues. In this case, the balance between core teachings and innovation required demographic change: from an older, less educated membership to a younger, more innovative but also more educated new membership.
As a Modern Orthodox congregation, this is a relatively more progressive scene than in many ultra-Orthodox synagogues, where the women usually only observe the men dance and engage in no ritual activity at all in the women’s section.
References
Ammerman, Nancy T. 1997. Organized religion in a voluntaristic society. Sociology of Religion 58 (3): 203–215.
Ammerman, Nancy T. and Arthur E. Farnsley. 1997. Congregation and community. Rutgers University Press.
Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. 2000. Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist 55: 5.
Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. 2004. Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties. New York: Oxford University Press.
Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen, and Lene Arnett Jensen. 2002. A congregation of one: Individualized religious beliefs among emerging adults. Journal of Adolescent Research 17 (5): 451–467.
Avishai, Orit. 2008. ‘Doing religion’ in a secular world: Women in conservative religions and the question of agency. Gender & Society 22 (4): 409–433.
Beck, Ulrich, and Johannes Willms. 2004. Conversations with Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity.
Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William N. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steve Tipton. 1985. Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. UC Press.
Blair-Loy, Mary. 2003. Competing devotions: Career and family among women executives. Harvard University Press.
Bois-Reymond, Manuela du. 1998. ‘I don’t want to commit myself yet’: Young people’s life concepts. Journal of Youth Studies 1 (1): 63–79.
Boyarin, Jonathan. 1997. Circumscribing constitutional identities in Kiryas Joel. The Yale Law Journal 106 (5): 1537–1570.
Brown, Harriet. 2015. Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight--and What We Can Do about It. Boston MA, Da Capo Press.
Cohen, Steven M., Jacob B. Ukeles, and Ron Miller. 2012. Jewish community study of New York: 2011 comprehensive report. UJA-Federation of New York.
Côté, James E. 2006. “Emerging Adulthood as an Institutionalized Moratorium: Risks and Benefits to Identity Formation.” In Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen and Jennifer Lynn Tanner. 2006. Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century. APA, 85–116.
Donin, Hayim H. 1991. To Be A Jew: A Guide To Jewish Observance In Contemporary Life. New York, N.Y: Basic Books.
Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. 2003. Culture in interaction. American Journal of Sociology 108 (4): 735–794.
Engelberg, Ari. 2016. Religious Zionist singles: Caught between ‘family values’ and ‘young adulthood. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 55 (2): 349–364.
Fader, Ayala. 2009. Mitzvah girls: Bringing up the next generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Farrell, Amy Erdman. 2011. Fat shame: Stigma and the fat body in American culture. New York London: NYU Press.
Fischer, Claude S. 2005. Bowling alone: What’s the score? Social Networks 27: 155–167.
Fischer, Claude S. 2010. Made in America: A social history of American culture and character. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Fischer, Claude S. 2011. Still connected: Family and friends in America since 1970. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Finke, Roger. 2004. Innovative returns to tradition: Using Core teachings as the Foundation for Innovative Accommodation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (1): 19–34.
Fishman, Sylvia B. 2007. Perfect person singular: Unmarried adults in contemporary orthodox American Jewish Communities. In Gender relationships in marriage and out, ed. Rivkah Blau, 91–113. Jersey City: Yeshiva University Press/Ktav.
Flory, Richard W., and Donald E. Miller. 2008. Finding faith: The spiritual quest of the post-boomer generation. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University press.
Frank, David John, and John W. Meyer. 2002. The profusion of individual roles and identities in the postwar period. Sociological Theory 20 (1): 86–105.
Furstenberg, Frank F. 2010. On a new schedule: Transitions to adulthood and family change. The Future of Children / Center for the Future of Children, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation 20 (1): 67–87.
Griffith, R. Marie. 1997. God’s daughters: Evangelical women and the power of submission. University of California Press.
Hammersley, Martyn and Paul Atkinson. 2007. Ethnography: Principles in practice. Taylor & Francis.
Hammond, Philip E. 1992. Religion and personal autonomy: The third disestablishment in America. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Hays, Sharon. 1998. The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press.
Heath, Sue. 2004. Peer-shared households, quasi-communes and neo-tribes. Current Sociology 52 (2): 161–179.
Heilman, Samuel C. 1998. Synagogue life: A study in symbolic interaction. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Heilman, Samuel C. 2006. Sliding to the right: The contest for the future of American Jewish orthodoxy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heilman, Samuel C., and Steven M. Cohen. 1989. Cosmopolitans & Parochials: Modern orthodox Jews in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kellner, Menachem. 2006. Must a Jew believe anything? Littman library of Jewish civilization.
Lamm, Norman. 1990. Torah Umadda: The encounter of religious learning and worldly knowledge in the Jewish tradition. Northvale, N.J: J. Aronson.
Lichterman, Paul. 1996. The search for political community: American activists reinventing commitment. Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mahmood, Saba. 2004. Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press.
Marti, Gerardo and Gladys Ganiel. 2014. The deconstructed church: Understanding emerging Christianity. Oxford University Press.
Martí, Gerardo. 2015. Religious reflexivity: The effect of continual novelty and diversity on individual religiosity. Sociology of Religion 76 (1): 1–13.
McLean, Scott L., David Andrew Schultz, and Manfred B. Steger. 2002. Social Capital: Critical Perspectives on Community and “Bowling Alone.” NYU Press.
Meyer, John W., and Ronald L. Jepperson. 2000. The ‘actors’ of modern society: The cultural construction of social agency. Sociological Theory 18 (1): 100–120.
Meyer, John W. 1986. “Myths of Socialization and Personality.” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford University Press.
Nishma. 2017. The Nishma Research profile of American modern orthodox Jews. Nishma Research.
Olson, Paul J., and David Beckworth. 2011. Religious change and stability: Seasonality in church attendance from the 1940s to the 2000s. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50 (2): 388–396.
Oppenheimer, Valerie Kincade. 1988. A theory of marriage timing. American Journal of Sociology 94 (3): 563–591.
Osgood, Wane D., et al. 2005. Six paths to adulthood. In on the frontier of adulthood: Theory, research, and public policy, ed. Richard A. Setterstein Jr., Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., and Ruben G. Rumbaut. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Patton, Michael Q. 2002. Qualitative research & evaluation methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Petts, Richard J. 2009. Trajectories of religious participation from adolescence to young adulthood. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48 (3): 552–571.
Pew Research Center. 2015. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape”.
Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our kids: The American dream in crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam, Robert D., and William Campbell. 2012. American grace: How religion divides and unites us. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Ries, Eric. 2011. The lean startup: How Today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. Crown Business.
Rosenblum, Jonathan. 2009. Confronting the Shidduch crisis. Cross-Currents.
Salamon, Michael. The Shidduch Crisis: Causes and Cures. New York, Self-published, 2008.
Saldaña, Johnny. 2013. The coding manual for qualitative researchers. London: Sage.
Sarna, Jonathan. 2004. American Judaism: A history. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Smith, Christian. 1998. American evangelicalism: Embattled and thriving. University of Chicago Press.
Smith, Christian, and Patricia Snell. 2009. Souls in transition: The religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soloveitchik, Haym. 1999. “Rupture and reconstruction: The transformation of contemporary orthodoxy.” Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader pp. 320–76.
Synagogue Bulletin. 1968, 1971, 1972. New York, NY.
Synagogue Journal, 5. 1996. Message from the honoree. New York, NY: Congregation [Beth Shalom].
Tavory, Iddo. 2013. The private life of public ritual: Interaction, sociality and codification in a Jewish orthodox congregation. Qualitative Sociology 36 (2): 125–139.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.
Timmermans, Stefan, and Iddo Tavory. 2012. Theory construction in qualitative Research: From grounded theory to abductive analysis. Sociological Theory 30 (3): 167–186.
Uecker, Jeremy E., Mark D. Regnerus, and Margaret L. Vaaler. 2007. Losing my religion: The social sources of religious decline in early adulthood. Social Forces 85 (4): 1667–1692.
Voas, David, and Mark Chaves. 2016. Is the United States a counterexample to the secularization thesis? American Journal of Sociology 121 (5): 1517–1556.
Warner, R. Stephen. 2005. A Church of Our Own: Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion. Rutgers University Press.
Whitney, William B. and Pamela E. King. 2014. “Religious congregations and communities.” in Emerging Adults’ Religiousness and Spirituality: Meaning-Making in an Age of Transition, edited by Carolyn M. Barry and Mona M. Abo-Zena. Oxford University press.
Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. UC Press.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2002. Loose connections: Joining together in America’s fragmented communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2007. After the baby boomers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Ann Swidler, Claude Fischer, Casey Homan, Jessica Lopez-Espino, Lindsay Bayham, Iddo Tavory, and Robert Wuthnow and the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University for their invaluable assistance with this paper. The author would also like to thank Shayna Weiss for the original inspiration for this research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Electronic supplementary material
ESM 1
(DOCX 15 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lichtenstein, M. “Younger People Want to Do it Themselves” - Self-Actualization, Commitment, and the Reinvention of Community. Qual Sociol 42, 181–203 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-019-9414-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-019-9414-6