Religious Doubting in Parochial School Adolescents

Abstract

High school juniors (N = 267) from Catholic and Protestant parochial schools were surveyed in regard to their doubting of core tenets of Christianity. Various indices were used to investigate the relationships between religious doubting and three constructs—adverse life events, family environment, and emotional distress. For the sample as a whole, support was mixed and generally weak for the hypotheses that religious doubt would correlate positively with adverse life events, conflictual family patterns, and emotional distress. However, although no denominational differences were predicted, separate analyses for the Catholic and Protestant students revealed that the latter group evidenced a pattern of consistently higher and statistically significant correlations for the predicted relationships. The authors conclude that religious doubting among adolescents may be most highly associated with adverse life events, conflictual family patterns, and emotional distress in subcultures in which religious values are well-integrated into the familial-cultural identity.