Back-Pocket God

The culmination of a decade-long project, in which researchers followed a set of young people as they grew from teenagers into adults, Back Pocket God challenges some popular assumptions about young people and religion. Melinda Denton and Richard Flory find that young adults are indeed moving away from organized religion. Yet, they don't seem so much opposed to religion or to religious organizations, at least in the abstract, as they are uninterested in religion, at least as they have experienced it. Religion is like the ubiquitous smartphones in our back pockets: there to be used, when convenient, to accomplish a particular task.