"Same Is Better": A Qualitative Study of Latinx and White Young Adults in Churches of Christ in the Southwestern U.S.

As younger generations drift away from evangelical churches, the number of religiously unaffiliated young adults grows. Is the drift because of politics, personal morality, rebelliousness, culture wars, or something else? In this project, 16 young adults from the Churches of Christ participate in qualitative interviews over a five-year span. They describe messages they learned about success and survival from their faith communities as children, and how they have embraced and reinterpreted those messages into helpful life principles as adults. The resulting study explores issues of ethnicity in evangelical borderland communities and contrasts Latinx narratives with white narratives in religious and educative contexts. Findings also revealed gendered narratives, class-based narratives, and the glaring absence of helpful narratives around sexuality, filtered through the lenses of religion and education. The central finding of the interviews is this: participants experienced the Church of Christ as rewarding conformity with community, a strategy (when it works) which secures the future of the denomination and cements a conservative doctrine in the next generation of leadership. However, the study concludes that true survival narratives were the narratives participants constructed in response to the narratives provided by Churches of Christ.