Religion's Generation Gap Growing

March 2- Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll used to be the Big Three of rebellion. Some families are adding religion to that list.

An increasing number of teens and young adults who were raised in nonreligious or nominally religious families are getting swept up in religious fervor. This is creating a complicated and sometimes painful family dynamic.

The parents of 16-year-old Kevin Ellstrand are self-described secular humanists who shun organized religion. Two years ago, Kevin says, he "started following Christ with all my heart." He has taken a missionary trip to Mexico and participates in a weekly Bible study group.

In a time when many teens are having sex and taking drugs, his parents mostly consider his piety a blessing. They get upset, however, when Kevin explains that he doesn't believe in evolution. "To me, this is appalling," says his mother, Karen Byers, who has a doctorate in strategic management and was raised a Methodist. "We get into arguments, and voices get a little louder than they should." Kevin says: "I don't want my parents to go to hell for not believing in God. But that is what's going to happen, and it really scares me."

Kevin's father, Alan Ellstrand, director of M.B.A. programs at the University of Arkansas business school, says he respects his son but is saddened that he has such worries. "I'm sorry that's the byproduct of his religious studies," says Mr. Ellstrand, who grew up Unitarian.

While parents of newly devout offspring often consider religion a benign if not positive influence, some say they are disappointed that their children have chosen a lifestyle so different from their own. Some of these teens and young adults are forgoing secular careers in favor of the ministry, moving away from home to religious enclaves, skipping family celebrations and changing their given names.

Clergy are in the difficult position of trying to guide young people toward devoutness without dishonoring their families. The reluctance of parents to accept their children's choices can be a source of frustration for some youths and their pastors. "My joke is, they liked them better when they were on drugs," says Pastor Peter La Joy, who directs the student ministry at Calvary Chapel in Tucson, Ariz.

While statistics on the number of devout young people are hard to come by, some groups that minister to the young report big gains. Young Life, an evangelical Christian ministry that focuses on children "disinterested" in religion, says more than 106,000 teens attended its programs on a weekly basis during the 2005-2006 school year, up from 66,362 12 years ago. "Mecca and Main Street," a new book by Geneive Abdo, a senior analyst at the Gallup Organization's Center for Muslim Studies, argues that a significant number of young U.S. Muslims are becoming substantially more devoted to Islam than their parents. In the Jewish community, a growing number of formerly secular young people are embracing an Orthodox lifestyle.

This issue is especially fraught in immigrant communities. Magdalena Ramos, 48, and her late husband came to Los Angeles from Honduras 24 years ago to provide economic opportunity for their children. "Every parent wants their child to have more money," says Mrs. Ramos, a housekeeper who didn't raise her son, Abner, with religion. During his sophomore year at the University of California at Los Angeles, Abner declared that he had decided to devote his life to Christ. But she became disappointed when Abner decided to forgo his plans of becoming a psychologist in favor of low-paying ministry work. Though Mrs. Ramos says she is proud that her son is "a good Christian," she had thought he would be the first person in the family with a professional career. He also had told her when he was a boy that he'd one day help support her. Says Abner, who now is 29: "My mom's dreams for me are inconsistent with the callings God has for me."

Tom Lin's parents, immigrants from Taiwan, sent him to Harvard University with the expectation he would become a corporate attorney. When he instead opted for a much lower-paying career in a Christian ministry, his mother threatened to kill herself, says Mr. Lin, 34, a regional director for InterVarsity, a college ministry that has 843 chapters in the U.S. Mr. Lin adds that both parents cut off all communication with him for seven years, reconnecting only after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. (She died in 2002.) Mr. Lin says his choices were "shaming" to the values held within many immigrant cultures. His parents "moved to America for material prosperity," says Mr. Lin. "When (immigrants') children forsake the very reason they came to this country, it's particularly devastating."

Families in which the children are more religious than the parents aren't the norm. In "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers," University of Notre Dame professor Christian Smith reports that a child's religious beliefs generally will closely reflect his parents'. And not all religious fervor among the children of secular families has a solely spiritual basis. At times, "it's a part of teenage rebellion," says Azeem Khan, the former national coordinator of Young Muslims, a group that runs summer camps and other youth-oriented religious programs.

Overall, American's religious devotion seems to have remained fairly constant over the past 10 years. In a 2006 Gallup poll, 63 percent of respondents said they were members of a church or synagogue, down slightly from 65 percent in 1996. When asked how important they considered religion in their own lives, 57 percent said it was very important, the same as in 1996.

The embrace of Islam by young people can be confounding to secular Muslim-Americans who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. "Our parents were more culturally Muslim than religious," says Farhan Latif, the former president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of Michigan's Dearborn campus and the alumni adviser to the chapter. But in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks - and the racial profiling of Muslims that ensued - some young people have gravitated toward their religion as a show of ancestral pride and an act of defiance against a society they see as discriminatory. Young Muslims, for example, says it has seen participation double since 2000 to more than 1,000 people.

Growing up in a Pakistani neighborhood in London, Ershen Ali, 21, says he shied away from embracing his religion because, he says, he associated it with "a lot of hypocrisy." He says he routinely witnessed self-proclaimed devout Muslims drinking alcohol, a violation of the Quran. While attending Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he joined the Muslim Students Association and began to learn more about "true" Islam, he says. He now considers himself religious, praying four or five times a day. When planning a recent road trip, he consulted Google to find a mosque in Wyoming. Mr. Ali says his father, Rashid Ali, has greeted his religious transformation nervously. "My dad is always like, 'Keep it on the down low,'" says Ershen, a management trainee at a supply-chain management company in Los Angeles.

Rashid, an engineer for a multinational oil company in the Middle East, says that his own parents - who suffered religious persecution in India - taught him that spiritual beliefs are a private matter. And the racial profiling of young Muslim men has only cemented that view. He says he is comfortable with his son's devotion so long as he continues to stay focused on his career and maintains a moderate approach to Islam. "I feel, unfortunately, these days that you have to save your kids from drugs, from gangs and from radicalism," says the elder Mr. Ali.

Young people gravitating toward orthodoxy is also an emergent issue in the Orthodox Jewish community. There is even a minilexicon of terms to characterize the movement. Baal Teshuva (Hebrew for "master of return") is the name Orthodox Jews give to secular Jews who are changing their lives to live like and among the frum - a Yiddish word describing observant Jews. Strict Orthodox Jews tend to live in close-knit communities, dress in a conservative fashion and strive to observe all of the Torah's 613 laws. There's even an Orthodox shorthand that includes terms like "BT" (Baal Teshuva) "FFB" (frum from birth).

Few issues create more tension for families comprised of people with different religious commitments than religious holidays and family celebrations. Last year, Philip Ackerman of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and his wife wanted to take their three children and all of their grandchildren on a cruise to celebrate his 70th birthday. Among Mr. Ackerman's children is Azriela Jaffe, who is a BT and the author of a book about how newly observant Jews can get along with their less-observant relatives, "What Do You Mean, You Can't Eat in My Home?" Because the cruise ship didn't offer kosher food, and the itinerary would require travel on the Jewish Sabbath, Mrs. Jaffe and her family declined the invitation.

The Jaffes celebrate Jewish holidays separately from their extended family because they aren't observant. Secular holidays such as Thanksgiving are celebrated together when everyone travels to the Jaffes' kosher home in Highland Park, N.J. "There is no compromise. It's her way or the highway," Mr. Ackerman said during a phone interview before abruptly hanging up at his wife's urging.

In some instances, of course, a child's embrace of religion can create stronger family bonds. When Ian Matyjewicz and his twin brother became observant Jews, their mother (a secular Jew) and father (a lapsed Catholic) felt some anxieties. In some ways, Phyllis Matyjewicz says, she and her husband, George, felt like their boys were "going into another world" and wondered if each of her sons would remain "the same person." They decided to investigate the lifestyle their sons were embracing - and then decided to join in. Phyllis had to adjust to the strict rules of Orthodoxy. For George, it was a more complex proposition: He had to go through a lengthy conversion process.

For Giti Egan, her 15-year-old daughter's decision to become an Orthodox Jew brought up a range of emotions. Ms. Egan, a 36-year-old mother of three, was raised Orthodox - and left the religion after deciding that she simply didn't believe the stories in the Torah. Now her eldest child, Kara Lieberman, is embracing that world. At Kara's request, her parents send her to an Orthodox girls school. She keeps kosher within her mom's and stepfather's non-kosher kitchen. (They bought her separate plates, silverware, pots and pans - and have turned over for her exclusive use a refrigerator, dishwasher and oven.) Kara spends nearly every weekend away from home because she finds it easier to maintain the rules of the Sabbath by staying with observant relatives. "That," says her mother, "is a bummer."

But whenever Ms. Egan gets annoyed by the recordings of rabbis' lectures blaring from Kara's room or disappointed by the lack of weekend time together, she considers the benefits of her daughter's religious devotion. "She's a much happier kid now," she says.