It is no surprise, then, that Smith recognizes that many of the implications for adherence to concrete congregations and the Christian life -- what Smith calls "religion" -- a liberal democratic abstraction that takes away the particularity of what Smith actual finds. Smith documents that the time of emerging adulthood is filled with transitions and distractions that arise from having to remake oneself as an "unencumbered self" (Michael Sandel) -- "a self understood as prior to and independent of purposes and ends."

According to Smith, emerging adults are learning to cope with adult responsibilities, and find themselves incredibly busy. Smith writes, "That is made worse by another factor: after school and work comes play. . . . The fun emerging adults believe they are supposed to be having usually centers on the evenings and weekends, and especially weekend evenings. . . . More generally, there is simply too much else going on at the time to go to church, synagogue, temple, or mosque" (p. 77). The emerging adult must experiment to discover what is most therapeutic for them to help them deal with the strain of the managerial realm. They are learning how to be assimilated into North American structures between work and play that drive the economy forward.

The prolonged time of identity differentiation, renegotiating relationships with parents, delaying of marriage and family formation, keeping options open for future opportunities, all cast weight to construct a self that is unencumbered except for how the individual wills it, how he or she finds it right for them. Rather than moving into a formed life, this self demands toleration, pluralism of experiences, and the distinct cultural modes of "partying, hooking up, having sex, and cohabiting." The unencumbered self must become an expressive self through the employment of its own unfettered will; these activities are culturally offered to help (?!?) this occur.

All these factors, grounded in liberal political institutions, have anti-ecclesial pulls on the lifes of emerging adults. It reduces the church to a "life-style enclave." If one adheres to a congregation, it is more likely that one does it for "community" (other emerging adults who are working their ways through the cultural demands to end in what the culture calls adulthood). Interestingly, the one cultural force that moves emerging adults toward the church are those who have suffered from the de- and re-traditioning forces of the liberal political institiutions. "These emerging adults, if they have even been able to pull out of their damaged and damaging lives at all--some have not--need serious help to stop their self-destructive behaviors and engage in the hard work of rebuilding themselves and their futures. . . .For some of them, it turns out, religion provides a crucial source of this help" (p. 85). Ironically, this means those who have been most secularized by the culture find themselves moving back to the church in order to reconstruct a life in participation with what human lives are supposed to be about -- one on the other side of an unencumbered self exercising an expressivist will. As a Christian, I can account for this movement.

What all this shows is that there are cultural/institutional forces at work that seeks to remove those in their late teens and twenties away from the church as constitutive of their lives. The logic of liberal democracies are strongly at work in its body formative powers. Only when the cost to the human beings that this extracts is evident, do the social forces move persons back to the context of where they can discover what it really is to be human. Even here, however, the danger is that the church becomes merely a voluntary association for a type of experience for the self, constructed by human will.

This is not the church. In Sanctorum Communio, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote even in 1929 that applies still today:

Our age is not poor in experiences, but in faith. One faith can create true experience of the church, so we think it more important for our age to be led into belief in the church of God, than to have experiences squeezed from it which as such are of no help at all, but which, when there is faith in the sanctorum communio, are produced of their own accord" (p. 198).