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Why are religious teens happier than their secular peers?

Here’s what we can learn from the way faith communities stay rooted in the real world — and diminish the harms of the virtual one.

Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. Such communities may have constrained their members in various ways — limiting, as [author Alan] Ehrenhalt writes in ‘The Lost City,’ ‘privacy, individuality, and choice’ — but they provided ‘some anchors of stability to help us through times of . This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why mostsecular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt wasmissingfromtheir lives.

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