Seeking the Good Life: The Moral Development of Young People in America

This dissertation consists of three essays on moral development among young Americans during the transition to adulthood. Its goal is to illuminate the social mechanisms by which young people’s moral views develop, solidify or change, and shape their religious and political views. All three essays are based on analyses of longitudinal interviews, field notes, and nationally representative surveys from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a 10-year study with 4 waves of data collected from 2002 to 2012. The first essay proposes a new approach for studying religious engagement, which involves considering the moral orders that shape people’s religious understandings. It finds that respondents’ religious understandings are strongly influenced by an intuitive moral framework consisting of two spectrums: “following the way” versus “making the way” and “helping self” versus “helping others.” Based on different orientations to this framework, it theorizes four ideal types of religious practitioners that help explain complex patterns of religious engagement and change in America. The second essay examines the development of Christian nationalist views during the transition to adulthood. It conceptualizes “affective conditioning” as an enculturation process by which emotions shape ideological views and cultural attitudes. Its analysis identifies distinct traumatic upbringing experiences among respondents, which condition heightened threat-sensitive emotions, giving Christian nationalists an enduring sense that their way of life is “under attack” and motivating reactionary sociological attitudes. It also distinguishes two dominant types of Christian nationalist ideology rooted in different emotion systems. The third essay analyzes the development of liberal and conservative political orientations, considering the moderating role of perception in respondents’ moral and political views. It finds that respondents’ views fundamentally concern a perceived gestalt of society as needing or not needing progressive reform, which emerges from the combined influences of their political upbringing, compliance with the established order, and prosociality. It then explains how different combinations of these factors lead to different political orientations. By conceptualizing and illustrating the roles of moral intuitions, emotions, and perceptions, each of these chapters offers new insights about how morality shapes and is shaped by social life.