Religous Teens in Today's World

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I want to hear people’s honest opinions or life experiences (for an article I am trying to write for a school journalism class. This means I might use some of your direct quotes completley unaltered) on catholic teens living in todays modern world. Or any other religion for that matter.

It seems to me that teens, at school or in daily life, are suffocated by the beliefs of other none believers. They can’t stand up loud and proud for their religion without being looked down upon by their peers.

Faith doesn’t seems like such an admiral quality, atleast not where I am from. People view practicing Catholic like they are fanatical. I can’t seems to express exactley what I mean but you get the picture. I would love to hear from some other people.
 
Well yeah, you’re not going to be very popular if you stand beside Holy Mother Church and say homosexual acts are a sin, contraception is turning your spouse into a sex toy, and abortion is plain and simple murder, no matter how early in the pregnancy. All of this goes against “modern sensibilities”, and these are all big money makers to boot.

To be Catholic, practicing Catholic, is to be counter cultural. It’s not shocking to have sex before marriage, that’s expected. It’s not unusual to put yourself first, that’s encouraged. In our society, it is the conservative, Mass-attending, abstinence practicing, shelter volunteering teen that’s really unique, but the Media thinks that’s boring, so it’s never portrayed except as ‘brainwashed’, ‘ignorant’, or ‘backwards’.

I’m not a teen, in the interest of honesty, I just turned 21 a couple weeks ago, but college campuses are very anti-Catholic. It can be similar to High School. The only extreme embraced here is extreme-liberalism, which is all for sharing and allowing everyone to live how they want to live except when it comes to Catholicism, or conservatives in general. Personally, I leave them too it. In class discussions I’ll state my beliefs, and defend them if I feel like it, but I don’t really care if I don’t change anybody’s opinions or if they attack me. I don’t have time for people like that.

At the same time I don’t go looking for fights. If I have the time, maybe I’ll debate a Street Preacher (quietly, I don’t like shouting matches), but if not I walk long way around them. I don’t take classes that I know I’ll have to sit on my tongue the whole time. It’s not worth it. Some people feel differently, and I would back them up, but it’s just not my style.

Yeah it’s hard, but it’s worth it.
 
May I respectfully suggest that if you are going to be a journalist, you should work on your grammar and spelling.

My children have not faced any negativity from expressing their faith to their peers. Maybe we are just lucky… 🤷
 
I’m on the staff of my school’s award-winning newspaper. Our entire editorial staff is vey liberal and it’s really hard for me to express my beliefs. One girl (who is Mormon) quit after the first semester! I felt so bad for her!

It sucks, but we have to grin and bear it, and stand up for what we believe.

P.S. Thanks for taking journalism. It’s a bad industry right now, and those in it need our prayers.
 
spellinggirl said:
I’m on the staff of my school’s award-winning newspaper. Our entire editorial staff is vey liberal and it’s really hard for me to express my beliefs. One girl (who is Mormon) quit after the first semester! I felt so bad for her!

It sucks, but we have to grin and bear it, and stand up for what we believe.

P.S. Thanks for taking journalism. It’s a bad industry right now, and those in it need our prayers.
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in accordance to you P.S.: I know! I’m scared. I want to be a journalist when I grow up but don’t want to submit myself to writing for online readers. I love newspapers
 
The problem is you’re all young.

Faith seems unneccessary when you are that age. The world is creeping in at the edges but it hasn’t sucked too many down the sewer yet. When you are 15 you can hang around the non-religious and for the most part they are acceptable people. None of them have stolen someone’s spouse or embezzled from the company just because they can. Everyone is doing the same thing. Everyone is pretty conformist. They dress alike and talk alike. The teen years are notorious for this.

To be truly Catholic is to be countercultural. And that’s the last thing a teen wants to be. Unless it’s being revolutionary in the stale cliched sense of the word that only a teen can appreciate, i.e. to reject “traditional values” that aren’t so traditional anymore.

Life takes care of that youth part. Time changes one’s perception.

After the hangover and promiscuity of college are long gone, and the truly devout have found each other and are in good stable family lives, some of those who thought religion didn’t matter find out that actually, the nicest most trustworthy coworkers and friends they have are mostly religious people. They find that practicing a faith is important when real life issues come along and they need guidance and sustenance. They find out that they can’t do it alone.

But when you are 16, you think it’s easy to be good without going to church. Or being good is a relative term and because your friends don’t shoot heroin (or maybe they do but to condemn that is to be judgmental, the worst crime) or run over kittens in their car, they are “good.”

Fact is, they’re maybe not that “good” without religion, but like a baby tiger, their capacity to commit mayhem is limited by their youth and inexperience and lack of a car.

But when you are in high school, it’s easy to confuse lack of opportunity with real goodness. So the non-religious don’t seem that much different from the religious.

Being religious doesn’t make you perfect, but it does give you a more reliable road map to personal integrity and responsibility than the do it yourselfers. They may get there too, but only by trial and error.

The public school my children attend for lack of anything else that is feasible is filled with a host of believers, non-believers, agnostics, atheists and people of every faith imagineable. My daughters have friends who are Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Evangelical, and even Zoroastrian. No one feels stifled. The only mocking I’ve seen is from an evangelical who attacked one of my daughters for her Catholicism. The religious ones are better people. And their peers recognize it sometimes. But the desire for conformity and a live and let live attitude keep religion from being at the forefront unless it’s the FCA kids who congregate just for that purpose.

As a mother I have found that the pluralism is more of a danger than any outright attacks. It gives the kids a sense that one religion is as good as another.
 
Liberanosamalo said:
The problem is you’re all young.

Faith seems unneccessary when you are that age. .
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Not for every teen thinks that. Some mature faster than others. I know my faith is necessary and trends and fashion don’t change that for me.
 
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