‘Religious-lite’: a phenomenon and its relevance to the debate on identity development and emerging adulthood

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative study of Israeli Jewish youth who self-identify as ‘religious-lite’ – intended to uncover the reasons youth choose to define themselves using a non-institutionalized, somewhat dissonant identity label. Eighteen participants aged 22–29 were administered in-depth interviews regarding their deliberations as to preferred identity. Analysis reveals that participants rejected major aspects of the modern identity project yet paradoxically adopt an identity label they view as enabling them to benefit from aspects of relational and intra-psychic coherence that it nevertheless provides. Furthermore, ‘religious-lite’ was seen as a temporary identity fitting their specific life-stage of emerging adulthood, though not inferior to consonant identities they envisioned they would adopt in adulthood. We discuss this phenomenon in the context of recent debates on identity's psychological structural change during the now extended transition to adulthood, and the debate on emerging adulthood as a developmental stage.

Keywords:

• identity
• young adulthood

Notes

1. Marcia's typology is used both for describing status regarding specific content domains (e.g. vocational identity, religious identity, ideological identity) and in a global manner encompassing all domains. We did not assess our respondents’ global identity status; rather we attempted to examine the goodness-of-fit of the logic of the status model to the respondents’ ideas regarding identity in the religious domain.