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Religion and Habitus: Exploring the Relationship Between Religious Involvement and Educational Outcomes and Orientations Among Urban African American Students Brian Barrett Urban Education 2010 45: 448 DOI: 10.1177/0042085910372349 The online version of this article can be found at: http://uex.sagepub.com/content/45/4/448

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Religion and Habitus: Exploring the Relationship Between Religious Involvement and Educational Outcomes and Orientations Among Urban African American Students

Urban Education 45(4) 448–479 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0042085910372349 http://uex.sagepub.com

Brian Barrett1 Abstract Large, lingering, and recently widening gaps in educational achievement exist amid growing differences in access to educational opportunity along lines of race and socioeconomic status among American students. Recognizing these gaps and developing strategies for eliminating them is essential. Previous research has documented a positive relationship between religious involvement and a wide range of adolescent outcomes. Most importantly, for the purposes of this article, these outcomes include educational resilience, attainment, and achievement. However, relatively little is known about the factors behind the relationship between religious involvement and educational outcomes especially for those students most often marginalized within the mainstream education system. This article seeks in particular to explore the influence of religious involvement on the educational outcomes of urban African American adolescents. It draws primarily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Christian Smith in constructing a theoretical framework employed in the qualitative analysis of interview data illustrating some mechanisms by which religious involvement can serve to promote positive educational outcomes among these students. 1

SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY

Corresponding Author Brian Barrett Email: [email protected]


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Keywords religious involvement, social capital, cultural capital, urban education outcomes Successful educational outcomes are not merely features of personal attributes and school processes (Glanville, Sikkink, & Hernandez, 2008). Individual, parental, peer group, and environmental characteristics as wells as socialization experiences all affect how well children perform in school (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2004; Weis, 1988). The impact of socialization through religious involvement on educational outcomes1 remains underexamined.

Religious Socialization In positioning the church as a socializing agent, Brown and Gary (1991) note that “to the extent that individuals are involved in a church or religious belief system, a socializing influence is exerted upon them” (p. 413) and define religious socialization as encompassing “the process by which an individual learns and internalizes attitudes, values, and behaviors within the context of a religious system of beliefs and practices” (Brown & Gary, 1991, p. 412). The socializing influence of religion stems from a number of sources such as exposure to scripture, participation in rituals and fellowship activities, and interaction with church leaders and fellow congregants. Brown and Gary offer the sermon and the wide range of moral lessons and social and political issues that sermons often touch on as a particular example of religious socialization at work. These aspects of religious involvement can serve to shape and form attitudes, outlooks, behaviors, and practices in the church setting and in other secular endeavors, such as education (Brown & Gary, 1991), reinforcing what Regnerus (2000) terms “‘traditional’ paths to success” (p. 364). The vital role played by churches as socializing agents in low-income urban areas, such as the locus of this study (detailed below), has been recognized before. Churches are often among the last institutions of civil society to leave and first to return to low-income urban neighborhoods and communities (Foley, McCarthy, & Chaves, 2001), and are “often the only, or at least the primary, institutions committed to the welfare of poor, inner-city neighborhoods” (Winship & Berrien, 1999, cited in Regnerus, 2008, p. 3). While these neighborhoods “rarely enjoy the social benefits that result from extensive legal commerce, plentiful good jobs, and strong schools that more stable communities enjoy . . . [they] do benefit from the significant presence of religious institutions” (Regnerus, 2008, p. 3).


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Overall, religious involvement has been demonstrated to correlate with physical (Jeynes, 1999; McIntosh & Spilka, 1990) and psychological health (Donahue & Benson, 1995; Glanville et al., 2008; Wright, Frost, & Wisecarver, 1993). It has also been shown to relate inversely with delinquent and highrisk behavior such as drug and alcohol abuse and adolescent sexual activity (Benson, 1990; Donahue & Benson, 1995; Glanville et al., 2008; Jeynes, 1999; Muller & Ellison, 2001). Among urban adolescents in particular, religious involvement has been considered a protective factor in fostering prosocial behavior and development. For example, the effects of neighborhood disorder on crime and drug use among urban youth have been shown to be mediated by individual religious involvement (Johnson, Jang, Li, & Larsen, 2000). Likewise, churchgoing by urban youths has been associated with a number of positive behavioral outcomes, such as higher rates of school attendance and labor force attachment (Freeman, 1986). In terms of race, scholars dating back to W. E. B. DuBois (1898) have conceptualized the Black church as a key agency of social organization among African Americans (Johnson et al., 2000; Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990). In the past, for example, the Black church served as an “invisible institution” (Frazier, 1963) providing “one of the only social vehicles through which slaves could meet and organize” (Johnson et al. 2000, p. 480) at a time when other forms of social organization were forbidden for them. This example highlights also a historical tendency among Black Americans to turn inward and rely on one another for support in the face of racism, discrimination, and limited access to alternative sources of aid (Lee, Campbell, & Miller, 1991)— issues and inequalities that continue to confront Black students within the education system today. Billingsley and Caldwell (1991), citing data from the University of Michigan’s National Survey of Black Americans (indicating, for example, that 84% of African American adults surveyed considered themselves to be religious and that 76% said that the church was a very important institution in their early childhood socialization), stated that “the Black church continues to hold the allegiance of large numbers of African Americans and exerts great influence over their behavior” (p. 428). They added that, “in the African American community, the church is more than a religious institution” (Billingsley & Caldwell, 1991, p. 412). Accordingly, Brown and Gary (1991) included psychological affirmation (personal comfort, consultation, emotional support, etc.), identity formation (the establishment and affirmation of group values), social support (advice, assistance, material aids, and services), protest (political education, advocacy, etc.), economic activity (employment


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opportunities and fund raising), education (Sunday school, adult education seminars, and forums for development of leadership and organizational skills), creativity (opportunities for involvement in and the development of spirituals, plays, sermons, gospel music), and social intercourse (picnics, church dinners, sports, church trips, etc.) among the social functions of religion particularly salient to the socialization experience of African Americans.

Religious Socialization and Educational Outcomes Religious socialization, associated above with various positive social outcomes, relates positively to a range of educational outcomes, including heightened educational expectations and increased standardized test scores (Elder & Conger, 2000; Sanders, 1998), and is inversely correlated with dropping out (Scharf, 1998; Smith, 2003). Religious socialization reinforces attitudes, outlooks, behaviors, and practices (Regnerus, 2000), shaping what Glanville et al. (2008, p. 128) term a habitus (a process, detailed more thoroughly later, “whereby the social comes to be inscribed within the individual as the structuring principles of consciousness”; Moore, 2004, p. 126) conducive to positive educational outcomes. Such behavioral and attitudinal reinforcement operates particularly through individuals’ commitment to and adoption of the goals and expectations of a group (such as the congregation or a religious youth group), which serves to offer constraints and opportunities in shaping individual action (Glanville et al., 2008). For example, religious socialization reinforces “the importance of staying in school, working hard to attain good grades, and achieving a diploma” (Regnerus, 2008, p. 5). Of particular salience in situating this article are seven studies examining (a) the effects of religious commitment on the academic achievement of Black students (Jeynes, 1999, 2002), (b) the impact of religious involvement on the educational outcomes of students in high-poverty neighborhoods (Regnerus, 2000; Regnerus & Elder, 2003), and (c) the possible mediating effect of social capital on the relationship between students’ religious involvement and their educational outcomes (Barrett, 2009; Glanville et al., 2008; Muller & Ellison, 2001). Jeynes (1999) assessed the effects of religious commitment (defined as church attendance and self perception of religiosity) on the academic achievement of Black and Hispanic children. He found that religiously committed Black and Hispanic children outperformed their less religious (Black and Hispanic) counterparts on standardized measures of math, reading, science, and social studies. Religiously committed students were also significantly more likely to have completed the core curriculum by 12th grade.


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This was true even after controlling for socioeconomic status, gender, and whether the student attended a private religious school, which Jeynes (1999) noted has been the focus of most of the debate on the effects of religion on educational outcomes (Bryk, Lee, & Holland, 1993; Chubb & Moe, 1990; Coleman, Hoffer, & Kilgore, 1982). Likewise, Jeynes’ (2002) meta-analysis seeking to determine the effects of religious schooling and personal religious commitment on Black and Hispanic students’ academic achievement indicated that, even after controlling for key demographic factors such as gender and socioeconomic status, individual religious commitment as well as, and apart from, the macro-level of religious schooling each have a positive effect on academic achievement and school-related behavior. Jeynes (1999) suggested that it may be that the historic academic advantage that students of religious schools have had over students from public schools may have as much or more to do with the individual levels of religious commitment of the students than whether they attended a public or religious school. (p. 459) Regnerus (2000) proposed and tested a multilevel model of involvement in church activities and schooling success among metropolitan U.S. public high school sophomores, which indicated that respondents’ participation in church activities is related to heightened educational expectations and that more intensely religious students score higher on standardized math and reading tests, even while controlling for variables such as socioeconomic status that often show religious effects to be spurious. Although his hypothesis that the power of church involvement in predicting these outcomes would be greatest for students in poorer neighborhoods was not supported, Regnerus and Elder (2003) subsequently found that, though adolescents in low-income neighborhoods do not differ in their church attendance patterns from their peers in higher-income areas, their religious involvement is more likely to contribute to their academic progress than it is among youth in higher income neighborhoods. This finding held even with adjustments for key risk and protective factors. In exploring factors behind the relationship between religious involvement and educational outcomes, and in light of its explosion within social science research literature over the past 15 years, researchers have more recently begun to consider the potential role played by social capital. Incorporating social capital into their analysis, Muller and Ellison (2001) found adolescents’ religious involvement to be consistently and positively


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associated with various forms of academic progress. While the estimated effects of religious involvement on academic progress were explained largely by family and community social capital, religious involvement remained modestly but significantly linked with desirable outcomes even when controlling for social capital and students’ background. Likewise, Glanville et al. (2008) examined the potential role of social capital and extracurricular participation in mediating the relationship between religious participation and academic achievement, dropping out of high school, and attachment to school. They found that religious attendance promotes intergenerational closure, extracurricular participation, and access to educational resources and normative reinforcement through friendship networks. However, those intervening variables accounted for only a small part of adolescent religious participation’s influence on educational outcomes, indicating that the mechanisms behind the significant and positive relationship between religious involvement and successful educational outcomes need to be further explored and explained. Using a representative sample of urban high school seniors, Barrett (2009) found religious involvement to relate significantly and positively with educational outcomes. Like Muller and Ellison (2001), Barrett hypothesized that social capital would ultimately explain and mediate much of the salutary influence of religious involvement on adolescent socialization. While this was indeed the case for White students in the sample (controlling for social capital as well as key demographic variables such as gender and socioeconomic status wiped out the statistical significance of religious involvement as a predictor of positive educational outcomes among them), the results among Black students in the sample were very different. Although some of the relationship between religious involvement and educational outcomes for Black students was explained by social capital and other demographic factors, religious involvement remained the most effective predictor of positive educational outcomes. While religious involvement appears to act as an important source of access to educationally instrumental social capital for these students to a much greater degree than it does for their White counterparts, there are other mechanisms not strictly related to social capital by which religious involvement appears to promote positive educational outcomes among Black students in the sample. This article attempts to identify and illustrate some of these mechanisms, inclusive of but not restricted to the role of social capital, by which religious involvement promotes positive educational outcomes. In doing so, it draws largely on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Christian Smith to construct the theoretical framework employed in the qualitative analysis of interview data


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obtained from participants in my previous study (Barrett, 2009). The article seeks to respond to calls for further research examining why Black students tend to benefit so much from religious involvement (Jeynes, 2002) and for research that tests the variability of the relationship between religious involvement and educational outcomes across racial and ethnic contexts as well as in the presence of consolidated inequality “where poor neighborhoods [and schools] are also largely inhabited by racial or ethnic minorities” (Regnerus, 2000, p. 369).

Theoretical Framework The concept of habitus has long been employed by sociologists and has its roots in the work of Durkheim (1995) and Weber (1966). More recently, it has been developed by Pierre Bourdieu, who conceptualizes it as a durable but not entirely inflexible system of learned attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors toward one’s probabilities and possibilities of life trajectories (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Habitus is acquired through socialization within families and social groups and, “integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Bourdieu, 1971, p. 83). In short, based on what are often the unconscious effects of socialization and of peoples’ observations of “people like us,” habitus is implicated as a driving factor behind peoples’ decisions regarding, for example, whether to drop out or to remain in school or whether to pursue a postgraduate degree or to enter the workforce. Habitus, therefore, regulates and is generative of “the ways in which we categorize, organize, select and configure the material and cultural resources we employ in our behavior” (Moore, 2004, p. 80). Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus serves to link structure and agency. As an internalization of social structure and one’s place in it (Dumais, 2002), habitus provides constraints and opportunities for agency that ultimately shape one’s position in a given “field”—a site of struggle for various resources such as knowledge, status, or different types of capital and the structure of the social setting in which habitus operates (Swartz, 1997). Interactions between agents within fields are shaped by their relative location—determined by the amount and types of capital they posses as they relate to the types of capital valued and sought after in any particular field— in the hierarchy of positions (Swartz, 1997). The education system is identified by Bourdieu (1977a; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) as perhaps the central field for the accumulation and transformations of the various forms of capital described next.


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Economic capital consists, simply, of that which can be converted directly into money or is institutionalized in the form of property. Social capital, introduced earlier, is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to . . . membership in a group, which provides each of its members with the backing of . . . collectively owned capital, a “credential” which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word. (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 51) In short, the concept of social capital is captured by the tenet “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” and would include, for example, relationships with those who might provide one with information about a job opening or who could put in a “good word” on behalf of someone seeking to fill this opening. Meanwhile, Bourdieu distinguishes between three “states” of cultural capital: the embodied state, which includes certain dispositions of the mind and body, such as language use and manner of dress, and a knowledge of the “rules of the game” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992); the objectified state, represented by cultural goods and material objects; and the institutionalized state represented, for example, by academic credentials, which serve as types of certificates of cultural competence (Bourdieu, 1997) and confer institutional recognition on the embodied cultural capital possessed by a given agent. For the purposes of this article and in terms of its value as “capital” within the mainstream education system, Dance (2002) has succinctly defined cultural capital as the “inherited or acquired linguistic codes, dispositions, tastes, modes of thinking, and other types of knowledge or competencies” (p. 74) deemed legitimate by the dominant group or groups in a given field. Bourdieu (1984, p. 101) conceptualized action, or practice, as the outcome of the relationship between habitus, capital, and field in the following equation: ([habitus] [capital]) + field = practice. As Swartz (1997) states, while the equation captures Bourdieu’s intentional emphasis on practice as the result of the combination of and interaction between habitus, capital, and field, it “confuses more than clarifies the exact relationship among the terms. Are habitus and capital interactive terms whereas field is additive? Or does the formula simply recommend that every empirical inquiry take into account all of these factors?” (p. 141). With this critique in mind, and taking each of these factors into account, I suggest that habitus be considered as being composed of students’ economic, cultural, and social capital resources and their understanding of the worth of these resources (Dumais, 2002) in a social field. This shapes their perceptions of their life trajectories and, consequently,


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their actions in a particular field. Therefore, different types of capital are constitutive of, but theoretically subsumed by, the more encompassing concept of habitus that, interacting with a particular field (education, for example), would produce action or practice (from a range of certain actions or practices) such that a simplified formula would read as follows: (habitus) (field) = practice. According to Bourdieu (1977a), the education system, while appearing neutral, is implicated in social reproduction “in that the culture which it transmits [and rewards] is closer to the dominant culture and that the mode of inculcation to which it has recourse is less removed from the mode of inculcation practiced by the [dominant-class] family” (p. 493). Furthermore, An educational system which puts into practice an implicit pedagogic action, requiring initial familiarity with the dominant culture, and which proceeds by imperceptible familiarization, offers information and training which can be received and acquired only by subjects endowed with the system of predispositions that is the condition for the success of the transmission and of the inculcation of the culture. By doing away with giving explicitly to everyone what it implicitly demands of everyone, the educational system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give. This consists mainly of linguistic and cultural competence and that relationship of familiarity with culture which can only be produced by family upbringing when it transmits the dominant culture. (Bourdieu, 1977a, p. 494) Therefore, the habitus of middle-class students tends to be closer to that which is “taught” by the school, making the school’s expectations and curriculum (both visible and invisible) easier to grasp for middle-class students than for marginalized students. As a result, marginalized students ultimately become more likely to, for example, self-select out of higher tracks or further education (Dumais, 2002). These decisions are driven by their habitus—their views on what is and is not objectively probable or possible for them (what Bourdieu terms the causality of the probable; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Dimaggio, 1979)—and the tacit acceptance that they do not possess the social and cultural capital requisite for school success. In addition, the lack of this social and cultural capital (which Bourdieu [1977b], particularly earlier in his career, stressed is arbitrarily and selectively valued, legitimated, and rewarded by schools and teachers) is likely to be mis-recognized by these students (and their teachers) as an


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inherent lack of academic ability or merit, contributing further to decisions to self select out of higher tracks or further education. Although the student’s family and home environment, according to Bourdieu, is the most important source in shaping a student’s habitus through the provision of the economic, social, and cultural capital that can make the educational system a comfortable and familiar place in which success comes most “naturally,” their habitus is “permeable and responsive to what is going on around them” (Reay, 2004, p. 434) and is continually shaped and modified through socialization experiences in the world outside of the family (Dimaggio, 1979). Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) introduced the school as one such socializing agent and, based on the literature review above, it is a logical extension to include religious involvement as another. While schools—in selectively valuing, legitimating, and rewarding the social and cultural capital characteristic of the middle class—are implicated by Bourdieu in the process of social reproduction, I suggest that, as a socializing agent, religious involvement can serve to shape students’ habitus through the provision of the sorts of social and cultural capital rewarded by schools and teachers, and by promoting attitudes and practices conducive to positive educational outcomes. This process is perhaps most important among those, such as the predominately low-income African American students included in this study, who, as revealed by the presence of the gaps in educational achievement mentioned earlier, are otherwise less likely to attain these outcomes.

Religion and Habitus In attempting to formulate a systematic, integrated, and coherent account of religion’s influence on the lives of American youth, Christian Smith (2003) suggested that religion might exert constructive influences in the lives of youth through nine “distinct but connected and potentially mutually reinforcing factors” clustered as groups of three under three larger conceptual dimensions of social influence (p. 19). In theorizing the effects of religious involvement in shaping students’ habitus in ways that positively impact their educational outcomes, I propose that Smith’s outline could be effectively condensed along the dimensions of social and cultural capital, which as I have proposed above serve as key components of a student’s habitus (Table 1).2 Drawing on qualitative data detailed next, I will subsequently illustrate some processes by which religious involvement may serve as a source of the social and cultural capital linked to positive social and educational outcomes and largely constitutive of students’ habitus.


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Urban Education 45(4) Table 1 Theorizing religious effects on adolescents

Smith’s (2003) constructive influences of religion I.

Moral Order 1. Moral directives 2. Spiritual experiences 3. Role models II. Learned Competencies 4. Community and leadership skills 5. Coping skills 6. Cultural capital III. Social and Organizational Ties 7. Social capital 8. Network closure 9. Extra-community skills Condensed version I.

Social Capital 1. Moral directives 2. Role models 3. Network Closure II. Cultural Capital 1. Community and leadership skills 2. Coping skills 3. Extra-community skills

Method The sample from which this study draws includes students who were in their senior year at six public high schools in a large urban center in the “Rust Belt” of the northeastern and midwestern United States characterized by high rates of poverty and segregation and a declining population. The schools were purposively selected to represent the range of high schools (magnet, vocational, and academic) in the city’s public school district. Roughly, 40% of the senior class at each school was randomly sampled, yielding a sample size of 306 individuals or 36% of the seniors across the six schools. All participants completed a survey based in part on the Saguaro Seminar’s (2002) short form Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey and designed to obtain information on (a) a number of indicators of students’ (and parents’) social backgrounds, (b) students’ levels of religious involvement, (c) students’ access to social capital resources, and (d) students’ educational outcomes. The survey, as well as the quantitative analysis of data obtained


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from it, is detailed further in Barrett (2009). In short, and as mentioned above, the relationship between religious involvement and successful educational outcomes was revealed to be much stronger for Black students in the city than for their White counterparts. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 39 students from the larger sample, selected in an effort to reflect the demographics of the district as a whole, as well as with 6 principals, 10 teachers, 6 sets of parents, and 5 educational activists from the city.3 Each individual interview was semistructured and lasted roughly 1 hr (but ranged from 30 min to more than 2 hr) and was audiotaped and transcribed in its entirety. Though the interview schedules contained no items specifically targeting religious involvement or even mentioning religion, when responding to prompts such as “Tell me about things that have helped you along the way in your education” and questions such as “Can you give examples of how your community and the people/institutions within it help young people get on in life?” or “Can you describe anyone or anything that’s been particularly helpful in providing the resources necessary for getting into college?” a considerable number of (predominantly Black) students, spontaneously and often at length (prompting unscripted follow-up questions), discussed their religious involvement when detailing the factors behind their academic success. This prompted the qualitative analysis, presented below, of data collected from the interviewees described here. As respondents were not asked to identify their denominational affiliations, this article, like others before it (Brown & Gary, 1991; Regnerus, 2000), can only suggest that the relationship between religious involvement and educational outcomes is comparable, as Regnerus (2000) noted, “across many faith traditions and identities” where churches and congregants serve as “agents of socialization into traditional means of achievement” (p. 369). Regnerus (2000) suggested further that “interpersonal processes of building relationships and routinizing practices, independent of differences in beliefs and attitudes promulgated, work to reinforce conventional (as opposed to alternate or illegal) orientations toward success, and are themselves conducive to achievement” (p. 369). Still, the results presented later in this article cannot discount the possibility that some denominations are relatively more dynamic in this sense than others and this is a potential area for future research. Of course, the significantly different socioeconomic positions of the city’s Black and White populations may suggest that social activism is, in a sense, more immediately necessary in many of its predominately Black churches than it is in wealthier (often largely White) congregation.4


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Results and Analysis I have suggested that religious involvement can serve as a key socializing agent in shaping students’ habitus by promoting attitudes and practices conducive to positive educational outcomes and that habitus could be conceptualized as being constituted of the economic, social, and cultural capital resources to which students have access and their understanding of the worth of these resources in the educational field, serving to shape their perceptions of their possible trajectories and their subsequent actions (from a matrix of possible actions) within it. In theorizing the effects of religious involvement on shaping habitus in ways that might positively impact the educational outcomes of students in the sample, I proposed a condensed version of Smith’s (2003) model. This condensed model is detailed next and employed in the analysis of interview data illustrating the role of religious involvement in shaping students’ habitus and facilitating positive educational outcomes.

Social Capital Social capital is proposed above as one key component of a student’s habitus, and religious involvement has been identified as, among other things, a source of social capital. The “resources” stemming from access to social capital are most often conceptualized, drawing on the work of Coleman (1988), as (a) information (e.g., regarding a scholarship or job opening) gained through social networks and (b) normative reinforcement provided by social networks. These resources can be invested in, through the formation and maintenance of reciprocal (though not necessarily symmetrical) relationships, and used by social agents, though this involves both constraints and opportunities mediated by social structure in terms of the potential group members agents are likely to come into contact with (Lin, 2001). Smith’s (2003) factors of moral directives, role models, and network closure each relate directly and, often, in overlapping ways to the network and normative aspects of social capital. In condensing Smith’s model, I have therefore clustered each factor under the dimension of social capital (Table 1).

Moral Directives Religious involvement can provide youths with the norms and standards that guide their practices and behaviors toward those that are prosocial and proeducational in the form of moral directives. One particular way in which such


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moral directives are revealed to be reinforced in this study is through the public recognition and celebration of academic success and of the practices and educational participation that underpin such success. The church and its congregants provide this recognition for students through, for example, the posting of newspaper clippings on bulletin boards or announcements and “sharing” during church services (Glanville et al., 2008, p. 110). Reverend Devaughn Johnson is one of the interviewees in the study and the energetic, innovative, and committed Pastor of one of the city’s largest and most socially active Black churches. He is known to be very powerful and direct with his words and passionate about exposing and confronting injustices. Reverend Johnson discusses below the importance of recognition: At the church, our general message is about education. Sunday was academic achievement day, for instance, which we have four times a year and the children bring their report cards and they receive rewards depending on where they are and where they are placed among their peers in the church. I used to have academic achievement day, and I always have the kids who are not on the honor roll and the merit roll stand up and I give them this talk about how, next semester, “you need to reach up” for about the first 3 years. Then, the merit roll folks start coming up. Well, guess what? This Sunday, what surprised me was, the majority of kids in this congregation came up for honor roll awards— honor roll awards! Not merit roll awards. There were merit rolls, okay, but more were on the honor roll than were just making it. That said to me, your message every . . . because you’ve got to keep saying it; you can’t just do it once a year. It’s got to be a part of the culture, and I think that is a big part and because I have a lot of young people here, they know that after report card, pastor is going to call us up to the front . . . and they are recognizing that when they do well in school, it brings rewards. Academic effort and success in this instance take on a sense of moral imperative as those who have achieved honor or merit roll status are recognized publicly in front of the congregation and those who do not are encouraged to “reach up” and mirror their fellow students, positioned here as role models (an often overlapping and mutually reinforcing aspect of social capital discussed subsequently). The rewards referenced by Reverend Johnson include the recognition provided by peers and role models. They serve to encourage educational effort and persistence, which in time become ingrained in the “culture”—the learned attitudes and behaviors, or, habitus— of students.


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Interviews with Reverend Johnson frequently included discussion of his church’s role in changing the “minds and habits,” “the mindsets,” or “the minds and attitudes”—ideas clearly linked to the concept of habitus—of its congregants. That this process often includes moral directives as issued by the Reverend is evident in the excerpt below. I just believe that if you change the inside of a person, their outside will change naturally . . . Our mission is to change minds and attitudes . . . by whatever means necessary . . . You can’t change a community by money. You can’t change a community by politics. You have to change the mindset of people . . . because if you change their mindset, their actions change. . . . So, that’s our mission. . . . For example, we do a baptism here every 3 months; I might do 60 people at a time and then I might do 12 babies, what we call a dedication in which the parents bring the baby forward and . . . we are basically saying to God, as parents: “Here is my child. I am going to be a responsible parent.” Well, I always tell parents: “Don’t bring these children up here in these cute little white outfits thinking that this sprinkling is going to change their lives. You are going to change their lives, and if they don’t see you being successful, they are not going to know what success looks like. They are going to base success on what your actions are and if you are home . . . and don’t have a job or a career or any hope; that is what they are going to see as acceptable.” So, parents are very important, but the unfortunate part is that many of the parents have not been trained or challenged, so the mission there again is changing minds and habits. Because Reverend Johnson recognizes what Bourdieu (1997) would term the habitus of a child is established largely in their home environment, he uses the church as a setting in which to impart moral directives. He has the goal of shaping attitudes and practices among parents that can shape their children’s perceptions about what is possible in their educational and life trajectories and their understanding of the attitudes and practices required to achieve these possibilities. As mentioned, the aspects of social and cultural capital highlighted in the theoretical framework underpinning this analysis frequently overlap and mutually reinforce one another. In exemplifying and enforcing the moral directives of the church, then, parents, youth peers, and other adults in the church such as the pastor can also serve as important role models for students.


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Role Models Access to role models, as sources of information and normative reinforcement, is considered here as an important aspect of social capital. As Lincoln and Mamiya (1990) stated, “Much of the socialization for . . . youth occurs through the process of role modeling—observing, evaluating, emulating and filing away for later use the behavior, examples, and values of others” (p. 312). Role models accessed through religious involvement provide “examples of life practices shaped by religious moral orders that constructively influence the lives of youth, and offer positive relationships that youth may be invested in preserving through their own normatively approved living” (Smith, 2003, p. 22). Furthermore, once a relationship with a positive role model is established, youth become invested in sustaining it and affirming and enacting the religious moral order, as violating the moral order would likely damage that very relationship (Smith, 2003). The imperative nature of this moral order (“It was not acceptable not to go to college”) is underpinned by the modeling of peers and framed below by Reverend Johnson in terms of success proliferating further success: It’s important for kids to have around them the possibility of success. . . . It’s difficult to attain something you’ve never been exposed to. I think that success breeds success. So, if your peers are not talking about college, you don’t talk about college because you become an outsider. So, if in the group of your church friends, they are talking about going to college, you talk about going to college. All of my church friends except one that I grew up with, probably 20 of us, all went to college, all went on to be fairly successful. And when I say successful, I’m not talking about money; I’m talking about doing what we were created to do—feeling like we’re doing what we were created to do and liking what we do. . . . We all grew up together . . . and so it was not acceptable not to go to college, not to finish high school; that was not an option and not because our parents said it but because we were around the same circles and we would have felt bad if one had dropped out. As aspects of social capital, norms—in not wanting friends and role models to feel “let down”—play a vital role here, leading to the internalization of students’ perceptions and desires, and shaping a habitus that guides behavior both in and out of school. Reverend Johnson also notes the potential of downward leveling norms that can be considered a “downside” of social


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capital (Portes & Landolt, 1996) in the example of a student who does not talk about college around his or her peers to avoid the sanction of being made an outsider in a different context. As indicated earlier in the case of the public recognition of school success, positive role models in the church include youths and their young peers who serve as sources of information and as sources of normative reinforcement. Their very presence may “crowd out” (Muller & Ellison, 2001, p. 160) negative influences. As Martina (2005) noted, youth peers are often the least intimidating and, therefore, the most accessible institutional agents—“those individuals who have the capacity and commitment to transmit directly or to negotiate the transmission of institutional resources and opportunities” (Stanton-Salazar & Dornbusch, 1995, pp. 116-117), such as information about school programs, academic tutoring and mentoring, college admission, and assistance with career decision making-for other youths. However, role models accessed from the church come from a variety of backgrounds and age groups. This point is illustrated in the extract below by Andre, a highly motivated, devout (he became an ordained minister at age 18), and popular low-income African American student at Henry High School, the highest achieving school in the city. In one interview, Andre noted that, before becoming involved in the church, he often engaged in risky behaviors with neighborhood peers and that he was apprehended by the police at age 12. In this sense, religious involvement truly serves to “crowd out” negative influences and to shape Andre’s habitus by promoting a vision of alternate possibilities and of the attitudes and behaviors that are required to underpin them. In addition, Andre’s comments demonstrate that role models accessed in the church may promote important coping skills for living with the stress of difficult situations, detailed later as an aspect of cultural capital, highlighting again the often overlapping and mutually reinforcing nature of different dimensions of religious involvement’s positive influence on youth outcomes. I mean, growing up where . . . [in] the heart of where a lot of gang activity is and drug activity is. It’s . . . really not the safest neighborhood because there’s been times when . . . just even sitting on my porch I can remember people running by with weapons, like guns and fights and just a lot of things. So, it’s not the best neighborhood, but at the same time, it’s like in that area; our church has done a lot for kids my age and kids younger . . . to try to keep us from getting involved in that and . . . I don’t want to say it’s the best neighborhood because there are still things that are wrong with it, but it’s not the worst because they


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actually try to keep us away from [the bad side of ] it. . . . Like, for the young men, there are a lot of things that the church will organize. . . . A basketball tournament . . . is one thing, but then they also will have a thing where weekly everybody will get together. . . . They’ll try to get together with all the young men like once a week or twice a week just to spend time with them, mentor them, and try to focus in on school. . . . They even help me try and figure out where I want to go to college, what I want to do, and it’s just a lot of things that they will . . . try to do . . . and they will have a lot of organized events that will try to bring all of us into the church as opposed to being out on the street. Andre notes the intergenerational nature, discussed in detail next, of the role models accessed in this situation, as both adults and peers in the church serve as role models and mentors for him. He underlines, in addition, the deliberateness of the church’s focus on schooling and even on where he might want to go to college. Andre’s religious involvement, in this instance as a source of information, is especially crucial in light of the severe shortage of guidance counselors in the city’s public high schools and, as he noted in his interview, of his parents’ relative unfamiliarity with the college and scholarship application process. Again, the church is identified as a site where role models can be accessed and, accordingly, where students’ educational orientations and perceptions of their educational life trajectories are shaped in important ways. As introduced above, this process is facilitated by what are often the diverse age and social class backgrounds of congregants and by the tendency for links between different generations of congregants to be reinforced through religious involvement.

Network Closure The relationships encouraged through religious involvement between youths, their peers, and adults (who may serve as role models and sources of information) often serve to link youths and their families within closed and intergenerational networks. This has been conceptualized as intergenerational closure (Coleman, 1990) or the socializing influence achieved when youths and their peers are involved in social networks that are linked (therefore, closed) intergenerationally with other adults (often their parents). Importantly, the peers also know the adults and each other. These closed and intergenerational links can therefore serve as sources of information and can influence and monitor students’ behavior more effectively than a network


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that lacks closure or the presence of adult reinforcement. Intergenerational closure has been associated positively with educational achievement and attainment (Carbonaro, 1998), though the presence of intergenerational closure today has been shown to be lower among Black students than among their White counterparts and to increase with parents’ income and education levels. The intergenerational closure promoted between parents and their children as a result of religious involvement, and an associated connection to community linked again to a sense of moral directive, is discussed by Mrs. D., a teacher at Raymond Vocational High School. She notes that My students who are students with an active faith life are plugged into their community in another way, meaning by church, not just by school. They often seem to have a deeper interest in becoming more a part of the community, as a society. . . . Parents take their children to church, so now, it is the family commitment, as a family together, and this is something the family does together. Glanville et al. (2008) identified the church as one of the few settings in which adolescents regularly interact with adults outside of the family and noted that many activities sponsored by the church, such as basketball or the weekly meetings mentioned by Andre above, involve multiple generations. This enhances intergenerational network closure in an environment that values and encourages adult commitment to the socialization of children. Likewise, the shared values, interests, and activities that, to some extent, can be assumed between fellow congregants ease the establishment of connections between them (Muller & Ellison, 2001). In addition, a heterogeneous class structure is a distinctive characteristic of most Black churches (Billingsley & Caldwell, 1991). For example, despite the high poverty and intensely segregated nature of the central city where data for this study was collected, churches in low-income neighborhoods are not only attended by neighborhood residents but also middle-class and wealthy African Americans who return weekly to their former central city neighborhoods for church services. Importantly, the peers and role models available through religious involvement may come from different neighborhoods, schools, and social class backgrounds and thus offer religiously involved students access to varied forms of social and cultural capital and perspectives on educational and life trajectories. Socialization with parents, peers, and role models from such varied backgrounds encourage an expansion of what Wellman (1983) referred to


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as the “social distribution of possibilities.” This is perhaps especially pertinent in light of increasing economic and racial segregation in the city where the data for this study was collected. For example, between 1989 and 2004, the percentage of low-income students eligible for free lunch in the city’s public schools increased from 54% to 74.9% and the percentage of ethnic minority students in the district has nearly doubled to 74 over the course of 30 years. This may decrease the possibility that the relationships described above will be established in a school setting and serves to embody Wilson’s (1987) notion of “concentration effects” resulting from social isolation as students there are becoming less likely to be surrounded by peers from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. In sum, religious involvement serves as an important source of social capital that, through the provision of moral directives and role models, often accessed within closed and intergenerational networks, can shape students’ habitus in ways that promote school success. Another component of habitus, as conceptualized above, is cultural capital, and its role in promoting success for religiously involved students is illustrated next.

Cultural Capital Cultural capital was presented above as the “inherited or acquired linguistic codes, dispositions, tastes, modes of thinking, and other types of knowledge or competencies” (Dance, 2002, p. 74) deemed legitimate (most often as endorsed, rewarded, and recognized by the mainstream education system) by the dominant group or groups in a given field. Cultural capital therefore assists agents in their successful navigation of various fields like the education system. I suggest that, within the education system, these codes, most often regarded (or, in Bourdieuian terms, “misrecognized”) as “talents” or “skills” by schools and teachers, would likely include the factors of community and leadership skills, coping skills, and extra-community skills as posited by Smith (2003), and I therefore cluster them under the dimension of cultural capital (Table 1).

Community and Leadership Skills Cultural capital, especially in its embodied state, is something that can be developed over time through socialization processes. Smith (2003) posited that while youths encounter a variety of contexts in which they might acquire cultural capital both inside and outside of the family, religious involvement can provide them with “increased and alternative opportunities to appropriate


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more and distinct kinds of cultural capital” by “observ[ing], learn[ing], and practice[ing] valuable community life skills and leadership skills” (p. 24). These skills could include group decision making, leading discussions, mobilizing consensus, and public speaking. These “are transposable for constructive uses beyond religious activities” (Smith, 2003, p. 23) increasing, for example, confidence and functional capacities in classrooms, study groups, student government, and extracurricular activities. As a result of the acquisition of cultural capital and of its activation in school and other mainstream settings, the religiously involved young person may “converse more comfortably with a broader array of social contacts, perform better in . . . classes, be more impressive in the . . . conversations of job interviews, and more” (Smith, 2003, p. 25). Outcomes of this sort are often selectively valued, legitimated, and rewarded by the education system and could therefore be expected to promote success within it. Grace, a high-achieving, low-income African American student at Roosevelt, one of the city’s few socioeconomically and racially integrated high schools, explains how her religious involvement prepares her and provides her with confidence for social interactions in a number of situations. These situations could involve those positive and productive interactions with representatives of schools and other institutions that Lareau (2003) suggested tend to occur less frequently for students of Grace’s background as a result of mismatches between the social and cultural capital of teachers and urban students. The preparation Grace receives and the confidence she acquires through her religious involvement, then, is considered here as a form of cultural capital. [My evangelizing] plays a part in my education, I think, with public speaking, in how I deal with teachers . . . because you learn how to react to certain comments that people might make. Because you’re around each type of race, then race is not a problem with you; you get comfortable . . . confident in school; and you’re around a lot of cultures and you get to understand a lot, you get to know a lot. You get to learn a lot about people’s lives and how they deal with living here [with the difficult conditions that exist in the city] or how the world affects them. (Grace) Andre, introduced earlier, conceptualizes this effect of religious involvement as “training” valuable in successfully navigating the education system and in becoming an “educated person.” Andre notes that this training promotes a sense of educational resilience (as well as access to college scholarships, underlining the potential connection between economic capital,


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in the form of scholarships, and the social capital accessed through religious involvement).5 He states, [My church] even gave me a scholarship; so they are giving scholarships to help people go to college. . . . It’s like they are really pushing me to become an educated person; so even if I didn’t—if I never wanted to read the Bible again in my life, they are giving me scholarships to become an educated person, and I think the more we try to push the young people to be educated and to guide them in the way that they should go, then they’re not going to go far from it. I believe—and that’s Biblical—so it’s like the Bible says: If you train a child in the way he should go, when he is older he will not depart. I really believe in that. . . . If you look at anybody, if you train them up a certain way, it is not going to be easy to take them away from their training. It’s not. Again, religious involvement is conceptualized here, as a source of social and cultural capital, to shape students’ habitus in a manner that is proeducational and, importantly, durable as Andre notes that religiously involved youths are unlikely to “depart” or to be “taken away from” their training. As embodied forms of cultural capital, the resilience mentioned by Andre here and implied by Grace above link logically with Smith’s (2003) dimension of coping skills, conceptualized below as a dimension of cultural capital.

Coping Skills Religious socialization can promote the sorts of coping skills—“a variety of beliefs and practices that can help believers cope with the stress of difficult situations, . . . to process difficult emotions, and to resolve interpersonal conflicts, and so enhance the well-being and life capacities of youth” (Smith, 2003, p. 23)—mentioned above by Grace in terms of how people “deal with” living in a high-poverty, intensely segregated city and attending what are often segregated and underresourced schools. As coping skills, particularly in the face of challenges such as the violence and poverty associated with many inner-city neighborhoods and the institutional racism and symbolic violence historically exercised by the mainstream education system on students of color, may prove valuable in facilitating successful navigation of the education system and positive academic outcomes, they are considered here as cultural capital. Jonathan is a high-achieving, low-income African American student at Main High School, one of the lowest achieving public high schools in the city. The student body there is nearly uniformly African American and low income, with more than 75% of students receiving free and reduced price


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lunches. Field notes from Main reveal a school context that includes crowded classrooms (one class in particular consisted of more than 60 students spread across two classrooms, adjoined by a doored wall, with a teacher and classroom aide alternating between them), and incidents of violence and disruption (a fight broke out early in the author’s initial visit to the school, and at least two physical confrontations, one between students and one between a student and teacher, received considerable media coverage during the period in which fieldwork was conducted at the school). In the face of this, Jonathan remains resilient and academically focused. He is also heavily involved in extracurriculars at a school where less than half of students surveyed indicate that they take part in any extracurricular activities. Jonathan has assumed a prominent role in the school’s leadership group (comprised of 52 students: 10-15 of whom can be considered core members), which is responsible for coordinating a number of activities at Main (e.g., dances, open houses, movie nights, and a school calendar). Here, he discusses how his religious commitment helps him cope with the stress of difficult situations. Jonathan: I mean, I didn’t grow up in the same neighborhood my whole life, but the same, like, feeling of the neighborhood. . . . When I was little, I grew up in the Dodge area and there was a lot of violence over there and it—the East Side—is a very violent place and that is where I grew up for most of my life. It doesn’t matter where you grew up, though. It just depends on you and how your outlook on life is and how you want to do things. Interviewer: How do you get from a street or a neighborhood with a lot of violence to being such a successful student? How do you deal with that? Jonathan: I stopped trying to focus as much on the bad things because that’s always going to be there. But then with me, spiritually . . . dedicating myself to get baptized; I just . . . look at the positive things, what God has to offer me and the things of that nature and that just puts the everyday disturbances to the side and you just can see—you continue to endure and hope for a better future. . . . When I started going to church, they used the Bible and . . . they answered questions that I really needed answers to, and I found it really was the truth and that is really important to me as a young one and any other person—especially as a young one, they need the proper guidance and true guidance in their lives and that’s what motivated me, wanting answers. . . . I do a lot of studying and research of the Bible. . . . Studying the Bible . . . helps me to keep my study habits in school up and not to slack off because I can’t slack off with my


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study of the Bible, which compares with school in that you prepare for stuff in school and you get A’s and benefits. The important coping skills accessible through religious involvement can also take the form of moral directives, indicating again the often overlapping and mutually reinforcing aspects of the influence of religious involvement as a source of the social and cultural capital that constitute and serve to shape students’ habitus, in youths’ lives. This is evident in the statement below by Reverend Johnson. Fortunately or unfortunately in just about every message I preach here, I have to infuse perseverance. I could preach all day long, but if I don’t keep reminding them “you can’t give up now”—Sunday I said to them “if you have not fully realized your destiny; if you don’t know where you’re going totally, you must refuse to die.” I said that “because a lot of times when we don’t know where we’re going, we want to commit suicide, we want to get out of it, we want it to be over, we want to go on drugs, we want to just numb ourselves. You’ve got to refuse to die because if you don’t know exactly where you’re going in life, that’s a sign that you’ve still got time to figure it out, but you need to start figuring it out because we were all created for something—every one of us—but you’ve got to refuse to die.” Again, these coping skills, whether they are acquired through role modeling, evangelizing, individual and group study of the Bible, or moral directives in a church sermon, can positively impact the health, functional capacity, and the successful navigation of the education system by youths.

Extra-Community Skills Finally, and as noted in the literature review, “Black churches, now as in the past, are extensively involved with their communities outside the walls of the church” (Billingsley & Caldwell, 1991, p. 431). Such involvement, in addition, often has an educational focus. Likewise, students’ religious involvement often leads them to participate in activities such as community service, missions, youth conferences, camps, and retreats associated with or sponsored by their church or other national and transnational religious organizations. Smith (2003) noted that while these activities “likely strengthen the religious faith and commitment of youth . . . they probably do more than that” and that by “moving youth out of local contexts and presenting them with new


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experiences and challenges, these sorts of experiences open up an adolescent’s imaginable aspirations and horizons, encourage developmental maturity, and increase knowledge, confidence, and competencies” (p. 26) valued in mainstream social settings, such as the school. Because they can facilitate the successful navigation of these settings, these extra-community skills are conceptualized here as an aspect of cultural capital. Philip, a low-income, African American student at Main, discusses below the importance of these extra-community skills, particularly as they promote increased contact with colleges and universities: Church brings you to a whole separate level of community service and doing different things. The church I went to allowed me to travel all over. I mean, I went to a whole lot of different places. We do a lot of school stuff when we go to our youth group conferences. Like, one conference we went to just a few weeks ago in Rochester—they had colleges come—representatives from colleges, they gave us applications, information, presentations, so as far as church—they’re really involved. Again, these experiences can serve to facilitate success in the school setting and even promote access to the university, an aspect of cultural capital that is perhaps particularly important here in light of the fact that Philip’s school has only one guidance counselor for over 1,500 students, limiting the time available to consult with individual students on their college and career aspirations. This is coupled with the fact that Philip’s single mother did not attend college and therefore may be less familiar with the process of applying for scholarships and admission to colleges. The analysis of the cases above demonstrates that, in providing access to social and cultural capital, religious involvement can serve as a key socializing agent in shaping students’ habitus by promoting attitudes and practices conducive to school success.

Conclusion This article has sought to explore the influence of religious involvement on the educational outcomes of urban African American adolescents by drawing primarily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1971, 1977a, 1977b) and Christian Smith (2003) to construct a theoretical framework employed in the qualitative analysis of interview data illustrating mechanisms by which religious involvement can serve to promote attitudes and practices conducive to positive educational outcomes among students. Religious involvement can


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provide access to the forms of social and cultural capital selectively valued and rewarded by the mainstream education system. These forms of capital may be less accessible elsewhere in the immediate social milieu of African American students in intensely segregated, high-poverty cities such as the locus of this study. Students’ access to these forms of symbolic capital, in addition to economic capital, as well as an understanding of their worth in a social field have been conceptualized as constitutive of their habitus, a durable but not entirely inflexible system of learned attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors toward one’s probabilities and possibilities of life trajectories (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In short, this article suggests that religious involvement serves to shape students’ habitus in ways that are conducive to successful educational outcomes. This suggestion, crucially, is not intended to deny the challenges and indeed emotional and psychological pain and questioning that such negotiation of “multiple worlds” (Phelan, Davidson, & Yu, 1993) entails for urban African American students “living out their lives as outsiders within the raceand class-defined dominant habitus of the school organization” (Horvat & Antonio, 1999, p. 318). Neither is it to deny what Bourdieu (1977b) earlier in his career took pains to highlight as the culturally arbitrary nature of the types of social and cultural capital that are selectively valued and rewarded by the education system nor what Bourdieu (2000) later conceptualized as the efforts of schools and other mainstream institutions to block students’ access to those forms of powerful knowledge and symbolic capital that might be considered culturally universal. However, like Delpit (1988), I argue that it is imperative to recognize that, because the school selectively values, legitimates, and rewards a culture of power, students—particularly those from nonmainstream backgrounds—must be taught the implicit and explicit rules of this culture, at the same time they are encouraged to understand the value of their own cultures and experiences despite a sociopolitical context that attempts to marginalize them (Stanton-Salazar, 1997). Delpit (1988) stressed that this is not because this is the way things should be, but because it is how they are. Therefore, successful navigation of the education system—as well as hope that the arbitrary nature of the culture of power is ultimately brought to light and changed—depends on it. In considering the implications of this study for future research, the possibility that particular denominations are relatively more dynamic than others in promoting successful educational outcomes, as suggested earlier, should be explored further. Likewise, results obtained from such research might point the way toward an examination of the social conditions that foster the deliberate and purposeful focus on academic and social competence


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presented by some African American churches discussed in this study. Finally, though notoriously “messy,” the concept of habitus can prove useful in further studies here using both quantitative and qualitative methods, as the narratives provided by the interviewees in this article illustrate a number of conditions under which religious involvement truly appears to shape and even alter in positive ways their perceptions of what is and what is not possible in their life trajectories and of the attitudes and practices that underpin these perceptions. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes 1. Religious involvement is a process that often operates apart from particular belief systems and organizational and denominational affiliations, and constitutes, in a Durkheimian sense, a form of social integration that has the consequence of reinforcing attitudes, outlooks, behaviors, and practices conducive to positive educational outcomes (Brody, Stoneman, & Flor, 1996; Regnerus, 2000). 2. Only one of Smith’s original nine factors, spiritual experiences, is not included in my condensed outline. I recognize that spiritual experiences such as a conversion experience, an answer to a prayer, a perceived word of divine guidance, or the witnessing of a miracle (Smith, 2003) all may help solidify moral commitments and constructive life practices, including the exertion of effort toward positive educational outcomes among adolescents who otherwise inhabit a culture “emphasizing individualism, pluralism, and choice” (Smith, 2003, p. 20). My omission of spiritual experiences here, then, is not intended to dismiss what is perhaps the most “distinctively religious” factor of Smith’s conceptualization or to fall into a reductionistic approach but rather is a reflection of the limits of my data and data collection efforts, which did not consciously seek to delve into such spiritual experiences, though this (the specific relationship between spiritual experiences and educational outcomes and the proper “placement” of spiritual experiences in a theoretical conceptualization of religion’s constructive influence on youth) could certainly be a focus for future research. 3. The names of all schools and interviewees in this article are pseudonyms.


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4. Today, the city ranks as the second-poorest large city in the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000), suffering from rates of unemployment that are much higher than national averages and a percentage of residents living in poverty, 29, that has doubled since 1970. The city’s population loss has been accompanied by White flight, and it is now the sixth most segregated city in the United States. Of the 331 cities analyzed in the 2000 Census, the city ranks eighth in segregation between White and Black residents (The Regional Institute, State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law, 2007). Overall, 38% of Black residents, as opposed to 18% of White residents, in the city currently live in poverty (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). 5. Andre noted that he obtained more than US$30,000 toward college scholarships through various church networks

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Bio Brian Barrett is an assistant professor of foundations and social advocacy at SUNY Cortland. His research uses a sociological lens to focus on religious involvement, educational outcomes, and the urban achievement gap.
