2. What are young people doing with their religious identity?
Wow, that’s just like saying, “So, tell me about the universe.”

A quick answer would be that young people are living their lives with it. But I wonder if the question actually was meant to be, “How are young people becoming religious?”, or something like that.

Safe things to say:
1. That young people are less likely to align their religious identity with a local church, group, para-church body, organisation, denomination or institution than previous generations.
2. That even regular young church-goers would get more information about how to be religious from sources outside the church than within it. Friends, movies, TV, magazines, all that stuff.
3. That this shift away from organised religion is also true in other spheres of life. Young people are also less likely to align themselves with a political party, a civil action group (I know Greenpeace wonders where all the activists have gone), a volunteer organisation than past generations.
4. That this doesn’t mean young people are less political, activated, even religious. It just means their choice of expressing these parts of their identity is different.

Difficult things to say:
1. That denominational expressions of Christianity are on their way out for good.
2. Aberystwyth.
3. That this is not just a trend, a slow social change. This is an ideological shift that is due in part to the mistakes made by institutional churches, which they(we) need to address. The spiritual abuse of young people is an important one, though by no means the only one.