Normative and Non-Normative Religious Experience among High School Youth

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Abstract
A sample of 451 Catholic, Baptist, and Methodist tenth-grade youth were asked about definite religious experiences in their lives, and 58 percent reported them. Most took place in church services or at a retreat or camp. We tried categorizing the experiences using the Elkind-Elkind and Stark typologies and found that with one additional category the Elkind-Elkind typology was apt. The “salvation or inspiration” type is the most common, especially among the Baptists and Methodists. This type is normative in those denominations, and church life facilitates it. The analysis of factors encouraging the experiences showed the necessity of distinguishing normative from non-normative religious experiences, since their determinants are different. The former are encouraged in certain denominations, and their occurrence is patterned. The latter are idiosyncratic and unpatterned.

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