Teenagers seem to use the visual media more than the traditions of religions to determine their spirituality.
Lynn Schofield Clark Ph.D studied the role that parents and media have upon both religios and non religios students. (It's a small survey so technically, it's too small to really determine with any absolute intensity that media does or does not effect teenagers ideas. But nontheless, it did have interesting concepts.)
Teenagers don't automatically assume their parents religious values and symbols. That was made clear by this article. Even a cross or a jewish star can have meaning less than or more than the what the parents taught their children.
Teenagers are more willing to accept the religious symbols from other countries or other religions than their parents were.
"The teens definitions were by and large much more therapeutic and individualistic. While this is at least somewhat consistent with what we might expect developmentally from teens, it is worth noting that this generation of young persons has less experience with religious institutions and formal belief systems than any of its predecessors. While this may or may not be the case for the individual teen, it is certainly the case for the environment of their peers, in which context so much of religious identity occurs.
flattening of religious symbols for teens. Rather than finding that most teens are reverential toward the symbols that represent what is most meaningful to them or even the symbols most closely associated with their own tradition, as Fowler asserts in his oft-cited argument of adolescent faith development, I found that teens actually approach all religious symbols more like what Frederic Jameson called bricoleurs. In constructing their religious identity, teens pick symbols from a variety of sources that may or may not be related to institutional religion, and may or may not be related to their specific institutional affiliation, if they have one.
Like other commodified symbols of the postmodern condition of late capitalism, symbols can and must be made useful
Yet even among teens with what they considered to be a significant affiliation with a religious organization, there was a sense in which teens see themselves as the ultimate authority over which religious symbols are or can be made meaningful. Like their unaffiliated counterparts, they approached mediated symbols as those that could become meaningful when given a religious context.
I take this to mean that teens are more open to differences in religion and as such, the choices they make when watching visual media (tv and movies) is not with the same mindset their parents have.
This extends to othe things like religion and politics, religion and the environment, religion and national healthcare.
Teenagers just aren't viewing religion through the same glasses as their parents
Its much easier these days to make a choice
I think that the media bring out too many mixed messages about symbols in relation to religion, and teenagers choose whatever symbols appeal to them....