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Resumo

Religiosity remains an important sociological concept, from assessing religion's effects on various outcomes to describing large-scale religious change. And yet conceptualizing religiosity—as a measure of intensity of religious practice—requires accounting for how respondents understand religious practice. Drawing on four waves of longitudinal interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), this paper examines the religious understandings of young Americans as they develop over 10 years. I find that respondents' religious understandings are shaped by deeper moral orientations that broadly structure their lives. From these moral orientations, I theorize four ideal types of religious practitioners that help explain complex patterns of religiosity in America—the Congregant, the Believer, the Spiritualist, and the Metaphysician. Recognizing the moral orders that structure young Americans' religious understandings opens new pathways for theorizing religion's influence and change over time.

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