Their identity is centered on their religious beliefs, and their morality derives from those beliefs.
They are attracted to a worldview that challenges many core values of the dominant secular concerns. Time-tested teachings and meaningful traditions appeal to them.
They embrace challenging faith commitments that offer them firm guidelines on how to live their lives.
Their adherence to traditional morality and religious devotion often comes at considerable personal cost, and the sacrificial nature of these commitments is often precisely what makes them attractive.
They yearn for mystery and tend to trust their intuitive sense that what they have found is true, real, and worth living to the extreme.
They seek guidance and formation from legitimate sources of authority and trust these authorities to help them find lasting happiness and avoid repeating their own painful mistakes or those of their parents and peers.
They strive for personal holiness, authenticity, and integration in their spiritual lives and are attracted to people and congregations that do the same. Conversely, they are repelled by complacency, hypocrisy, and pandering.
Their beliefs and practices - though usually completely compatible with the core tenets of their faith traditions - often defy conventional wisdom about their generation, the expectations of religious leaders, and existing classifications of believers within individual denominations (for example, charismatic or conventional, liberal or conservatism).They are, for the most part, concerned with impacting and engaging the larger culture. Yet they are equally committed to living out their beliefs in the context of authentic communities that support them and hold them accountable.
These young adults understand the challenges that traditional morality and orthodoxy pose. They sometimes empathize with members of their religious traditions who want to "update" teachings to make them more relevant, and many of these young believers happily embrace worship styles that make Christianity more accessible to seekers. But they resist any compromise of the essential tenets of orthodoxy as capitulation to secular culture. These young orthodox believers defend Christianity's timeless moral teachings and its scriptural and ecclesiastical authority with vigor because they believe that any other approach would endanger the integrity of the faith they hold so dear.
Taken from "The New Faithful" pg. 15-16
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