Title: "These teen-agers are not delinquent"
Description: "These Teen-agers Are Not Delinquent" investigates the advice theologically conservative Protestants, particularly evangelicals and Southern Baptists, offered to young adults between the years of 1945 and 1965. Conservative Protestant religion underwent a profound regeneration during this era, as leaders such as Harold Ockenga, Carl F.H. Henry, and Billy Graham made efforts to help evangelical Christianity regain cultural and intellectual relevancy for a broader audience. Further, this time period saw a great deal of public anxiety about "juvenile delinquency," and many evangelicals shared this concern. This project draws upon the written culture--such as novels, advice books, magazine articles, and tracts--that evangelicals and Southern Baptists employed to prescribe and model their visions of mature behavior for young adults. Linking the practice of reading to the construction of a moral identity, evangelicals and Southern Baptists believed that better literature for young adults could help them negotiate temptations and make mature moral decisions about the formation of their developing identities. This dissertation argues that while the broader American culture demonstrated an optimistic faith in expert advice and self-improvement literature, evangelical and Southern Baptist literature urged young adult readers to recognize that self-realization and maturity were dependent upon a submissive relationship with God, a relationship that required full obedience to his plans for individuals' lives. This understanding, however, did not preclude attention to expert advice; although conservative Protestants were far from consistent in their opinions about psychology and other social sciences, it was during this time period that interest in a specifically evangelical form of psychology began to develop.

The advice literature surveyed in this dissertation, then, includes writing that creatively drew upon the lessons of psychology, as well as writing that expressed wariness of that discipline. Throughout the dissertation, the language of "maturity" serves to shape discussions of dating, marriage, education, and vocational choices. Ultimately, discussions of maturity tended to pull in two main directions: For some writers, a mature faith represented participation in a collective, shared expression of belief, whereas others saw faith as a force that helped to guide individual willpower, sometimes leading individuals to act against the cultural trends of not only secular but also evangelical culture.