Why are well educated middle class young people interested in old fashioned religion?

Why do they actively

pursue a religious practice and identity that differs from the common norm? (Appeal of the Gregorian chant)

Religious option is attractive to many and reinforces the tendency of judging social life in moral
terms.
Habits of the heart by robert bellah, a famous American sociologist who looks at the rise of individualism in
American society and the loss of a civil consciousness common in the past. Some of his ideas may apply to
your thesis. (Society has become more individuated and sense of community has been lost)

HABITS OF THE HEART

What is good is what one finds rewarding. If ones preferences change, so does the
nature of the good. P.6
His description of his reason for changing his life and his current happiness seem to
come down mainly to a shift of his notions of what would make him happy.can be
justified as idiosyncratic preference rather than as representing a larger sense of
purpose in life. P.6
With the freedom to define oneself anew in a plethora of identities has also come an
attenuation of those common understandings that enable us to recognize the
virtues of others. P.48
In fact, the culture is deeply ambiguous. It represents both the easing of constraints
and dogmatic prejudice about what others should be and an idealization of the
coolly manipulative style of management. P. 48
In our society, with its sharply divided spheres, it provides a way for a beleaguered
individuals to develop techniques for coping with contradictory pressures of public
and private life. P. 48
most groups today embody and element of community as well as an element of
lifestyle enclave. The distinction is more analytic than concrete. P. 74
Thus even those who would most like to think of our society in organic and
communitarian forms cannot avoid the lifestyle enclave as the effective social
expression of our personal lives. P. 74
Modern individualism seems to be producing a way of life that is neither individually
nor socially viable, yet a return to traditional forms would be to return to intolerable
discrimination and oppression. P. 144
Much is said about the cultural diversity and pluralism of American life. But perhaps
what divides us most is not that diversity, but the conflict between the
monocultures of technical and bureaucratic rationality and the specificity of our
concrete committments. P. 152
But since the end of the nineteenth century, the American landscape has been
forever changed by urbanization and industrialization. Though urban Americans still
get involved in an astounding variety of voluntary association, the associational life
of the modern metropolis does not generate the kinds of second languages of social
responsibility and practices of commitment to the public good. P. 177

The metropolitan world is one in which the demands of work, family, and
community are sharply separated and often contradictory, a world of diverse, often
hostile groups, interdependent in ways too complex for any individual to
comprehend. P. 177
Religious membership was no longer unified. Even in the smaller communities, it
had become highly segmented.

Chant is discovered into a more secularized setting that hints the shift into the profane from the sacred (digital
orality)