The Numbers, by Andrew Park
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Last month, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life published a fascinating report on the religious lives of the Millennial generation. In it were loads of survey data showing that young adults today are not only less religious than their elders, they're less religious than their elders were when they were young adults. For instance, only one in four Millennials claims an affiliation with a faith, compared to 20 percent for Gen Xers in the 1990s and 13 percent for Baby Boomers in the late 1970s, and fewer than one in five Millennials say they go to church regularly.
On first blush, these figures fit the recent pattern of grim news for God (Remember the Newsweek cover last year on "The Decline and Fall of Christian America"?) But in fact, Pew found that Americans born after 1980 believe in The Man Upstairs and engage in daily prayer in similar proportions as their parents and grandparents did when they were in their 20s. And on some measures, such as the intensity and importance of their religion, Millennials report higher levels of devotion.
In Between a Church and a Hard Place, I describe the debate among sociologists about the secularization of American society. Some point to data like these as evidence of the waning power and significance of religious institutions that has already emptied pews across Europe. Others argue that organized faith is alive and well in the United States and that young Americans will gravitate back to it, as they always have, when they start their families.
Disillusioned with the faiths of their youth, my parents were among the minority of Americans in the 1970s who chose to raise their children without religion. It wasn't until they were in their 50s that they returned to church. Perhaps the Millennials will outgrow their disinterest in Sunday services and denominational labels and engage with communities of faith bigger numbers as they age. Or perhaps they will change the very nature of what it means to be religious in America.
Andrew Park, Between a Church and a Hard Place, religion, atheism, Penguin, Avery, books
