Over the last decade, there has been a steady stream of news stories about how young people are abandoning their formative faith commitments. These articles frequently argue that despite their parents’ best efforts, young people are bent on forgoing any association with organized religion, along with all the benefits that come with it. This story is compelling, and for many concerning, but it’s not entirely right. Or rather, it’s only half the story.
Compared to young adults a generation ago, young people today are less religious by every conceivable metric we have for measuring religious commitment. They go to church less, say religion is less important, have more doubts about the existence of God, and increasingly identify with no religious tradition. But this trend isn’t exclusive to young people: The same pattern is evident among every single age cohort. Americans in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s are less affiliated and less involved in formal and informal worship than people the same age were a few decades earlier.
Still, in terms of absolute numbers, young people are showing the greatest movement away from religion. Because of this, we have tended to reach for generational explanations that focus primarily on the distinctive characteristics of Generation Z and Millennials — things such as their higher rates of educational attainment, their attitudes about sex and sexuality, or their widespread adoption of social media. Many of these explanations found little actual support. For instance, higher rates of formal education among young adults are unlikely to have contributed to the surge in secular identity given that most young people disaffiliate before they ever step foot on a college campus.
But more importantly, these explanations ignore the single most important predictor of adult religiosity: our religious experiences in childhood.
Much of the decline in current religious commitments can be traced back to the way young adults have been raised. A new report, “Generation Z and the Future of Faith in America,” documents the waning religiosity of young Americans in the country today. Each successive generation reports having grown up with less formative religious engagement than the one preceding it. For instance, 57 percent of Baby Boomers say they attended religious services each week during their childhood. But only 40 percent of adults who are part of Generation Z say their families did the same. Further, only 42 percent of Generation Z attended Sunday school regularly. For Baby Boomers, this was a common experience: Sixty-one percent said they did so weekly while growing up.
The most straightforward explanation for why young Americans appear to be less religious is one of the most obvious. Young people are leaving a religion they were never particularly connected to in the first place. A 2016 study found that young people cited their family’s lack of strong ties to religion as an important reason they no longer belong to a religious group, more so than politics, sex-abuse scandals, or a specific negative experience. More than one in three (36 percent) young adults reported that they no longer identify with their childhood religion because their family was not that religious to begin with.
More Americans today are being raised in secular households than ever before. More than one in seven Gen Zers report that they were not raised in a religious tradition at all. What’s more, unlike past generations, most Americans today with no religious attachment in childhood remain unaffiliated as adults. This marks a significant change from the recent past, when many unaffiliated Americans would rejoin a religious community later in life, often once they got married and started a family.
If we spent the past 20 years seeking to understand why Americans leave religion, we may spend the next 20 attempting to identify the factors that lead people to join a religious community in the first place. For the growing numbers of young people with only a nominally religious background, it’s difficult to see how such a return to religion might be accomplished.
The social context has changed dramatically for young people. Religious pluralism is a value shared widely among young adults. Most Americans do not believe that atheists are immoral. In fact, young adults today are more likely to be friends with an atheist than with an Evangelical Christian. Americans who are not religious are more likely now than in the past to have friends whose religious background is the same as their own. Secular marriages are increasing, and secular families along with them.
One of the most critical hurdles in getting young people interested in religion is overcoming the perception that organized religion in general — and Christianity in particular — embraces a set of values they simply do not share.
More than two decades ago, a pair of sociologists noted that liberal and moderate Americans were disaffiliating from Christianity at far higher rates than conservatives. Liberals are now much less likely to belong to a place of worship, attend religious services, or believe in God than they once were.
But the growing perception among young people that Christianity is primarily about promoting a conservative worldview makes the entire enterprise less appealing to people who do not share that goal. When churches lead with politics, it not only alienates people whose political views differ, but also those who are not looking to engage in politics at all. If you exclude all young people who are liberal, moderate, or apolitical, there are not a whole lot of people left to fill the pews.
