iGen

by Jean M. Twenge

  What Can We Do?

  According to his parents, Brian Go, a junior at Caltech, wrote an email to a counselor at the university’s counseling center asking for help. After a breakup with a girlfriend, he wasn’t sure he had the “will to go on,” he wrote. The counselor told him she couldn’t get him an appointment for several more days. Soon afterward, he killed himself.

  Caltech disputed that account, maintaining that Brian had denied that he continued to have suicidal feelings. Nevertheless, the case highlights a nationwide problem: the often inadequate resources for mental health assistance on college campuses. Waiting lists for appointments with therapists can be long, and budget cuts have meant fewer staff to minister to more students seeking help. Many campus counseling centers have limits on how many times students can see on-campus therapists. After Shefali Arora ran through the twelve sessions of on-campus therapy allowed for each student at Tulane University, the office handed her a list of off-campus therapists. “But I didn’t have a car,” she said. After taking a semester of medical leave, she attempted suicide but, thankfully, did not succeed.

  High school students and their parents are already seeking help for psychological issues at an unprecedented rate. In 1983, only 4% of high school seniors (in the MtF survey) had seen a professional for psychological or emotional issues in the past twelve months. That figure doubled to 8% by 2000 and then rose to 11% in 2015. Thus mental health providers are experiencing a larger caseload than in years past, a trend that is likely to continue. Practitioners need to prepare for an increasing wave of iGen clients.

  The bigger problem will occur if young people don’t seek help. In college newspapers, iGen’ers themselves are sounding the alarm, calling for more recognition of mental illness and less stigma around it. “I worry about the lack of understanding that always seems to accompany any talk of one’s emotional well-being,” wrote Logan Jones in the Utah State student newspaper. “. . . Seeing a therapist is still taboo. . . . Nobody likes the idea of putting a label on what can so easily be written off as some form of insecurity—nobody wants to be diagnosed.” More often than not, depression goes untreated. Even in our age of greater awareness of mental illness, Cooper Lund argues in the Daily Oklahoman, depression is still stigmatized and undertreated. “If I thought I might have cancer, I’d go running to the doctor, but when I thought I had depression it took me four years to finally see a psychiatrist,” he admitted.

  Help for mental health issues is essential, but of course it would be even better to stop depression and anxiety before they start. To do that, it would help to know what causes these mental health issues in the first place. Though some people have genetic predispositions to anxiety and depression, the abrupt rise in mental health issues strongly suggests that genetics is not the whole story. Recent research confirms this, finding that genetics and environment interact. Among those predisposed to depression, only those who experience certain environments will actually become depressed. For example, sleep deprivation is linked to depression; as we saw, teens are not getting enough sleep, and that’s probably one reason why more are depressed. The decline of in-person social interaction and the rise of smartphones are likely another reason. In other words, there is a simple, free way to improve mental health: put down the phone, and do something else.

  Chapter 5

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  Irreligious: Losing My Religion (and Spirituality)

  Boys hurl themselves onto plywood ramps, their skateboards rattling under them as they leap. It’s cold outside, and they’re enjoying having a place to board inside. But it’s not just any skate park—the boys fly through the air under dramatically arched ceilings, silently watched by a stone sculpture of St. Joannes. Their skateboard park is the former Church of St. Joseph in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

  Like many other churches across Europe, the Church of St. Joseph closed as more Europeans disassociated from religion. Another Dutch church is now used as a school for acrobats, and a third is a high-end women’s clothing store. Many others sit empty. “The numbers are so huge that the whole society will be confronted with it,” the Dutch religious heritage activist Lilian Grootswagers told the Wall Street Journal. “Everyone will be confronted with big empty buildings in their neighborhoods.”

  For decades, the United States has been a much more religious country than most of Europe. Even as churches in Europe have emptied, Americans have remained very religious in comparison. For a long time, scholars of American religion maintained that religious practice and belief were relatively stable in the United States. The few changes that did appear, even among young people, were dismissed as “weak and slight.” Nobody was going to skateboard in American churches.

  Then came the Millennials. As studies by the Pew Research Center showed in the mid-2010s, one in three Millennials (then 20 to 34 years old) claimed no religious affiliation, much higher than the one in ten Americans over age 70 who did not affiliate. However, younger people have always been less religious and older people more so. Maybe Millennials are less religious just because they are young. Since the Pew data go back only to 2007, that survey can’t tell us whether Millennials are less religious due to their age or to true generational and cultural change.

  To really tell how the American religious landscape is changing, it’s better to draw from data that reach back across the decades to compare young people now with young people of previous generations. With iGen’ers still emerging into adulthood, their religious orientation is a harbinger of what the United States will look like in the coming decades—whether that’s shuttered churches or a new revival of American religion. Because most US teens who identify with a religion are Christian—68% of 10th graders in 2015—most of this discussion centers on Christianity and why teens are leaving it. Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim teens remain small minorities in the United States (at 1.6%, 1.0%, and 1.5% of 2015 10th graders, respectively). The coming years may see more discussion of these faiths and how they impact iGen.

  Part of the Flock: Public Religious Participation

  Ben is a thoughtful 18-year-old from Illinois, one of the few iGen’ers I spoke with who loves paper books more than his phone. When I ask him whether he ever goes to church or religious services, he says, “Nope. Most of my friends don’t, either.” I ask if he was raised that way or if he gave up on religion at some point. “My parents just never took us to church. They both grew up quasi-religious, but they never had us doing anything,” he says. “I know one or two people whose parents still go to church and want them to, but they stopped.”

  Affiliating with a religion was once a near-universal experience for young people: In the early 1980s, more than 90% of high school seniors identified as part of one religious group or another, meaning that only one out of ten chose “none” for his or her religious affiliation. As late as 2003, 87% of 10th graders affiliated with a religion.

  Then that changed. Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the 2000s, fewer and fewer young people affiliated with a religion. The shift was largest for young adults, with the religiously affiliated dipping to 66% by 2016 (see Figure 5.1). Thus, a full third of young adults do not affiliate with any organized religion.

  Figure 5.1. Percentage affiliating with any religion, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (Monitoring the Future) and 18- to 24-year-olds (General Social Survey), 1972–2016.

  It’s not just young people: iGen’ers are more likely than any generation before them to be raised by religiously unaffiliated parents. In the 2016 college student survey, 17% of students’ parents did not belong to a religion, up from only 5% in the late 1970s. The drop in students’ own affiliation is even steeper; by 2016, 31% did not affiliate with a religion. As Figure 5.2 illustrates, the gap between the religious affiliation of parents and their college student children has widened in recent years; though college students were always a little less likely to affiliate with a religion than their parents, the divide has now grown to a yawning gulf.

  Figure 5.2. Percenta
ge of college students and their parents who affiliated with a religion. American Freshman Survey, 1966–2016.

  This suggests that two forces are working simultaneously to pull iGen’ers away from religion: more iGen’ers are being raised in nonreligious households, and more iGen teens have decided not to belong to a religion anymore. That seems to happen sometime between 8th grade and young adulthood, when adolescents begin to ask more questions and make decisions for themselves.

  iGen’ers came of age in an era when disavowing religious beliefs became strikingly more socially acceptable. In 2009, Barack Obama became the first US president to include “nonbelievers” in an inaugural speech when listing religious groups. More and more Americans publicly challenge religion. “In the 21st century it has become clear that ancient religious texts are simply the creation of human beings. To believe otherwise is to define ‘delusion,’ ” wrote Brian Sheller of Columbus, Ohio, on the New York Times website in 2015. “Anything offered by religion can be found by another, less deluded manner of belief or behavior.”

  Perhaps iGen’ers eschew affiliating with a religion but still go to religious services once in awhile. In the past, many religious scholars argued that Americans were still as churchgoing as ever—or that any changes in attendance at religious services were small.

  But that’s not true anymore. Attendance at services declined slowly until around 1997 and then began to plummet. In 2015, 22% of 12th graders said they “never” attended religious services (see Figure 5.3). That is a very low bar; going to a service even once a year would still count as going. The picture is the same for more frequent attendance: only 28% of 12th graders in 2015 attended services once a week, down from 40% in 1976.

  Figure 5.3. Percentage ever attending religious services, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (Monitoring the Future) and entering college students (American Freshman Survey), 1968–2016.

  In an interview on NPR, Father James Bretzke of Boston College acknowledged that only a small percentage of college students go to Mass but noted that his church in suburban Bedford is filled with young families. “They tend to come back to the Church because they want their children to have some sort of religious education,” he said. That suggests that iGen’ers and Millennials are staying away from religious services because they are young—unsettled, childless, and far from situations such as death and sickness that religion comforts. Perhaps those generations will go back to religion later on when they have settled down.

  However, age can’t be causing the difference in these data over time: iGen’ers and the Millennials are less religious than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age. The recent data on Millennials, who are now in their family-building years, indicate that they are less likely to attend services than Boomers and GenX’ers were at that age. In fact, the decline in attending religious services for this group in their prime family-building years has been just as steep as that for young adults ages 18 to 24 (see Figure 5.4). Millennials have not been returning to religious institutions during their twenties and thirties, making it unlikely that iGen’ers will, either.

  Figure 5.4. Percentage of young adults and prime-age adults who attend religious services at all. General Social Survey, 1972–2016.

  Faithful but Different

  Even though it’s 10 p.m., 20-year-old James is wide awake and ready to talk. He’s just gotten out of a business class at his university outside Atlanta, and when I call and ask, “Is this James?” he answers with a cheerful “That’s me!” After we chat for a few minutes about his major, his parents, and where he’s from, I ask if he went to church growing up. He tells me about the mostly white Baptist church he and his family attended in suburban Atlanta, every Sunday at first but then less and less often. “They were very conservative. Very old-fashioned. Which is fine. We’re an old-fashioned family. We have old-fashioned ideals,” he says. Despite this, there were issues from the beginning: “Our family had a hard time . . . my father is black, my mother is white, and both of us are biracial, me and my brother. We would walk into the church and get stares from everyone.”

  Then his brother came out as transgender at the age of 14, which was an immediate issue at church. “Our church was not very LGBT-friendly at all,” James says. Once, he says, the pastor mocked another church that was more accepting of LGBT people, saying they might as well accept cheaters and murderers, too. “Why would you celebrate sin?” the pastor asked. A few years later, James came out to his family as gay, after struggling with his feelings during middle school. He knew he was attracted to men, but he also knew that that wasn’t accepted in his church. “It was just basically fear. Like you can’t even think about that because you’re going to go to Hell,” he said. “In the church you had to put on major filters in order to be accepted. You couldn’t be up-front with the things that you struggled with or couldn’t be up-front with things that you believed in, or they were going to get shot down.” Not surprisingly, James and his family stopped going to that church.

  Yet, he says, “Right now all four of us are still very much Christian. All four of us still have very strong beliefs.” His brother is “very involved with his friends who are religious. I feel like he has gotten a lot more of that spiritual learning, spiritual feeling from sources outside of the church.” And even though James has moved away from church, he still longs for a religious connection. “It’s very important to me that my relationship with God and my relationship with religion is sound in my own mind instead of trying to find fulfillment through the church,” he says.

  If James and his brother had been born fifty years ago, they might have stayed in the church and kept their identities hidden, at least for a time. But they are iGen’ers, and they are not going to hide who they are. Their challenge now is to find a church that supports both their identities and their deep Christian faith. That hasn’t happened yet for James and his brother, but he’s hoping it will once they are older. “Being in college now, being busy . . . He’s eighteen. I’m twenty. Once I’m more secure and once my brother is more secure, finding a more permanent church would be a goal of ours,” he says.

  Losing My Religion: Private Religious Beliefs

  When I ask 14-year-old Priya if she believes in God, she says, “I don’t really know if there’s, like, one person or a bunch of people or no one. So I’m keeping my views open—I’ll figure it out.” She only occasionally goes to religious services. “Sometimes my mom takes me along when she goes to the [Hindu] temple,” she says, sounding uninterested. When I ask her if she ever prays, she says, “Not really. Sometimes I’m, like, ‘Please please give me a B or higher on this essay.’ So I guess I’m praying to the teacher. Or to some mysterious God of Essays that does not exist, I’m pretty sure.”

  For twenty years, headlines and academic articles declared that yes, fewer Americans affiliated with a religion, but just as many were praying and just as many believed in God. Americans weren’t less religious, they said, just less likely to practice religion publicly. That was true for several decades: the percentage of young adults who believed in God changed little between 1989 and 2000.

  Then it fell off a cliff. By 2016, one out of three 18- to 24-year-olds said they did not believe in God. Prayer followed a similar steep, downward trajectory. In 2004, 84% of young adults prayed at least sometimes, but by 2016 more than one out of four said they “never” prayed. Fewer young people believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God; by 2016, one out of four instead thought it was “an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men” (see Figure 5.5).

  Figure 5.5. Private religious beliefs, 18- to 24-year-olds. General Social Survey, 1974–2016.

  Thus it is no longer true that Americans are just as religious privately. More and more Americans, especially Millennials and iGen’ers, are less religious both publicly and privately. This is not due to shifts in ethnic or racial composition in the population: the trends are the same, and sometimes even stronger, among white America
ns only (by 2016, only two in three white young adults ever prayed, and only 60% believed in God). The waning of private religious beliefs means that younger generations’ disassociation from religion is not just about their distrust in institutions; more are disconnecting from religion entirely, even at home and even in their hearts.

  I meet Max, 16, at his high school, sitting just outside his classroom as the lunch period is about to begin. With his buzz-cut dark blond hair and white-and-gray shirt, he would have blended in with teens in a 1950s school. His hobbies, though, are more modern: he spends all of his free time playing video games. When I ask Max if he goes to church, he says simply, “No.” He gives the same simple answer when I ask if he believes in God or prays. When I ask him what he thinks religion is for, he says, “It’s great for supporting people, like, if they’re in a bad time. Like the saying, like, if you’re in the trench and you’re being bombed, everyone’s praying.” He says that some of his friends’ parents “make them” go to church but his parents aren’t religious.