Some iGen’ers who do pray aren’t exactly engaging in traditional religious supplication. “I’ve stopped praying just to thank God; I only pray when I need something or when someone else needs something,” wrote Tiara, 17. “To be honest, I kind of just forget to pray until a bad situation arises and I want it to change.” Others do follow a more religious approach, though in their own way. “The way I pray is simply talking to God,” wrote Marlee, 21. “I don’t get on my knees or act ‘churchy’ about it. Prayer is personal.”
For several decades, belief in the afterlife was a notable exception to the trend away from private religious beliefs: more young adults in the mid-2000s believed in the afterlife than had in the 1970s. Perhaps some young adults wanted to believe in eternal life even if they didn’t want to go to religious services or believe in God. But even belief in an afterlife started to fade after 2006. Thus, late Millennials and iGen’ers are markedly less religious than their close generational neighbors the early Millennials, and that’s true across all four private religious beliefs (praying, believing in God, believing the Bible is the word of God, and believing in an afterlife).
Another private feeling is the importance of religion in your life—and here as well, fewer teens are religious. By 2015, nearly one in four 10th and 12th graders said that religion was “not important” in their lives. The vast majority of teens said that religion was at least a little important to them until around 2000, when the number began to drop. Overall, iGen is, with near certainty, the least religious generation in US history.
Most iGen’ers do still participate in religion in some way. But there is now a relatively large segment of completely secular nonbelievers who don’t participate in religion at all: they never attend religious services, don’t pray, and don’t believe in God. That growing segment is about one out of six 8th graders, one out of five 10th graders, one out of four 12th graders, and one out of three college students and young adults. Having such a large number of young people completely disconnected from religion is unprecedented. It’s also a likely portent of what is to come in American religion: fewer and fewer believers and more and more churches closed down. We’re not Europe yet, but that might be where we are headed.
Religion vs. the Twenty-First Century
It’s a Monday around lunchtime when I reach Mark, 20, at his parents’ home outside Fort Worth, Texas. “Is this still a good time to talk?” I ask. “Yes, ma’am,” he replies, his choice of words momentarily transporting me back to my own Texas upbringing. Mark has been raised in a devoutly Christian home—“my parents are by-the-book Christians, by the Bible, all for the Bible,” he says. He goes to church every Sunday, either to his parents’ church or to a Dallas megachurch with his girlfriend. When I ask him if he prays, he says, “I do pray, every day. I pray for blessings over everyone that I know, hand of protection. I pray God will give me wisdom in life and that he’ll make me the person he wants me to be.” He says his life’s goal is this: “I want to be able to get out of bed, and when my feet hit the floor, the Devil goes, ‘Oh, crap, he’s up.’ ” That, I thought as I laughed out loud, is real faith.
At the same time, Mark is iGen, and during the hour we talked I could almost visibly see the push and pull of his evangelical Christian faith wrestling with the twenty-first-century, iGen world he inhabits. When we talk politics, same-sex marriage never comes up in his list of important issues. When I finally ask about it specifically, he says, “Yes, I know same-sex marriage is wrong because it can never physically work out for the reproduction of life, but everybody has their own viewpoint and if they want to go out and have a same-sex lover, then there’s really nothing you can do, it’s not like you can force them to like the opposite sex.”
Trying to decide whether to have sex before marriage also left him pulled in two different directions. He didn’t get involved with the hookup scene at his public high school, but two years later he met his girlfriend—whom he describes as “the right person”—and they eventually decided to have sex. They plan to get married after college, he tells me. “It’s tough, though, because who knows how long you’re going to be in college, right?” I ask. “Exactly. Whether it’s two years out of junior college, four years, six years, eight, ten years, I know people who have been in college for twelve years,” he says. Still, he describes not waiting until marriage to have sex as a failure. “Ninety percent of people fail, and I was one of those who failed,” he says. “You waited longer than most people, so I wouldn’t call that a failure,” I say. “Well, true, but I wouldn’t mark it up as a victory, either. [My girlfriend] said it was the right thing to do, and it would have been nice to wait, but she said I’m glad we did what we did.” (It turns out that he’s in the majority: a recent study found that 80% of unmarried young adult evangelical Christians have had sex.) But Mark is still not sure. “If I could tell, like, a younger brother who was in my position, I’d say wait until marriage,” he says.
Mark was both keeping his faith but also acknowledging the reality of his iGen world. His views may represent the future of Christianity: assuming that he and other iGen’ers like him keep their faith, they will usher in a new, more tolerant era of Christian belief that steps away from what people should not do to focus on what they should do.
“Spiritual but Not Religious” Has Become “Not Spiritual and Not Religious”
Another common narrative about trends in American religious belief says that spirituality has replaced religion. In 2001, the religious scholar Robert Fuller penned a book called Spiritual but Not Religious arguing that most Americans who eschew organized religion still have deep and dynamic spiritual lives. That theory is often mentioned in relation to young people; the assumption is that young people who are distrustful of traditional religion are still willing to explore spiritual questions.
That might have been true at one time, but no longer. iGen’ers are actually less spiritual as well as being less religious. iGen’ers and late Millennials ages 18 to 24 are the least likely of all age/generation groups to say they are a “spiritual person,” showing a pronounced break even with older Millennials in their late twenties and early thirties (see Figure 5.6). The age/generation differences look very similar to those in identifying as a “religious person”—older generations are the most likely to identify as both religious and spiritual and younger generations the least likely.
Figure 5.6. Percentage identifying as a “very” or “moderately” religious person or spiritual person, by age/generation group. General Social Survey, 2014–2016.
Of course, these differences could be due to age instead of generation; perhaps younger people have always been less spiritual. However, slightly fewer 18- to 24-year-olds in 2014–2016 (48%) described themselves as a moderately or very spiritual person than in 2006–2008 (56%).
Other data bear this out: in the American Freshman Survey, the percentage of college students who described themselves as above average in spirituality fell from 45% in 2000 to 36% in 2016. When sociologist Christian Smith interviewed young people about their religious beliefs in the late 2000s, most did not even know what he meant when he asked them if they were spiritual. “What do you mean, ‘spiritual seeking’?” many asked. So the idea that young Americans in recent years are less religious but more spiritual doesn’t hold up; they are less spiritual than their elders. Spirituality has not replaced religion among the young.
For years, religious scholars and observers have argued that the decline in American religious life is explained by other factors or isn’t important: it’s because this generation is still young; this generation just doesn’t like institutions; Americans are just as likely to believe in God and pray; more young Americans are now spiritual instead; the changes are small. The most recent survey data, which you’ve seen here, knock down every one of those explanations: it’s not age, because Boomers and GenX’ers were perfectly happy to be religious when they were young; iGen is less religious even in beliefs that don’t require religi
ous institutions; fewer Americans now believe in God or pray; fewer, not more, young adults are spiritual; the number who do not participate in religion has doubled.
iGen’ers are less religious and less spiritual, publicly and privately, and strikingly different from previous generations when they were young. The move away from religion is no longer piecemeal, small, or uncertain; it is large and definitive. More young Americans are thoroughly secular, disconnecting completely from religion, spirituality, and the larger questions of life. These complete nonbelievers are still a minority, but their numbers have swelled significantly in a very short period of time. More iGen’ers than any other living generation are unconnected to religion. Here’s the question: Which ones?
The Chasm: Religious Polarization by Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Region
Not that long ago, religion was a nearly universal American experience. White or black, rich, middle class, or poor, in Boston or Atlanta, Americans went to religious services and identified with a religious tradition. The specific religion or denomination may have differed: more Baptists in the South, more Catholics and Jews in the Northeast, more Lutherans in the Midwest; more well-off Episcopalians; Christian churches segregated by race—but all demographic groups went to religious services at about the same rates.
iGen’ers have changed that, continuing trends begun by Millennials. Races, socioeconomic groups, and regions differ in their religious service attendance much more than they did a few decades ago. The religious landscape is now more polarized based on identity.
Most generational trends are remarkably similar across demographic groups. The correlation between race and religious participation is the largest exception to that rule, with strikingly different trends over time for white and black teens. In the early 1980s, black high school seniors were only slightly more likely than white ones to ever attend religious services, but by 2015, the gap was much larger (see Figure 5.7). Until very recently, black teens’ religious service attendance barely budged while white teens’ attendance plummeted.
Figure 5.7. Percentage of black and white 12th graders who ever attend religious services. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
Black iGen teens might be following the lead of white teens—the declines in religious service attendance since 2009 among black teens are the most consistent in decades. Black iGen teens might be the harbinger of a move away from religion in the black community that may take hold in the years to come. Still, the gap between white and black teens in religious service attendance, once small, is now a wide gulf.
Beliefs have also diverged. In the late 1980s, black and white American adults were nearly identical in their belief in God, but by 2016, blacks were much more likely to be believers than whites (see Figure 5.8; this is for adults of all ages to ensure that there are enough people in each group). So although black and white Americans could once assume they had belief in God in common, now the races are much further apart in this fundamental religious belief.
Figure 5.8. Percentage of all adults who believe in God, blacks and whites. General Social Survey, 1988–2016.
The 2016 election exposed the divide between working-class and college-educated Americans. Yet there is one class difference that is rarely discussed, perhaps because it is misunderstood: contrary to popular belief, teens from families with a college-educated father are actually more likely to attend religious services than those whose fathers did not attend college. That was not always true: in the 1970s and 1980s, teens from both types of families went to religious services at about the same, very high rate. That began to change during the 1990s, and in recent years teens from higher-SES families were more likely to go to religious services (see Figure 5.9). The recent gap isn’t as large as that for race, but it follows the pattern of increasing polarization over time, with teens from different backgrounds having different religious experiences whereas they once had near-universal exposure to religious services. However, the same was not true for beliefs: the decline in belief in God was similar among all adults regardless of their education level.
Figure 5.9. Percentage of 12th graders who ever attend religious services, lower and higher SES. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
Regions of the United States have also become more polarized. The South is often known as the Bible Belt, which I experienced firsthand growing up in Irving, Texas, which at one time claimed to have more churches per capita than any other city in the country. Religious service attendance didn’t differ much by region in the 1970s and early 1980s (see Figure 5.10). But by 2015, there was a larger gap in religious service attendance, with more southern teens attending services at least occasionally (the MtF survey stopped asking this question in California in 1997, so we can’t compare residents of the West).
Figure 5.10. Percentage of 12th graders who ever attend religious services, by US region. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
Belief in God has also diverged across regions. In the 1990s, the percentage who believed in God was once about the same in the South and the rest of the country, with southerners just a little more likely to believe. But views have sharply diverged since then, with a belief in one higher power barely budging in the South while it declined in the Northeast, Midwest, and West (see Figure 5.11). By 2016, only one out of five white southerners did not believe in God, compared to nearly one in three white non–southern residents. The image of the godless North may be long-standing, but it became (partially) accurate only in the twenty-first century.
Figure 5.11. Percentage of white American adults who believe in God, South versus other regions. General Social Survey, 1988–2016.
This religious division by region may be the product of the new choices Americans have enjoyed over the last few decades to move wherever they like. People cluster into neighborhoods of people like themselves, growing ever more isolated from those with different views.
As recently as the 1990s, religion was a near universal in America—whether black or white, northern or southern, rich or poor, a high school student could look around her classroom and expect that those sitting around her were religious. Now, about one out of four are nonbelievers—but many more if you’re in a classroom of mostly white students in the Northeast and many fewer if your classroom is mostly black students in the South. Over time, this polarization may lessen if black Americans and southern residents become less religious. For now, the chasm remains.
Too Many Rules: Why Religion Has Declined
“I don’t pray, nor do I believe in an omniscient God,” wrote Brittany, 19. “I like to think that your whole life isn’t planned out already for you, and that your choices determine who you become.”
Why has Brittany’s view become more common? Why are young Americans now less religious? As with the other trends, we can identify things that changed at the same time that are also linked to lower levels of religious commitment. Brittany’s reasoning hints at one possible cause: American culture’s increasing focus on individualism—as she put it, “your choices.”
To more precisely analyze the link between religion and individualism over time, I matched those indicators of individualism with teens’ religious service attendance by year (so that each year was associated with an average level of, say, individualistic language in books and an average level of religious service attendance). The rise in these individualistic factors moved in lockstep with the decline in religion: more individualistic times were less religious times. That makes sense, given that religion by definition involves believing in something bigger than yourself. It also often involves following certain rules and joining groups, two other factors that don’t fit particularly well with an individualistic mind-set. In a society where young people hear “If it feels good, do it” and “Believe in yourself,” religion seems almost countercultural. As we saw in the stories of James and Mark, iGen faith often involves a careful balance of individualistic modern realities with traditional religious doctrines—particularly around issues of sexuality, gender i
dentity, and sexual orientation.
Even religious teens often adhere to a more individualistic version of faith. When Christian Smith interviewed young people for his book Soul Searching, he found that many adhered to a belief system he labeled “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which embraces a belief in God but also includes more uniquely modern ideas, such as the importance of happiness, feeling good about yourself, and the idea that “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.” Smith also found that most teens embraced “moral individualism,” his label for teens’ idea that “we are all different, and that’s good.” Twelve-year-old Harper, whom we met in chapter 2, sees an individualistic purpose for church: “Church is for people to express their beliefs. There’s certain churches for certain people, like, what they believe in. It’s a place that you can meet people who believe in the same thing as you.”
In You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church . . . and Rethinking Faith, his book about young former Christians, David Kinnaman reports that many young people feel a disconnect between their church and what they experience outside of it, including science, pop culture, and sexuality. For example, half of 13- to 17-year-olds want to pursue a science-related career. Yet only 1% of youth pastors say they have addressed any subject related to science in the last year. Kinnaman told the story of Mike, 20, who was invited to tell a room full of pastors why he no longer affiliates with Christianity. “I’m as nervous as an atheist at a pastor’s conference,” he began. But then he said, “It was tenth grade. I started learning about evolution. . . . I knew from church that I couldn’t believe in both science and God, so that was it. I didn’t believe in God anymore.” If his church had not presented things as so black and white, he said, he might have stayed. Other iGen’ers echo that idea. “My father is an atheist and my mother is agnostic. We’re science people,” wrote Timothy, 23. “Religion, at least to people my age, seems like it’s something of the past,” says Matthew, whom we met in chapter 1. “It seems like something that isn’t modern.”
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