RELIGION AMONG THE MILLENNIALS


Y SOME KEY MEASURES, Americans ages 18 to 29 are considerably less religious than older Americans. Fewer young adults belong to a specific religious group than older people do today. They also are less likely to be affiliated than their par- ents’ and grandparents’ generations were when they were young.


B


Fully one in four members of the Mil- lennial Generation—so called because they were born after 1980 and began to come of age around the year 2000—-are unaffiliated with any particular faith. Indeed, millennials are significantly more unaffiliated than members of Generation X were at a comparable point in their life cycle (20 percent in the late 1990s) and twice as unaffiliated as baby boomers were as young adults (13 percent in the late 1970s). Young adults also attend religious services less often than older Americans today. Compared with their elders today, fewer young people say that religion is very important in their lives.


Yet in other ways, millennials remain fairly traditional in their religious beliefs and practices. Pew Research Center surveys show, for instance, that young adults’ beliefs about life after death and the exis- tence of heaven, hell, and miracles closely resemble the beliefs of older people today. Though young adults pray less often than their elders do today, the number of young adults who say they pray every day rivals the portion of young people who said the same in prior decades. Though belief in God is lower among young adults than among older adults, millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty at rates similar to those seen among gen-Xers a decade ago. This suggests that some of the religious differences between younger and older Americans today are not entirely generational but result in part from peo-


ple’s tendency to place greater emphasis on religion as they age.


In their social and political views, young adults are clearly more accepting than older Americans of homosexuality, more inclined to see evolution as the best explanation of human life, and less prone to see Hollywood as threatening their moral values. At the same time, millenni- als are no less convinced than their elders that there are absolute standards of right and wrong. And they are slightly more supportive than their elders of govern-


say they were raised in a religion but are now unaffiliated with any particular faith. Among older age groups, fewer say they are now unaffiliated after having been raised in a faith (13 percent of those ages 30-49, 12 percent of those ages 50-64, and 7 per- cent of those ages 65 and older). Young people’s lower levels of religious affiliation are reflected in the age composi- tion of major religious groups, with the unaffiliated standing out from other reli- gious groups for their relative youth. Rough- ly one-third of the unaffiliated population


RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION AMONG YOUNG ADULTS, BY DECADE Among adults ages 18-29 in the … 1970’s 1980’s 1990’s 2000’s Unaffi liated (no religion) Affi liated


12% 12% 16% 23% 88% 88% 84% 77%


ment efforts to protect morality, as well as somewhat more comfortable with involve- ment in politics by churches and other houses of worship.


The 25 percent of millennials who are unaffiliated with any religious group describe their religion as “atheist,” “agnos- tic,” or “nothing in particular.” This com- pares with less than one-fifth of people in their 30s (19 percent), 15 percent of those in their 40s, 14 percent of those in their 50s, and 10 percent or less among those 60 and older. About two-thirds of young people (68 percent) say they are members of a Christian denomination and 43 per- cent describe themselves as Protestants, compared with 81 percent of adults ages 30 and older who associate with Christian faiths and 53 percent who are Protestants. The large proportion of young adults who are unaffiliated with a religion is a result, in part, of the decision by many young people to leave the religion of their upbringing without becoming involved with a new faith. In total, nearly one in five adults under age 30 (18 percent)


is under age 30 (31 percent), compared with 20 percent of the total population. Data from the General Social Sur- veys (GSS), which have been conducted regularly since 1972, confirm that young adults are not just more unaffiliated than their elders today but are also more unaf- filiated than young people have been in recent decades. In these surveys conducted since 2000, nearly one-quarter of people ages 18-29 have described their religion as “none.” By comparison, only about half as many young adults were unaffiliated in the 1970s and 1980s.


Among millennials who are affiliated with a religion, however, the intensity of their religious affiliation is as strong today as among previous generations when they were young. More than one-third of religiously affiliated millennials (37 percent) say they are a “strong” member of their faith, the same as the 37 percent of gen-Xers who said this at a similar age and not significantly different than among baby boomers when they were young (31 percent).—Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life


EVANGEL • JULY 2010 27


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32