Wrong Enterprise for Millennials.
The Millennial’s Enterprise had a bar with Whoopi Goldberg in it, instead. Says it all, really.
I agree the “no negatives” thing is a big factor.
Just a quick data point. Attending church came up in a conversation with a friend yesterday and this thread came to mind. My friend has been going to the same church since she was a child, and the church has been part of her life all along (got married there, taught Sunday school when she had small children, volunteered at special events, etc.). But in the last 10-15 years has pulled away from going there regularly, saying going to the church no longer really appeals, and she has her own connection to God and does not need anyone guiding her any more.
OTOH, her mid-20s daughter goes to a different church. She has attended with her daughter a few times and there is a large and active congregation, with 3 services on Sundays, all filled. Some of the pastors are younger and connect well with the younger population. The sermons really resonated with her. Also, the church is big and modern with music and big TVs and the whole shebang. The daughter has made many social connections and works a few hours in the church each week (paid).
I wonder if geography is playing more a role than generation, and if our location (those in this discussion) affects our perceptions about religion in general. I am not sure that the board here leans more coast-ward, but I suspect if you live in a more liberal area the perception that religion is in decline will be more strong than if you are in a more rural inland area. Sacramento is on the border of the more liberal and progressive SF Bay Area sphere of influence and the inland, rural, and more conservative region of Northern CA.
If you live away from a large (and presumably more diverse and liberal) city, what is your perception of the state of religion and church health in your area?
I’m a baby boomer so I’m not really connected to the groups in the OP. That said, I personally think the decline in religion or at least formal religion has to do with how families aren’t as connected as they used to be. I’ve seen a trend especially in my own family. When I was a kid, we all got together, played together, were in each others business…all the time. But as the family became more spread out (and wealthier), we sort of lost connection. My uncles and aunts were VERY close. Each family unit was close (i.e. each of my uncles and aunts and their respective families). All tied together by my grandmother. When she died, it started to break down…slowly. I lost track of my cousins, only seeing them on occasion, same with my aunts and uncles, especially those still in Mexico. We only got together a few times a year. Now go up a generation to our kids, and there is barely a connection at all.
Tying this back to religion, my grandmother and my aunts and uncles were all VERY religious. And to an extent, us cousins were at least indoctrinated in that religion. And while my grandmother lived, we all still attended church, at least most of my cousins did when they were around her. But I think for most of us (some of my cousins are still very religious) we lost connection and drifted away (for my part I did long before this, but then my dad moved my family out of our old neighborhood when I was a kid and we moved all over the country). Today, most of our kids (including my own) are pretty low on the religious scale, even if most are nominally Catholic.
I’m sure this was a confusing stream of consciousness post, but to tie this together, I’ve noticed that the families who spread out the most follow the trend of less religion, while the ones who stayed where the family is or was concentrated are still pretty religious. This is most noticeable these days when we have our infrequent family reunions, especially the last one in Senora where a good chunk of the family still lives. Those that stayed there or stayed where my family first came to Mexico are much more religious than those who have spread out and moved on and become more American (or in some cases more Thai, English or where ever else they ended up finally living).
Anyway, that’s my confusing 2 cents (and a bargain at double the price!).
I feel this is a point being ignored. Religion is declining now, but when these kids get closer to death, they’ll likely go back to religion. Just the like old sage that “a conservative is just a liberal that has been mugged”, a 55 year old churchgoer is just a 25 year old atheist with heath scares and dead parents. Sad but true.
Check back in 30 years, and see what happened.
I think not only is religion declining, but what religion there is left is mutating as well.
Where in the past, most people went to a Catholic church, a mainline protestant church or a Baptist church, and all of them were relatively sedate- maybe more fire & brimstone at the Baptist church is all.
None of them were trying to substitute themselves in place of the wider, secular world. Church was part of your lifestyle to a greater or lesser extent, but you had friends outside of church, you had activities outside of church people/church stuff, and the vast majority of what you did/watched/read was outside of the Church’s purview.
But now the modern megachurches and evangelical churches ARE basically trying to substitute themselves/their communities for the wider world in their congregants’ lives. They’re trying to provide services and even structure such that people can live in their little church-centric bubble, with the exception of work.
A lot of people seem to like this insular stuff- I guess they don’t have to think for themselves or be confronted with anything that would make them uncomfortable, just good pastor-approved church stuff that they can trust is good and right.
But it’s a problem in the wider world when say… the 5000 members of Mega-Abundant Mark Cathedral Church-of-Life are basically indoctrinated and do politically active stuff that’s totally church-oriented and guided.
Maybe it’s a reaction to the concept that contemporary US lifestyles aren’t conducive to a religious lifestyle- they’re coming up with a new one that is. I don’t know.
I dunno, I’m much less religious now, with one dead parent the other talking quite seriously about her death and how she doesn’t want her life extended at the cost of comfort, and several health problems, than I was when I was young and healthy. It doesn’t help to like the idea of an afterlife if you don’t believe in it.
Quoted for truth.
I’m a member of a United Methodist Church congregation (in fact, I head up the marketing committee). We’re liberal, and very much invested in social justice. We serve as a shelter for the homeless. We’re a “reconciling congregation,” which means that we support full inclusion in our church of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. We’re currently supporting three seminary students, two of whom are gay.
We have a lot of younger families in our congregation, and we’re located in a suburb that’s popular among younger families. But, most of the younger families in our church are second- or third-generation members of the congregation.
Even so, in theory, we have a lot to offer younger, liberal people. But, we really struggle to attract new, younger people to the church, and what we see is that, in the minds of a lot of people, what “Christian” means has been defined for them by the stridently conservative views of evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches, who have been able to dominate any conversation about Chistianity.
Even within the UMC, we’re struggling with this – there are liberal and conservative wings of the church, particularly on the issue of homosexuality, and it seems likely that that issue is going to lead to a schism in the church in the very near future.
As a counter-anecdote, my grandfather, who had stubbornly resisted Christianity for decades, converted mere months from his death (he had terminal-stage cancer by then.) It can’t be proven that his impending death was necessarily the reason for his conversion, but I do think many people finally get confronted by the inescapable question/issue of faith and afterlife as their remaining final time ticks down. So I think **Just Asking Questions **is on to something, at least with a certain subset of people.
Twice I have been close enough to death to say goodbye to friends and family, and neither time was there a thought about religion and/or spirituality.
That’s why I said mostly. And you forgot the “one god is enough for us” line at the end of “Who Mourns for Adonais.” Which Mission Log said the actors hated.
The next show filmed was “The Doomsday Machine” and the last line of that "one [planet killer] is enough for me is Shatner getting back for having to say that line.
No to mention the episode where a goddess returns, does miracles, and she is exposed as a con artist using technology to scam the planet.
The study quoted showed that things are trending differently now. The older millennials are at an age where historically they begin drifting back to organized religion and fewer of them are doing so than in generations past.
No, I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a long term shift to secularism. Unless the nation’s churches can figure out ways to become (more) inclusive and the centers of society in ways that the youngest two generations can appreciate, they will be viewed as the last vestiges of anti-diversity and anti-science by groups who will be dominating US politics for decades.
Most (First-World) people just don’t make religion a huge part of their lives, one way or the other. Therefore, they follow a path of least resistance, and avoid the scary/annoying people who get way too into it. Once the path of least resistance is not going to church and not professing a faith, the religions begin to hemorrhage pew-fillers and only retain the ones with that gleam in their eyes when they talk about other people burning in Hell.
A secular shift to secularism.
The first thing to do is to take the First Amendment at its word and break free of politics, instead of denying and wriggling around the law of the land and attempting to control politics. This would primarily be good for politics, and therefore the whole rest of the country and the world, but it’s also needed to allow religions to become religions again, as opposed to the GOP’s Tax-Exempt Auxiliary League.
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This sounds an awful lot like the “there are no atheists in foxholes!” line of reasoning.
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While I am non-religious in the atheistic sense, I am under no illusion that a great many (perhaps even the greater number) of those who go on to claim “no religion” or “unaffiliated” on these kinds of surveys do still maintain a belief in god, or if not that, a sort of spiritualist is worldview that allows for an afterlife on the grounds that they “feel” their loved ones aren’t really gone.
Let us not equivocate the decline of religion with the rise of atheism. While I believe (based on recollection of other polls which I’d be happy to dive after if someone really wants to know) that atheism is on the rise too, not all the non-religious would count themselves as such.
I’m with Monty on this. If I remember correctly the episode “Who cries for Adonais?” has Captain Kirk explicitly saying one god is enough for him.
Star Trek and Star Wars came out almost 50 years ago. Despite what you or I or George Lucas (link to TIME interview) might like to think, lots of people think Star Wars is “profoundly religious”.
~Max
I think this feeds directly into the sense of community mentioned by FlikTheBlue. If most of your extended family will be at church every Sunday, that’s a huge influence on whether you go to church every Sunday. If your family is spread over the seven continents, and the only family at your church every Sunday is the same family that would otherwise be in your house, that’s one less reason to attend church.
~Max
Whoops, missed the whole second page there.
~Max
I am not a millennial or even a boomer, so maybe I should not contribute to this thread, so be warned.
I grew up in a family that had no religious practice. We knew we were Jewish, but aside from Hanukah candles (and small gifts) there was nothing. At one point I had a school that involved getting a passage from the bible and was embarrassed to admit that we didn’t have one. My mother grew up in a house that was nearly as divorced from religion except that her mother, but not her father, liked to go to services on the high holy days. I honestly don’t know about my father’s family. My wife is a bit more religious than I. She likes to light candles and say prayers on some occasions, but really has no more belief in god than me. Our kids were raised without any religion. All three have married. Two of them to fallen away Catholics and their kids are being raised without religion. The third one is married to a woman who claims to believe god exists. In fact, she once expressed the belief that, deep down, I must really feel that god exists. Nope. In fact, I can’t help but feel that deep down, below all the turtles, an intelligent woman like her cannot really believe in god, although I have never said that to her. Be that as it may, there is, as far as I can tell, no religious practice in their house and I don’t think their kid has had any religious training.
Now to get back to the OP, when I think of religion, I mostly think of the evangelicals and they are opposed to everything I believe. The Jewish equivalent, the Hasidim are nearly as bad, although I don’t think they are into right wing politics to quite the same extent. At any rate, there is nothing that is going to bring me to religion no matter how old I get. I am an agnostic who deep down believes there is no god, which makes me an atheist. And if an omnipotent god does exists, I don’t want to know him because of all the awful things he allows to happen.
Incidentally, a good friend once remarked to me that Darwinism didn’t make it necessary to reject god, but it did make it possible. Otherwise, you look around at the enormous numbers of different species around and conclude that you needed a god to explain all those special creations. Now you need only only one miracle, the creation of self-replicating cell And in a billion years it is conceivable that that happen by chance. I don’t know if that is why so many churches oppose Darwin, but it is one reason none of them interest me. The typical attitude to science in general, climate science in particular, also repels me.
One prospect we may be giving short shrift to is the potential rise in popularity of the liberal church. Like this one in North Carolina. What if churches with beliefs like this catch on with today’s and tomorrow’s yute?
There’s really nothing preventing churches from becoming forces for progress and good.