LA Times: Study on religion finds young adults less affiliated but not less believing

[marmar]

Study on religion finds young adults less affiliated but not less believing
The Pew Forum reports that fewer than 20% of people age 18 to 29 attend church services regularly, but about three-quarters of them believe in an afterlife -- about the same rate as older generations.

By Mitchell Landsberg
February 22, 2010


Is faith losing its grip on the young?

That would be one way to read a new report by the respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found that more than one-quarter of Americans age 18 to 29 have no religious preference or affiliation, and fewer than one in five attend services regularly. That makes them easily the least religious generation among Americans alive today, perhaps the least religious ever.

Or does it?

The Pew study found that, although young adults -- the so-called Millennial generation born after 1981 -- are shunning traditional religious denominations and services in unprecedented numbers, their faith in God and the power of prayer appears nearly as strong as that of young people in earlier generations.

"If you think of religion primarily as a matter of whether people belong to a particular faith and attend the worship services of that faith . . . then millennials are less religious than other recent generations," said Alan Cooperman, associate director of research for the Pew Forum, a Washington-based think tank run by the nonprofit Pew Research Center. "But when it comes to measures not of belonging but of believing, they aren't so clearly less religious."

The report, "Religion Among the Millennials," relied on surveys that Pew and other research organizations have done since the 1970s, and compared the Millennial generation to four previous generations, which it labeled and defined as Gen Xers, born from 1965 to 1980; Baby Boomers, born from 1946 to 1964; the Silent Generation, 1928 to 1945; and the Greatest Generation, born before 1928. The report shows steady erosion in religious affiliation from generation to generation. All but 5% of the oldest group reported an affiliation with some religious tradition, whereas 20% of Gen Xers and 26% of today's young adults said they had no such ties. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-beliefs22-2010feb22,0,7143343.story

[Don Caballero]

1. I hope for the day that all young people reject religion

Then it will slowly die and go away.

[Green_Lantern]

7. it won't happen....

Religion will just be taken less literally and will be seen as a way of finding spiritual awareness.

[madrchsod]

2. the kingdom of heaven is within you....

[AlinPA]

3. Another one of these articles with leading questions in it. To me it is cheap "journalism".

Is faith losing its grip on the young?
Or does it?


"Is Obama a (fill in the blank with some stupid accusation)?" and other bullshit questions.

[Lost-in-FL]

4. The power of memes. nt

[Ozymanithrax]

5. Believing in life after death is a win win situation...

It hurts no one until they commandeer an airplane and fly it into a building.

[Arugula Latte]

6. Hope church attendance continues to fall ...

particularly with the wingnuttier sects of the cult.

[KonaKane]

8. Because the traditional institutions are failing people

this really is not news to me. They've been doing that for years. But it also points up that spirituality isn't going away, and probably shouldn't.