Postcards from the Protestant decline in America [View all]

[trotsky]

https://religionnews.com/2019/12/10/postcards-from-the-protestant-decline-in-america/

...The problems of aging congregations and diminishing numbers are so well-documented in mainline Protestantism that they hardly need repeating here, yet it’s rare for me to have so personal and piercing an experience of it. But what I saw in western Illinois is a microcosm of what’s happening all across the country, especially with young adults. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then here is a graphic from sociologist of religion Ryan Burge, who has analyzed several decades of General Social Survey data to demonstrate what has happened over time with Americans in their 20s.



...That means that about one in five of these young adults were Protestants at all in 2018, compared to twice that when I was in high school. The long-term trajectory is trending downward, even though there have been some uneven “rebound” years, like in 2017.

Sometimes because of my research into young adult Mormons, I meet people who are clinging to the belief that many young adults tend to leave religion in their teens and early twenties, only to return to the fold after they’ve sown some wild oats and established their adult identities independently of their parents. Once they get married and have children of their own, the thinking goes, they will come back to church.

There are definitely kernels of truth to this; the “life cycle effect” is a very real phenomenon that we have data about stretching back for decades. Late adolescence and the early twenties are the most vulnerable time for people to leave religion. The differences now are that 1) more young people than ever before are leaving during that vulnerable period and 2) many of them are not coming back at all, even if they buck the demographic trends by getting married and having children while they’re still in their twenties. (More are delaying marriage or not marrying at all; according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age for marriage in 2018 was nearly 30 for men and 28 for women.)