Religion is failing young people, not the other way around. Why? It depends who's asked.
According to authors Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, it's politics. In "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us", they show how over the past half a century, many Americans have adjusted their politics to fit their religion, rather than the other way around. They write that young people "have been alienated from organized religion by its increasingly conservative politics."
And though youth are increasingly more liberal on social issues, there's nothing inherently wrong with conservative politics. Rather, it's our polarizing tendencies -- specifically our lack of deep conversations -- that are turning young people away from religion. The future of religion rests in our capacity to engage in honest dialogue on the world's biggest moral issues.
Putnam and Campbell determine more than one quarter of 20-somethings today say they have no religious affiliation, about four times higher than in any previous generation. Though people tend to become more religious as they age, Millennials (ages 18-29) are significantly less religious than the past two generations, comparatively.
But young people today are fairly traditional in their religious beliefs and practices. They pray and believe in God at comparatively similar rates as their elders and are no less convinced than previous generations that there are absolute standards of right and wrong.
Putnam and Campbell suggest "religious leaders will concoct more palatable offerings" for young people to reengage in religion. However, religious leaders can "concoct" all they want. What religious leaders -- especially followers of Jesus -- need to do is create space for conversations, especially among people who disagree.
For too long, the church has reflected the miscommunication and polarization of society. Life isn't about being right or wrong, Democrat or Republican, Catholic or Protestant. It's about engaging the world's moral questions.
So why don't we have frequent, honest conversations with young people?
First, there's little time or space for conversations. With overscheduled lives, social media are increasingly the only places young people can be themselves. We need to move from living as connected individuals in world wide webs of communication to intimate communities of believers sharing God's redeeming love with each other.
Second, young people are more liberal on social issues. This is especially true on sexuality. But differing viewpoints, especially across generations, shouldn't limit conversation. Opinions will always vary. We need to relearn how to have conversations where we honestly listen rather than jump to defend ourselves.
Third, we don't know how. For too long, we've only conversed with people like us -- those of similar age, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. True conversations are difficult, and they take practice. We need to rediscover principles of communication that allow for safe, two-way dialogue.
The future of religion, specifically the church, hinges on our ability to engage young people and conversations. It's time for a spiritual awakening that makes room for people we disagree with, because it's when we disagree that we learn most about each other and ourselves.
In talking with young people who don't belong to any particular faith, it's clear they don't want to be less religious. Millennials are plenty spiritual. But young people will continue losing their religion unless we engage them in conversations.
David Briggs: Knowing Your Neighbor is a Powerful Force for Religious Civility
Frank Fredericks: The Voices of Religious Youth: Are You Listening?
Resources - National Study of Youth and Religion | National Study ...
National Study of Youth and Religion | Insights into Religion
Talking to Youth About Religion : NPR
FoxNews.com - Young People Less Tied to Organized Religion, Poll Finds
Losing their religion: Why are young people rejecting church ...
See, the reason why peopel are leaving churches, temples, mosques etc. is because they gave in to the secular, materialistic world. What they want is a real alternative, a religion that makes a difference, not a weak congregation that gives in to any public pressure.
You've filled his house with things of Gold
While handing crumbs to the old and poor
Then you preach about being pure
And wonder why we're laughing
In your old way you're trying to find us
But we can't follow what's behind us
Too much blind faith it will blind us
Tho sometimes that's a blessing.
Got nothing to do with heaven or hell
What I do in bed I'm not going to tell
What I'm talking about you know dam well
You really ought to try it.
The Church should have listened to John 40 years agol
That's the feeling I'm getting reading this article and some of the comments. It's like some people think we need to find some way, any way, to pass on their religious tradition to young people. As if they know young people are leaving their religious tradition and with that their pet religion will die. They sound so desperate.
That line of understanding, from science is bleeding over, and decade after decade peoples understanding of our world, us, and the universe will be more and more informed by science.
My friends son just had a heart transplant. they literally took this kids HEART out of his chest and for a short time he was without a heart and they placed a new heart from another human into his chest, and now he's alive and well...... we can actually do that..... because of science. think about 100 yrs from now where we will be. Science is continually defying religious understanding and the youth grow up with this stuff, touch screens and iphones, heart transplants, and cell transforming. how in the coming decades and the coming new discoveries can you possibly make religion relevant
this is true actually, the only way religion can hand around, working harder at conditioning religious belief in the youth of today, it's the same thing cigarette companies try to do. whats the saying? “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man”
It would be so much better if children were not indoctrinated at all. When they are old enough to reason critically they can look at religion and choose for themselves. Once indoctrinated as children...they find it very difficult to choose. As a child I was given Grimms Fairy Tales and the Bible at about the same age. I was told that Grimms was a book of fairy tales. I was told the Bible was the word of god...how sad...(sigh)
Certainly the problem is with us today. Many young people know only the most grotesque caricatures of religion. Many are ignorant of other traditions as well, including the values enshrined in the Constitution.
But there is another, countervailing trend: middle-aged people who once thought of religion as irrelevant turning back to it, seeing it with new eyes. This doesn't necessarily mean that they become more credulous about the mythic/supernatural elements. Just the opposite: they now see that the supernatural part was for kids, but the sociological functions are vital to the communal lives they want to lead.
The problem of transmitting traditional values will never be solved, but it will always be necessary. Our particular society is breaking down, but someday, if it is ever to be renewed, it will have to educate young people in the real value of tradition. Of course they must feel that they are discovering traditional values anew. That's the crucial trick.
You speak of how "our particular society is breaking down". Is it really breaking down or is it merely moving away from the way you liked how society used to do things?
There is apparently a issue (again, I wouldn't call it a problem) with young people leaving their churches. They tend to do so in their late teens and twenties, around the same time they go to college. One reason why seems to be that they get some distance from their religion and go on living without it. This seems to suggest that people don't stick with religious traditions because there is some great value to it, but rather that keeping with a religious tradition requires constant exposure to keep you indoctrinated in needing the tradition. That doesn't speak well to the notion that tradition is valuable.
I also find it odd that you'd have to trick people into finding tradition anew, as if it wasn't tradition.
It's a problem because you can't reinvent everything for yourself. I don't know if you read a recent post of mine about the guy who joked that he didn't need a table of integrals, he could just derive whatever form he needed when he needed it. Obviously this would have made his job impossible because he couldn't take the time out to derive everything, plus he would probably get some of them wrong.
The other example I like to give is language, which is a kind of tradition. You can in theory invent your own language. But every time it's been tried, it has failed miserably. For one thing, we aren't even aware of all the subtleties of natural languages.
So I'm not saying you have to be Catholic because of your dad, but I am saying that you have to get a lot of your values from your dad/family/culture, because experience matters and there isn't time to analyze every situation from some blank-slate pure-reason principles.
(Some dads are of course not to be emulated, and some cultural preferences are unjust or silly, but I'm giving a general principle.)
Our society is breaking down because it is becoming ever less cohesive, and more people have a what's-in-it-for-me attitude. It is manifest at many levels, including government.
I didn't mean that someone has to trick someone else for traditions to persist. What I meant was that the natural course of things involves people understanding the real value (as opposed to, say, the mythical elements) of tradition when they get older. As I pointed out, the phenomenon of people leaving churches in their twenties is matched by many of the same people embracing communal structures (whether the ones they were born into or not) in middle age.
You can see the phenomenon I'm talking about just in individual families. It's a cliche that people in their 30's/40's/50's come to discover that old dad wasn't quite the silly dufus they thought he was when they were 16.
The same thing also happens on a broader communal level.
"Don't do drugs" sounds old-fogeyish and restrictive to the 8th grader, but somewhere along the line he realizes that the society is better off if everyone isn't a drug addict. (Just an example, I'm very much opposed to the "war on drugs" as the feds conduct it.)
Religion is failing young people for the simple reason that the traditional religions are increasingly making themselves irrelevant to contemporary life.
1. Instead of evolving to embrace what science has learned (and is learning), religion expends most of its energy defending a worldview that has its origins at the end of the Iron Age.
2. Instead of seeking to help develop compassionate-and-caring human beings, religion expends most of its energy arguing over which "rules of behavior" are the "right" one...and trying to enforce those rules.
3. Instead of helping people to understand that spirituality is about walking a path that makes one's self a "better" person....religion spends its time cultivating people who too busy trying to control everyone else around them, to be bothered with looking into their own hearts and getting real about what they find there.
Sadly, the Catholic Church and the boorish way in which it has (failed to) respond to this latest sex abuse scandal is emblematic. An instution so busy taking everyone-and-everything else's moral inventory that it is literally deaf-mute-and-blind to its own (considerable number of) sins.
It (and the Pope) may be blind to this staggering level of arrogance and hypocrisy....but young people of any-degree of intelligence are not.
This though, is a primary problem, the more you know about scientific discovery, the harder it may be to believe in such impossibilities of physics and biology that are represented in the bible as truth.
it's as if the church has to fight against science simply to try and stay relevant, it's become a "wait they don't have the answers we have the answers!"
It only becomes "more difficult" if one tries to interpret what is in The Bible as "fact", "science" and "history".....rather than as Myth and Metaphor.
When Genesis---for example---is viewed as a MYTH (rather than recorded history) about the origins of the Universe and the Evolution (and implications) of Human Consciousness....
...not only does it not contradict what contemporary science has discovered in the fields of Cosmology, Geology and the Life Sciences....it is (for 3000 years ago) a pretty sophisticated summation of these fields.
The Church only has to "fight" against Science when spirituality is "stuck" at what philosopher Ken Wilber likes to call the "mythic stage" of development, or what Joseph Campbel refers to as "concrete" level. Where stories and acts that are primary metaphors and are symbolic are percieved as being literally-and-concretely true.
Spirituality---especially in the East---has outgrown this stage. Because of the Church and the Scientific Revolution, it has not done so here in the West. As a result the matter of spirituality remains stuck in a battle over the "truth" of (to put it rather bluntly) what is a relatively early stage, and underdeveloped understanding of spirituality.
I recommend reading the Gnostic Gospels. They were suppressed---imo---because they were an early attempt to move Christianity past this mythic stage....and Jesus is constantly rebuking His Apostles that they do not understand what it is that he is trying to communicate to them.
Amen, Mr. Good. Thank you for your frank and honest view on this issue. If our predominant religious institutions made a genuine, humble effort to engage youth, genuine understanding, healing and compassion could flow forth as a result. I am neither religious, nor young, and sadly, my faith that "big religion" of the Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu varieties has the capacity to honestly engage the youth of their faith, let alone other faiths is so small as to be nearly invisible.
So here is your challenge big religion: "It's time for a spiritual awakening that makes room for people we disagree with, because it's when we disagree that we learn most about each other and ourselves."
In order to be "approved" you must meet the "standards" of the Church/State. This is good for stability, but limits new ideas and change.
Society will adapt,change and move into the New World. Institutions that can't or won't adapt will crumble and be abandoned.
I believe young people realize there is a good reason to treat each other as they would like to be treated but they reject the idea of doing it just because they are told to.
I think the young people might be drawn to what might be called "agnostic" Buddhism or Christianity. Moral right and wrong that YOU have discovered in yourself, without the need of "faith" or the "supernatural".
BUT the question is Can the Old Traditional Church/State allow this to happen ?
Religion, as a belief in god, require being forsaken by searchers for truth, as Isaiah 7:14-22 suggested. Religion as a science finding meanings to concepts for concepts the mind can grasp is required.
Religion as a belief in god, Christianity especially, teaches us we don't need to know, Jesus is truth and all we need to know. However, man means "mind able to comprehend all things" and require inquiring minds for comprehending. Communicating with others, especially those reasoners and not blind believers, encourages us to find evidence and substance to support unseen beliefs, Hebrews 11:1.
If as generally believed, we're in the "harvest time," we need to overcome traditionally beliefs substituting it for knowing through reasoning. If "the truth will make us free," why isn't those who believe Jesus is that truth free? The only way truth cam make us free is living it, not to believe someone is. That is the kind of reasoning required to make religion work for today's youth. With many youths being questioning people, opposing secular schools' desire, they are the future of "true religion undefiled."