The Share of Religious Americans Will Continue to Decline
My generation, millennials, has been blamed for ruining so much: cloth napkins, traditional marriage, American cheese. But in the long run, we might be credited with destroying American religion. We are not a particularly faithful generation, and there’s evidence our offspring may be even less so.
As the Silent Generation, Boomers and Gen X become a smaller and smaller share of the population, there will simply not be enough religious young Americans to replace them.
The reality is that 20 percent of boomers are nonreligious and it’s at least 42 percent of Gen Z, about the same as millennials.
The move away from organized religion among younger people isn’t just with their feet — it goes much deeper than church attendance. Christian Smith argues that millennials created a “new zeitgeist” where religion is much less important to their overall worldview than it was to previous generations. Smith, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, told me, “I think culturally religion is in bigger trouble than a little plateau might suggest.”
Smith described organized religion to me as having become a “polluted” idea in the American mainstream, because of the publicity around sex abuse scandals and financial malfeasance in many different faiths in the ’80s and ’90s as millennials came of age. “The scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good,” Smith wrote. “They demonstrated that religion did not make people moral, did not help its own leaders cope with life’s challenges and temptations, did not promote social peace and harmony and did not model virtuous behavior for others.” Those scandals helped destroy religion’s credibility — and led to millennials no longer believing that religion could be a “glue” that held America together.
Part of why we’re seeing a particularly virulent strain of Christian nationalists’ fight for power in American society right now is because, deep down, they know that they’re losing the long game. But the irony that Smith points out is that the more religious Christians tightly embrace electoral politics, the more they will continue to repel many of those they seek to attract.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/opini...erica.html
My generation, millennials, has been blamed for ruining so much: cloth napkins, traditional marriage, American cheese. But in the long run, we might be credited with destroying American religion. We are not a particularly faithful generation, and there’s evidence our offspring may be even less so.
As the Silent Generation, Boomers and Gen X become a smaller and smaller share of the population, there will simply not be enough religious young Americans to replace them.
The reality is that 20 percent of boomers are nonreligious and it’s at least 42 percent of Gen Z, about the same as millennials.
The move away from organized religion among younger people isn’t just with their feet — it goes much deeper than church attendance. Christian Smith argues that millennials created a “new zeitgeist” where religion is much less important to their overall worldview than it was to previous generations. Smith, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, told me, “I think culturally religion is in bigger trouble than a little plateau might suggest.”
Smith described organized religion to me as having become a “polluted” idea in the American mainstream, because of the publicity around sex abuse scandals and financial malfeasance in many different faiths in the ’80s and ’90s as millennials came of age. “The scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good,” Smith wrote. “They demonstrated that religion did not make people moral, did not help its own leaders cope with life’s challenges and temptations, did not promote social peace and harmony and did not model virtuous behavior for others.” Those scandals helped destroy religion’s credibility — and led to millennials no longer believing that religion could be a “glue” that held America together.
Part of why we’re seeing a particularly virulent strain of Christian nationalists’ fight for power in American society right now is because, deep down, they know that they’re losing the long game. But the irony that Smith points out is that the more religious Christians tightly embrace electoral politics, the more they will continue to repel many of those they seek to attract.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/opini...erica.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
