Church Attendance

Younger people are increasingly unlikely to attend church on a regular basis, or at all. But, many young people are not atheists and many attend church sometimes, but only infrequently. The material below comes from a pastor's twitter feed:

Among those born in the early 1930s, 60% attend church weekly. 17% never attend. [Between 33%.]

Among those born in the early 1950s, 32% attend weekly. 29% never attend. [Between 39%.]

Among those born in the early 1990s, 18% attend weekly. 42% never attend. [Between 40%.] . . . 

People do not become religious as they age. I address that myth in my latest book. 

I looked at every 5 yr. birth cohort from 1930 through 1994. Not a single one has a higher rate of affiliation today than they did in 2008.

From here based upon data from the General Social Survey (GSS) (material in brackets mine).

Why is this happening?

As Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute told Salon in 2017, there's "a culture clash between particularly conservative white churches and denominations and younger Americans" over issues like science, education, and gender equality. Younger people brought up in these churches increasingly reject the sexism, homophobia, and anti-science views of their elders. Since the churches won't reform to be more egalitarian and pro-science, they find that these younger people are walking away altogether.

This isn't entirely true, however. The truth is more complicated. If this were the only thing driving young people away from churches and Christianity you would expect to see a mass migration of young people from conservative Christian churches to mainline Christian denominations, since mainline Christian denominations in the United States largely rejecting sexism and homophobia, and have far less strong anti-science views. But that isn't what has happened. Indeed, mainline Christian denominations saw their attendance fall off before conservative Christian churches caught up with them.

Predominantly white mainline liturgical Christian churches like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American (ELCA), the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the largest Methodist Church denomination, and the Congregational Church are all in membership and attendance free fall as well, among younger people raised in the church and aren't gaining large numbers of converts from more conservative Christian denominations to make up for their losses among young people born into those churches.

Some of this is because mainline Christian denominations demanded little, did not protect a threatened culture, and were more easily discarded when it became socially acceptable to do so because being non-religious reached a tipping point. 

Young people have decided that they can advance their values and find community without the Christian metaphysics and investment of time and effort in activities like Bible study and church attendance. A religious worldview is increasingly out of step with our modern scientific worldview to an extent that has been particularly pronounced as young people form their religious beliefs in childhood and young adulthood. 

The inconvenient statements buried in the Bible, the history of the Christianity, and in basic Christian doctrine, haven't fared well in the face of criticism and closer scrutiny now that it is socially acceptable to question them and to not be affiliated with a church. Young people no longer meekly offer questions in confirmation classes that are quietly set aside with incomplete answers that are deemed by general social consensus to be "good enough."

Some of this is also because conservative Christians have given the Christian "brand" a bad name that young people are disavowing wholesale. The failure of white young people to differentiate between mainline and conservative Christianity is, in part, because historically white, mainline Christian denominations failed to denounce the basically heretical views of their conservative Christian counterparts. The mainline Christians held back from criticizing conservative Christians out of what they viewed as mutual respect and a distaste for conflict, even though conservative Christians were happy to denounce mainline Christians as heretics from the pulpit. As a result mainline Christians have paid the price for not defending the "Christian brand" from being tarnished by conservative Christians.

It isn't as if the world has never seen the trend we are now seeing in the United States. The same trend towards secularization swept Europe decades earlier in the post-World War II period, and the current leader of the Roman Catholic church, Pope Francis, upon taking office put the threat of secularization to the Roman Catholic church at the top of his list of concerns upon taking office. 

Church attendance in most countries in Europe is lower than it is in the United States, where the rate for Christians is 47% (although it varies greatly from state to state from 21% of all adults regardless of religious affiliation in Vermont to 55% in Alabama):

From Wikipedia. Similarly (via the same link), the 2008 European Social Survey found that the following percentage of people in each country never attended church except for special occasions like weddings and funerals:

The remarkable thing is actually that secularization arrived in the United States so much later than it did in Europe, rather than the fact that it happened at all.