What does religious loyalty look like?

August 12, 2010 By
Dec 2005, Royal Botanical Gardens, Sydney, Australia.

It’s always interesting to see what stories reporters jump on and which are ignored. This has actually been a good year for coverage of changes in religious affiliation, thanks to some major studies on the matter. Here’s a CNN piece headlined “Study: Young Americans less religious than their parents,” for instance.

I caught this Reuters story about another study with a somewhat surprising take on denominational affiliation and waited for a few more stories to come in before posting on it. They never came. The Reuters headline? “Young Americans more loyal to religion than Boomers.” Both this story and the CNN piece above were based on what appear to be solid data. There is no necessary conflict between the two studies — young Americans might on average be both less religious and more loyal to religion than their parents.

But for those of us who are involved with our denominations, this is interesting news and I wish it would have gotten more play. This is purely anecdotal but I recently attended my church body’s convention (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod). I had also attended the convention six years prior. At the previous convention, if I had to describe the average delegate age, it wouldn’t have been “young.” At this convention, I actually ran into delegates who I had met at youth events when they were in high school. The pastors were young, the laypeople were young. In many cases, I felt old. And only six years had passed. I wondered if it was just my church body where young people seemed so much more involved in denominational affairs.

OK, on to the story. Here’s how it begins:

Younger Americans, between the ages of 36 to 50, are more likely to be loyal to religion than Baby Boomers, according to new research.

In a study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Philip Schwadel, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said this was true even though they were less likely than previous generations to have been brought up with a religion.

He said the trend “is good news for those who worry about declining religious adherence.”

Now, just last week did I make it into that age group and while I would be flattered to think of myself as “young,” I’m not sure that’s technically accurate. But the upper bound on that is particularly off, no? Apparently different people have different definitions for “Baby Boomer” but by my definition, the youngest are only turning 46 this year, right?. So if this age group includes Baby Boomers, how can we say they’re more loyal than Baby Boomers?

Unfortunately the rest of the story is just as confusing. The study itself may have been great — based on the General Social Survey of more than 37,000 people from 1973 to 2006. But the lack of data in the story made it almost worthless. We learn that non-affiliation with religion grew from 8 percent in the 1970s to 16 percent by 2006. But I never got a good idea of what the study determined with regard to loyalty, per se. The quotes didn’t really help much either:

The professor attributed the change to what he described as “a backlash by political liberals against the conservatism of the 1980s and into the 90s.”

He suggests that liberal people who had only a tangential connection to religion may have decided to leave their faith because of the conservative emphasis on religion.

“The Boomers’ enmity toward organized religion is still evident in the relatively large proportion of their children and grandchildren who are raised with no religious affiliation,” he added.

So it would have been nice to see some more coverage. Did this study merely look at loyalty to any religion, loyalty to the same religion or denominational loyalty? I’m still pretty unsure.

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Filed Under: Godbeat, Journalism, Religion
  • http://getanchored.blogspot.com Tom Goodman

    No one in his/her 40s accepts the “Boomer” label, considering we were in preschool or grade school when the Boomer’s defining moments happened (Woodstock, Watergate, etc). If our 49-year-old President is labeled “post-Boomer,” the rest of us 40-somethings want the same privilege. More observations here: http://getanchored.blogspot.com/search/label/Generation%20Jones

  • Dave

    I recall different definitions of the Boomer cohort, back when it (and I) were a lot younger. Some put the cutoff date at 1960, some at 1965.

  • Bill

    To say that the defining moments of the Baby Boom generation are Woodstock and Watergate is like saying the defining moments of Mollie’s generation are the Clinton Impeachment and Michael Jackson’s death. It’s an easy hook to hang a hat on, but like a hat rack, it doesn’t hold much weight. Yet it’a a recurring theme in media, and with repetition, takes on a patina of truth.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    More than that, Bill, it says little about what Boomers thought of any of these supposed defining moments. My parents are Boomers and this annoys them no end. They point out how, numbers-wise, the vast majority of Boomers (who were eligible) voted for Nixon in 1972. He won in a landslide, of course. It doesn’t support the chosen narrative so people just brush by it.

  • Julia

    the Boomer’s defining moments happened (Woodstock, Watergate, etc)

    Lots and lots of war babies at Woodstock. The youngest of them were 24 yrs old. The oldest of the Boomers were 23. Almost all of the performers were war babies.

  • http://kingslynn.blogspot.com C. Wingate

    Well, I’ve been wont to define “boomers” as “people who were in college between 1967 and 1972,” but I suppose that definition won’t work in this context. At 50 I have certainly never thought of myself as a boomer.

  • Bill P

    Funny. I’m 46 and the youngest of four boys. And yes, depending on the definition, I am or am not a Boomer–although I do not consider myself one. My brothers are 15-5 years older. We all left the Catholic Church, but I returned and am now a grad student in theology, religious ed. teacher/writer, the works.

    My reason for the mini biography is that when I began re-attending church, and learning more about its history, I became increasingly aware of how individualistic and “self-oriented” my brothers were and are. They have no use for organized religion–or for anything that would direct them externally. While I love them dearly, we have very different worldviews.

    Of course, this is just one story, but it seems to fit the Reuters piece.

    Maybe the piece didn’t catch on because many editors are like my siblings, and they don’t want to acknowledge that their kid brother has found something in faith that they find distasteful or a challenge to their way of life.

  • Bill

    More than that, Bill, it says little about what Boomers thought of any of these supposed defining moments

    Exactly. We weren’t all hippies. Besides, what one thinks as a college student is likely to change in a very few years. I confess that at 18, I was an even bigger idiot that I am now.

    This feeds into another popular theme: that the current social and financial woes are the product of the monolithic boomer generation’s selfishness and profligacy. Yet many of the programs that are in trouble were put in place by the “Greatest Generation.”

    This is not to say that my generation is not guilty of selfishness and profligacy; it’s part of the human condition. But I think a story we will continue to see covered is an intergeneration conflict, probably based more on economic issues, but with plenty of religious ghosts.

    BTW, Mollie, 36 is young. Trust your elder on this.

  • Jerry

    Wikipedia has a nice article with some dates for what the baby boom years actually are depending on the country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-World_War_II_baby_boom

    But I want to give kudos to Mollie for that great picture of true loyalty. I’m sure the dog is thrilled about the loyalty shown by the human and may even get someone to “ghost blog” about it.

  • Bill

    But I want to give kudos to Mollie for that great picture of true loyalty

    As the ditty goes:

    A man may smile and bid you well,
    Yet wish you to the devil.
    But when a good dog wags his tail,
    You know he’s on the level.

  • Jen G.

    From a pure demographic perspective, the ‘baby boom’ ended in 1964 which is why those between 46-50 get labeled as ‘Baby Boomers’.

    From a generational identification perspective (i.e. how they think of themselves; what their collective experience of childhood, youth, and now middle age looked like; how they balance between the two poles of communal responsibility and individuality; etc.) there are strong arguments to place that segment in with so-called Gen X.

    If you believe in some of the generational theory pioneered by Strauss and Howe, it is actually not surprising to find those in the 30-50 age range having more loyalty to particular religious denominations than the generation preceding them (who would really only be the parents of the latter half of that age group, the war babies parented the first half for the most part). Generations seem to swing between two poles of community vs. individuality with Boomers being the pinnacle of the later. As the pendulum swings back, you will find the next generation is by nature individualistic but places a high priority on personal loyalty to one’s chosen community.

  • Dave

    Jen, it’s simplistic to describe the Boomers in terms of community vs individual. Some Boomers went out of their way to create new forms of physical community such as Haight-Ashbury or the Ant Farm. Many others considered themselves part of an electronically connected wider community via their music on the radio or from vinyl. Even the acid evangelists wanted to transform their community, not just turn on individuals. Boomers were as complicated as anyone.

    Dave (b 1941)

  • Julia

    During the 1967 Summer of Love this war baby was in an apartment across the street from Golden Gate Park’s PanHandle listening to the Jefferson Airplane next door practicing for the Monterey Pop Festival. At that time the major figures in the movement were my age or older – later the Boomers took it to the mainstream. My war baby cousin’s husband invented the dots on paper method of taking LSD. Everybody is complicated.

    Speaking of wayward youth – isn’t it almost always the case that many young adults drop out of the religion scene and pick it up again when they start having children? The age of first parenthood is getting older. Perhaps that is all the survey is revealing. Even the ancient Greeks complained about the youth of their day not carrying on according to Greek tradition.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Julia,

    You’re exactly right — data going back 60 years shows that people tend to drop out of regular churchgoing while in college and all the way until they have children.

    And yet each few years we see some shocking study about young adults not attending church. Not that it’s not noteworthy, but we must always keep some historical perspective.

  • David T

    I’m a Unitarian Universalist. I have no hard data, but anecdotally, I’m seeing a striking upsurge in young vocations. Most of our current ministers are 45+, in their second careers. But suddenly I’m seeing a significant group newly-minted ministers coming out of seminary in their 20′s. And unlike the older ministers, most of these were raised UUs.