2024-05-31T07:32:02-04:00

The big religion news over the last few years is the growth of the Nones, the people who say on surveys that their religion is “none.”  We have blogged quite a bit about this, including last week with Why Are So Few “Nones” Atheists?  But now there is another development.

Demographer Ryan Burge is the author of the book The Nones:  Who They Are, Where They Came From, and Where They Are Going.  Crunching a great deal of data from the General Social Survey and other sources, he has come to a rather surprising conclusion:  The percentage of Nones has stopped growing and hasn’t grown for the last five years.

Since 2020, the percentage of Nones has been hovering around  35%.  That’s a lot, to be sure, and the percentage of Americans who are religious has certainly declined.  But Burge’s data suggests that the decline has stalled, maybe, according to the trend lines, stopped, or at least plateaued.

Here are the percentages, the differences of which are statistically insignificant:

  • 2020: 34%
  • 2021: 36%
  • 2022: 35%
  • 2023: 36%

In 2008, the percentage of Nones was 21%.  Five years later, the number shot up to 30%.   That number grew until 2019, when the number reached 35%.  After that, the numbers have mostly stayed the same, going up or down a little in statistically insignificant ways:  2020: 34%; 2021: 36%; 2022: 35%; 2023: 36%.

Interestingly, the percentage of atheists has been remarkably stable since 2015, when the percentage was 6%, except for 7% in 2019.  In 2013 and 2014, the number was 5%.  This was a jump from 2009 through 2013 when it was 4%.

This is encouraging news overall, but when Burge slices and dices the data, he uncovers some more good news but also something sad.

While the percentage of Nones has been the same over this five-year period, this is partially because it has gone down for some demographics but has gone up for others.  Specifically, it has gone down for younger people, which certainly bodes well, both for them and for the future of the church.  Among Generation Z, those who were born after 1996, the percentage has dropped considerably, from 48% in 2022 to 46% in 2023.

But for members of the so-called Silent Generation, those born between 1925 and 1945–the fast-disappearing cohort that lived through the Depression and World War II–over those years when the percentage of Nones were stabilizing, their numbers have shot up.  In 2008, only 12% of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were Nones.  That has risen steadily until in 2023, that number has risen to 21%!  One-fifth of our elderly now say they have no religion!

Why is that?  As these people near death, they have no solace in their faith?  Is it because they can’t go to church anymore and check “None” because they aren’t active in any congregation?  Have they been abandoned by their congregations?  This is beyond tragic, uncovering an important need for ministry.

We Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964,  are not doing much better.  In 2008, the percentage of None Boomers was 17%, but that has risen by 2023 to 28%.

To be sure, the total percentage of Generation Z Nones (46%) is higher than Silent Generation Nones (21%), but why is the former going down, while the latter is increasing?  Any theories?

 

Photo by Kindel Media via Pexels, public domain: https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-elderly-man-with-an-unhappy-facial-expression-8172241/

2024-04-13T14:25:42-04:00

Yesterday I came down pretty hard on Generation Z.  Since turn about is fair play, today I will give the same treatment to my own generation.

I came across some clickbait entitled 23 Things Kids Did in the 60s That Would Completely Horrify Parents Today.  I couldn’t resist clicking.  At first, I laughed.  Then I waxed nostalgic, since I did nearly all of these things.  And then I started thinking.  Does this hold a clue to why we Baby Boomers messed up the culture and the subsequent generations?

Here are the 23 things we did:

(1) Driving without seatbelts or carseats.  [My parents got a “station wagon pad” for our boat-sized Chevy wagon, turning the back into a vast play area.]

(2) Public space smoking.  [Second-hand smoke was the aroma of our lives.]

(3) Unsafe cribs.  [Nevertheless, I survived.]

(4) Hitchhiking.  [Only when my truck broke down.]

(5) Toy gun playtime. [You should have seen my arsenal.]

(6) Non-Store Bought Halloween costumes.  [You should have seen me as the Mummy.]

(7) No parental controls on TV.  [But that is because no one needed them.  The networks all had a Department of Standards and Practices that protected even parents.]

(8) Lawn Darts.  [I never got into that sport.]

(9) No outside supervision.  [We played baseball, roamed the neighborhood, and rode our bikes all over town without an adult in sight.  I read that crime was no less then that it is today, and possibly even worse.  And yet neither we nor our parents seem to have worried that much about it.]

(10) Bicycling without helmets.  [Of course not!]

(11) Children walked to school without adult supervision.  [I walked six blocks to and from school from the time I was in the first grade.]

(12) Sunscreen not popular.  [And yet we were outside all the time.]

(13) Garden hose drinking.  [Where else would we get a drink while mowing the lawn?]

(14) Playing outside until dark.  [And sometimes after dark.]

(15) Trampolines without nets.  [Trampolines have nets?]

(16) No childproofing.  [We could get into anything.  As for safety, I remember our school playground having monkey bars that we climbed on at recess.  It was installed over concrete.]

(17) Using fire hydrants to cool off.  [That’s what they did in the big cities.  We just used the garden hose.]

(18) Blood brothers and sister.  [I never did that, two friends pricking their fingers and touching so as to “share the same blood.”  We did have strong friendships, though.  My impression is that today such friendships are sexualized, creating an inhibition against them or the assumption that “I must be gay!”]

(19)  Free play = Not as much extracurricular activities.  [We played however we wanted!  The thought of “extracurricular activities” structured and supervised by adults and taking up all of our time would be the opposite of fun!]

(20) Peanut Butter–School lunch staple.  [I know peanut allergies are real and can have terrible consequences.  And yet I never ran into them during our peanut-butter saturated school lunches.]

(21) Participation trophies not a thing.  [I have to laugh at that one.]

(22) After school and summer part time jobs.  [Does this really not happen any more?  I always worked, to my great benefit.  Not long ago, I took my grandson to the local Dairy Queen.  I told him how I knew all about DQ soft serve, including how to make that little curl to top everything off, because I used to work at a Dairy Queen.  I think I impressed him with my cool job, but then he said, “Well, why did you get fired?”]

(23) No screen time.  [As I always have to explain to my incredulous grandchildren, in the days when I, their ancient ancestor, was their age, cell phones and personal computers had not been invented yet.  Nor were microwaves, DVD players, or color TV sets.]

Can you think of others, beyond these 23?  For example, corporal punishment was commonplace.  And parents always took the teacher’s side.  A spanking from the teacher was generally followed by another spanking from the parents.

Now here are my questions, which perhaps you can answer in the comments:

(1)  Although we Baby Boomers for the most part loved the kind of childhood we had, when we grew up, we typically didn’t raise our children in the same way.  Why not?

(2)  Did our idyllic childhoods make it hard for us to grow up?  So that in some cases a latent immaturity sabotaged our marriages, our parenthood, and our work life?  And that even now that we’re old we think of ourselves as young, with many of us trying to look and act young to the point of making ourselves ridiculous?

(3)  Did the relatively untrammeled freedom that we enjoyed in our childhood contribute to the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies, which was the beginning of so many of our current cultural and personal problems today?  Now I do think that our large dose of freedom was accompanied by a large dose of responsibility–that combination was indeed character-building, though I think quite a few of us threw out the responsibility part when we left the nest.

 

Photo:  Children at Play on the Street at Oak Ridge via RawPixel, public domain

 

2023-11-05T16:30:25-05:00

The president of China, Xi Jinping has some rather remarkable things to say about what he calls the “smokeless battlefield”:  the war of ideas.  We need to be aware of this part of his strategy for China’s domination.  And we should wonder, has he already attacked?

I was reading an article in the Free Press entitled  Why Do Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok.  by Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI).   He  cites a Harvard/Harris poll that asked, “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?”  Most Americans in every cohort said, “No.”  But among respondents aged 18-24, a majority, 51%, said that it is justified.

(Interestingly and disturbingly, when asked, “Do you think that the attacks on Jews were genocidal in nature or not genocidal?,”  62% of this group said that they were genocidal, which means that a large number of young adults must think that genocide against the Jews is justified.)

Rep. Gallagher blames the influence of TikTok.  He cites research showing that 51% of Generation Z (teen through 26) use the video sharing site as a search engine instead of Google or some other actual search engine!  The reasons they give is that they prefer information in a video format instead of having to read it (69% say that), and that TikTok videos are “more relatable” (65%).  He cites another study that found that about six in ten teenagers, in his words, “are hooked on the app before their seventeenth birthday.”

Rep. Gallagher observes that TikTok has close ties with China’s Communist Party.  He is concerned that this gives Chinese Communists the ability to shape how America’s new generation is thinking.  China is pro-Hamas, he reasons, so this why 51% of TikTok-obsessed American teenagers feel the same way.  He thinks TikTok should be banned.

I think Rep. Gallagher is jumping to conclusions.  Using TikTok as a search engine turns up videos from both sides of the controversy.  I’d want to know if the 51% of 18-14 year olds who support Hamas have actually been watching Chinese propaganda on the subject on TikTok, or if their opinion is just because they adhere to the larger left-wing ideology of woke intersectionality.  That belief system has long identified Palestinians as being an oppressed group with whom progressive people must be “allies,” with Israel branded as the “oppressor.”  They may have learned that in school.

But whether the connection is completely valid or not, what most struck me in Rep. Gallagher’s article is this quotation from Xi Jinping (my bolds):

Xi Jinping understands the importance of information warfare—or the “smokeless battlefield,” as he’s called it. In a text regarding “military political work,” Xi declared, “The crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas. . . changing the way people think is a long-term process. Once the front lines of human thought have been broken through, other defensive lines also become hard to defend.”

Maybe TikTok’s role is to serve not so much as a channel for Chinese propaganda as to turn young Americans’ minds to mush, with all of the “challenges” that are idiotic (such as styling your hair with Gorilla Glue) and sometimes dangerous (such as boiling a chicken in Nyquil or taping your mouth shut while you sleep).  And the general anti-intellectual ethos of preferring watching videos from your peers (often consisting of dance moves or “influencer” commercials) to reading.   Surely, disabling your enemy’s rational faculties must be a major tactic on the smokeless battlefield.

But the war of ideas has more fronts than that.  “Western thought” has been a target on university campuses–which once existed to transmit it–for decades.

As we’ve been blogging about, assaults against “liberal democracy”–that is, freedom and self-government–are being mounted both from the left (as usual) and from the right (as is unusual).  I can see why Chinese Communists and their Marxist and post-Marxist fellow-travelers would be against our Constitutional order, but how have they become allies with ostensibly conservative intellectuals?

Once cherished beliefs about marriage, sexual morality, and having children are being bombarded.  Basic human identity, such as whether a person is male or female, is imploding.

And, of course, religion, which is opposed on principle by Marxists, is being dropped completely or changed beyond recognition.

Chairman Xi calls for breaking through “the front lines of human thought.”  Think of that.  “Human thought” is the enemy.  And certainly that front line is being fired upon and assaulted.

Is there a Chinese connection to any of this?  Maybe.  But most of this we are doing to ourselves.

 

Photo:  President Xi Jingping via Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

2023-06-10T16:07:31-04:00

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, also adapted to film, the government keeps all of its citizens under constant surveillance, using two-way screens installed in every home, watching your every move under the slogan “Big Brother Is Watching You.”

Orwell was projecting a terrifying dystopia.  But some people today–especially those born after 1984–actually think this would be a good idea.

J. D. Tuccille has written a rather disturbing article for Reason Magazine entitled Why Are So Many Younger Americans OK With Big Brother Monitoring Their Homes?, partially answering the question with the deck “Children raised in an atmosphere of fear become adults who prioritize security over liberty.”

He cites research from the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, that asked 2000 Americans whether they “favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”  (Go here for the report.)

Overall, 75% said “no.”  It’s still rather surprising that 14% of Americans favor the idea and that 10% “don’t know.”

But the age breakdown is more concerning.  Among “generation Z,” Americans aged 18-19, nearly one out of three (29%) are in favor of government surveillance cameras in our homes.  Among those aged 30-44, one out of five (20%) like the idea of Big Brother watching.

Then the numbers go down precipitously, with only 6% of both the 45-54 and the 55-64 aged cohorts.  Us elderlies over 65 are the most zealous guardians of personal liberty and privacy, with only 5% being open to Big Brother.

Tuccile asked some experts and offers some ideas:

“I think there are two ways to think about this new finding from Cato and both can be true at the same time, and may even be connected,” psychologist Clay Routledge, Vice President of Research and Director of the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute, told me by email. “The first is a story of technology driving changing attitudes. Younger generations have grown up with less privacy than older generations because of technological trends related to smartphones and social media so this finding may represent a greater comfort with more surveillance as a result of how they grew up. The second is a story of mental health driving changing attitudes. Younger generations are more anxious and when people are anxious they become more likely to privilege security over freedom so this finding may represent a greater comfort with less freedom as a result of greater mental distress. And these explanations might be connected because the growing surveillance culture and social media more broadly may be contributing to higher rates of anxiety which ironically may lead to greater support for more surveillance, leading to more anxiety.”. . .

Other experts connect the sentiment to the “snowflake” aversion of many young adults to being “triggered” by ideas they disagree with:

Routledge’s concerns echoed those of Greg Lukianoff, president of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” an article published by The Atlantic in 2015 and later expanded into a book. They delved into the then relatively new phenomenon of intolerance on college campuses for the free exchange of ideas. The roots, they suggested, lay in overprotective childrearing that encouraged anxiety and warped culture.

“Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe,” they wrote. “The flight to safety also happened at school.”

The result was a “vindictive protectiveness” that smothered dissent and prioritized safety over liberty.

I think it has something to do with the percentage of people who have not read 1984.

As concerns are being raised about the threat to privacy posed by today’s information technology and the potential of the government to use that technology to monitor its citizen’s behavior, as is already happening in Communist China, some Americans just don’t care about any of that.  And that indifference looks to increase with the rising generations.

The trade off between security and freedom is a perpetual issue.  Tuccile quotes Rutledge again:  “I do think this new finding from Cato is just one indicator of a very real trend of Americans, and especially younger generations of Americans, prioritizing security over freedom.”

 

Illustration from Free SVG, Public Domain

2023-05-04T09:51:12-04:00

A new religious holiday, recruiting gamers into the military, and Johnny Rotten as model husband.

Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday

Did you celebrate Earth Day on April 22? I didn’t think so. Paul Greenberg and Carl Safina, writing in Time Magazine, lament that the holiday proclaimed 53 years ago in 1970, does not get the observance that it deserves.  They propose turning Earth Day in a bona fide religious holiday with all of the trappings–special foods, hymns,  a holy book–indeed, that the day become the center of an entire “earth-reverent belief system.”
They suggest recovering “the nature-centered origins of our existing religious holidays”–Christmas and Hanukkah at the winter solstice, Easter and Passover with the arrival of Spring–and “reframe these holidays as days of thanks for what the natural world gives.”  “Next, we might look at what religions do to help us form community and mark life’s important benchmarks: birth, maturity, marriage, and death,” they say. “What if we were to come to celebrate these benchmarks for what they are biologically?”

Earth Day, they say, also deserves its own Bible.

What if a book like that existed for the Earth? What if it were replete with hymns to this world of the living? What if it contained the stories of the prophets of natural earth knowledge—Darwin and Carson, Galileo and Humboldt? What if we came to mark those discoveries as the gradual opening of consciousness to the laws of nature. . . .What if we used that book not to scold our children into following commandments but rather to light a path forward that encouraged discovery and reverence, and gratitude for the relationships that are this planetary spaceship’s life-support?

Frankly, I don’t think a religion built around nature has a chance.  Nature is the last concern of our contemporary belief system–with its rejection of objective reality, its insistence that the body has nothing to do with a person’s self-determined gender, its preoccupation with technology, and its attempts to separate sex from reproduction.  This is true even of environmentalists, including Greenburg and Safina, who say they love nature in the sense of trees and wildlife, but exclude humans from nature.  Thus, their proposed rite of marriage  would be the occasion “to remind young couples to consider the burden children place upon the planet.”  Don’t have children!  Don’t reproduce!  What would the Prophet Darwin say?

Recruiting Video Gamers for Our Military

Video games are said to offer “realistic” simulations of combat.  That is said usually by people who have never experienced actual combat.  But the Pentagon has been advertising on game sites to recruit gamers into the military.

Now the top brass is embarrassed that one of these recruits, Jack Teixeira, who was apparently slotted into IT work for his computer prowess, but who is still spending his time on the game sites, has been leaking top secret reports on the Ukraine war to impress his gaming buddies.  It turns out, this has happened before with other gamers.

Veteran Rob Henderson has written a piece for the Free Press (behind a paywall) entitled What Your Country Can Do for You.  He notes that the military is facing a crisis in its failure to meet its recruitment goals.  But “by abandoning its old standards and appealing to more selfish ends, the military has exposed itself to the likes of Jack Teixeira.”

He laments the drop-off in appeals to patriotism.  Though that’s understandable, since 40% of Generation Z believes as it has been taught, that the American Founders were villains rather than heroes.  I would add that the Pentagon’s “woke” initiatives is putting off the young people who are patriots who used to be its best candidates.

And recruiting advertising slogans like “Be all that you can be” appeal to values that contradict the military virtues of unit cohesion and self-sacrifice.  Alluding to JFK’s famous challenge, Henderson observes,

Recruitment campaigns seldom appeal to higher values, or to the history of the United States and its innumerable achievements. Rather, they appeal to the self. More and more young people are asking not what they can do for their country, but what their country can do for them.

Johnny Rotten and Other Devoted Husbands

You do know that celebrities are mostly putting on an act, don’t you?  Johnny Rotten, among the most rebellious and anarchic figures of the 1980s punk rock scene, turns out to have been a devoted husband and family man.  His wife of 44 years, Nora Forster, died last month at the age of 80 from Alzheimer’s.  Mr. Rotten, a.k.a. John Lydon, lovingly attended to his wife throughout her disease until her death.

Steve Beard tells the story of their marriage in a moving Federalist piece entitled How A Rotten Sex Pistol And His Wife Modeled Life-Long Commitment In A Rocky World.  He also cites some other hard rockers with  outrageous persona who have strong, long-term marriages:  “Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne have been married for 42 years, while Alice and Sheryl Cooper recently celebrated their 47th wedding anniversary.”

A quote from Beard’s story:  “When I make a commitment it’s forever and I stand by that and I’m very proud to do the best I can for her.”

 

 

 

2021-10-31T20:31:25-04:00

The marriage rate is lower than ever (56% of Millennials, aged 25-40, are unmarried).  People are having less sex (the number of sex-free young men 18-30 has tripled since 2008), and they are having fewer children (25% of adults in Michigan are childless by choice, deaths outnumber births in half the states, and in San Francisco, there are more dogs than children).  And a growing number of young women are making sure that they will never have children by getting sterilized.

So reports journalist Suzy Weiss in her article ‘Humans are a mistake’: Why more young women are getting sterilized.

Part of this is “antinatalism,” the view that it is immoral to have children, a topic we have blogged about.  As Weiss puts it, “The message from this young cohort is clear: Life is already exhausting enough. And the world is broken and burning. Who would want to bring new, innocent life into a criminally unequal society situated on a planet with catastrophically rising sea levels?”

She quotes psychologist Clay Routledge, who says that many young people have sense that “humans were a mistake.”“They’re saying that the future isn’t a good investment,” he says, “And if there’s no future, why would you be anything but hedonistic? Why would you donate to charities? Why would you try to make the world better or care about human progress?”

One 28-year-0ld woman Weiss profiles reflects this view, saying, “I think it’s morally wrong to bring a child into the world. . . .No matter how good someone has it, they will suffer.”

But the other women getting sterilizations whom she profiles do not seem particularly concerned about the fate of “new, innocent life.”  They tend to speak pretty callously about children.  In fact, the same 28-year-old, a Texan, who says it’s wrong to have children because they will suffer says she is rushing to get sterilized because she fears that her state’s Heartbeat Bill will prevent her from getting an abortion.  “I can’t take the risk of getting pregnant and not being able to abort.”

Other reasons for getting sterilized are bad experiences with their own parents.  “My generation is very aware of the ways that our parents traumatized us,” a young woman told the reporter. “My mom smoked a lot of weed and did her own thing, and my dad was away a lot for work.”

Others express a fear of pregnancy and giving birth, a psychological condition known as tokophobia.

Others have an aversion to children.  One young woman commented that kids “kind of gross her out.”

A big reason, though, seems to be the desire to not be tied down, to be free.  To the question whether she might come to regret her decision to get sterilized, one woman responded, “What’s there to regret? That I’ll be too happy? Too free?”

Another interview was especially telling. The reporter asked a 19-year-old about her plans for the future after she gets sterilized.  The young woman was annoyed.  “It’s kind of hard to ask someone who is nineteen and hasn’t finished college what they want their life to look like.”

Exactly!  She herself doesn’t know how her life will unfold.  Our lives change.  And she herself will change.  Which is why it is so  unwise for women so young to take such a drastic and permanent step.  When she gets older, she may well yearn to have a child.

The accounts in the story give a picture of young women happy with their lives now and wanting to perpetuate their current way of living.  But that won’t last very long, whether they have children or not, as their friends who do have children move out of their orbit and as they outgrow their social scene.  They fail to factor in growing older.  And that children grow older.

When they think of having children, they think of babies.  But babies, however “gross” they might seem,  grow up into toddlers, school children, adolescents, and young adults much like they are now.  In fact, for parents, some of the biggest satisfactions of parenthood come when one’s children reach adulthood.

Meanwhile, the parents themselves have grown older.  Their adult children–and, importantly, their children–become an important and treasured part of their lives.  This extended family becomes their prime social outlet.  And gives them the security that they will not die alone.

Not everyone needs to be a parent, just as not everyone needs to get married.  Some people don’t have those vocations, and that is fine.

I’m just sad for these young women, not so much for rejecting motherhood but for the reasons that they give, their narcissism and their nihilism.

According to the article, 39% of Generation Z (aged 9 to 24) is hesitant to have children “for fear of the climate apocalypse.”  This phenomenon does have an apocalyptic dimension, but it’s not that global warming will destroy the human race.  (Those who really believe that “human are a mistake” should welcome that prospect, not try to prevent it by environmental activism.)  Rather, this mindset is a sign of the genuine apocalypse:

And there followed [Jesus, being led to His crucifixion,] a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’”  (Luke 23:27-29)

 

Illustration:  Jesus Meets the Daughters of Jerusalem (8th Station of the Cross), photo by Damian Gadal via Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0.  No changes.

 

 

Follow Us!



Browse Our Archives