Review: “Got Religion?” by Naomi Riley

About the Book:

Why are young people dropping out of religious institutions? Can anything be done to reverse the trend? In Got Religion?, Naomi Schaefer Riley examines the reasons for the defection, why we should care, and how some communities are successfully addressing the problem.

The traditional markers of growing up are getting married and becoming financially independent. But young adults are delaying these milestones, sometimes for a full decade longer than their parents and grandparents. This new phase of “emerging adulthood” is diminishing the involvement of young people in religious institutions, sapping the strength and vitality of faith communities, and creating a more barren religious landscape for the young adults who do eventually decide to return to it. Yet, clearly there are some churches, synagogues, and mosques that are making strides in bringing young people back to religion.

Got Religion? offers in-depth, on-the-ground reporting about the most successful of these institutions and shows how many of the structural solutions for one religious group can be adapted to work for another.

The faith communities young people attach themselves to are not necessarily the biggest or the most flashy. They are not the wealthiest or the ones employing the latest technology. Rather, they are the ones that create stability for young people, that give them real responsibility in a community and that help them form the habits of believers that will last a lifetime.

My Thoughts:

I have read a ton of books that have been released over the past year that try to decode the minds of my generation who have been labeled the “Spiritual but not Religious.” Many religious leaders from across the spectrum of faith have been scrambling as they have seen the numbers of young adults leaving their congregations and faith traditions altogether dramatically increasing over the last decade. The question that everyone seems to be asking is, “What can we do to win the millennials back?” As a millennial evangelical who is aspiring to be a religious leader myself, I find the reaction of many religious leaders amusing. All of the answers that many people are suggesting are nothing short of laughable. Religious leaders are trying to reimagine what their faith could look like in order to compel millennials to come back home, but none of them are actually consulting millennials themselves. Instead, religious organizations are spending millions of dollars trying to innovate and re-evangelize my prodigal generation without every actually asking us why we left.

That is, until Naomi Schaefer Riley released her new book Got Religion? this week. This book is perhaps the most accessible and accurate guide to understanding the millennial exodus from organized religion available today. Based on dozens of interviews and studies of millennials, Riley has created a text that accurately diagnoses the reason for the reason millennials are leaving faith communities. While Riley readily admits that her research is far from exhaustive, she has managed to paint what I believe to be a very vibrant picture of millennial spirituality and has offered a clear path forward for communities who are interested in winning the next generation back to their tradition. What is also fascinating about this book is that includes profiles and studies done not only in evangelical congregations, but also in mosques, synagogues, and LDS wards (or Mormon churches), showing that the issue of millennial disenchantment with organized religion isn’t only a Catholic and Protestant problem, but a generational problem that is affecting congregations and communities from all faiths.

This is a perspective that (unfortunately) most religious leaders never realize because of their lack of interaction with leaders of other faiths. Riley offers a number of very practical suggestions for how religious communities can win back millennials based on her interviews with millennials themselves which makes this book an important resource for every religious leader in North America today. I cannot, as a millennial, recommend this book enough. It gets my generation correct in a way that no other book to date has done. This is a well-researched, thoughtful, and compelling guide to rethinking what it looks like to do organized religion in a millennial context, and offers a perspective filled with hope for the future of religious communities.

I give “Got Religion: How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back” a 4 out of 5 Stars!