Baby Boomers

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Americans who never attend worship services are a bit of a political puzzle these days

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Americans who never attend worship services are a bit of a political puzzle these days

I was thinking a bit today about the idea of subgroup composition in the world of politics and religion.

For example, evangelicals could be the same share of the population today as they were in the early 1980s, but that doesn’t mean that the composition of the group hasn’t changed significantly during the previous four decades. In fact, it would be pretty shocking if the racial composition of evangelicals hadn’t shifted and the average educational attainment hadn’t climbed, given the overall macro-level movement in American society.

That got me thinking quite a bit about a specific group — those who never attend religious services.

In 2008, according to the Cooperative Election Study, about 20% of all respondents reported that they never attended religious services. By 2022, that share had risen to 34%. A fourteen point jump is a whole lot of folks, by the way. In fact, in real numbers that’s over 45 million Americans.

But the composition of never attenders has also changed as that group has grown so much larger. What I really wanted to do is help readers better conceptualize this group — especially when it comes to politics.

One of my hobby horses recently has been trying to convince people that they need to stop thinking about Republicans as incredibly religiously active and Democrats are the ones who have nothing to do with religion. The Republican coalition is looking less and less religious every year and this is going to have big impacts in the elections to come.

Let’s start broad — with the share of each party identification that never attended religious services between 2008 and 2022.

In 2008, Independents were the most likely to be never attenders — bet you wouldn’t have guessed that.

Twenty-eight percent of them checked the “never” box, which was four points higher than Democrats. There were very few Republicans who were never attenders back when Barack Obama faced off against John McCain for the White House — just 10%.


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Life, death, eternity, golf: Can reporters spot Baby Boomer religion ghosts at The Villages?

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Life, death, eternity, golf: Can reporters spot Baby Boomer religion ghosts at The Villages?

I think it was “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau who summed up the Baby Boomer aging process by saying it would be really depressing to have a heart attack while wearing your faded 501 Levi jeans.

I get that, as a Boomer who was born at the peak of that demographic wave (think January 1954). It seems like 75% of the ads during every noon ESPN Sports Center broadcast are aimed at me and my Medicare benefits. On top of that, I also spent several years in South Florida (I turned 50 there), where half the houses (it seemed to me) were in a development with “villages” in the name.

Thus, I understand why people are reacting to that recent feature. “Shadow on the Sun,” that ran in The Lamp Magazine, “A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc.” This long article by Sam Kriss isn’t a “news” feature, but I would argue that religion-beat journalists should dig into it.

Why? Well, as the Grateful Dead prophet Jerry Garcia put it — “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” And for millions of Boomers, the end of that trip is getting closer (like the Firesign Theater’s Antelope Freeway exit that never seems to arrive). Thus, there are lots of news hooks in this piece linked to death, dying and the Boomers, especially for reporters in Florida.

This brings us to The Villages, the largest retirement community in the world. The feature opens with a real-estate agent named Jason at the wheel during a tour.

Scholl Foot Care. Urology Associates. Cracker Barrel. Jason told me about The Villages. He explained that The Villages occupies around eighty square miles of central Florida, which makes it substantially larger than the island of Manhattan. It’s home to some one hundred forty thousand happy, active retired people, with more constantly arriving: this is the single fastest-growing metro area in the entire United States. It contains nine state-of-the-art hospitals, four gun ranges, two one-thousand-seat concert venues, and eight vast churches. It has more than fifty free golf courses, enough for you to play on a different range every week of the year. Ninety swimming pools, not counting the ones in people’s backyards. Twenty of them are Olympic-sized. Something like ten million square feet of commercial space, including a dozen sprawling shopping centers and over one hundred restaurants and bars. Residents also have their pick of around three thousand community social clubs. The Acting Out Theater Club produces its own original musicals. The Red Sox Nation Club has more members in The Villages than it does in Boston. The MAGA Club has hosted members of the Trump family. You can sail or scuba dive or line dance or learn the ukulele or discuss Ayn Rand. The Villages has its own radio station (W.V.L.G.), TV channel (V.N.N.), and newspaper (the Daily Sun), and somewhere north of eighty thousand homes. Jason couldn’t give me a more precise figure because it’s constantly changing. The Villages builds four hundred new houses every month.

What does this have to do with religion, morality and culture?


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Gen Z and trends in religious faith and practice: Looking at 2021 and beyond

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Gen Z and trends in religious faith and practice: Looking at 2021 and beyond

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve written a post about the precarious religious position of Generation Z (those born after 1995), and with data from late 2021 available it seems like a prime opportunity to update what we know about their religious inclinations.

Because almost all surveys only contact adult Americans (18+), we can’t get a full picture of the entirety of Gen Z, but just the oldest members of this generation. Thus, here I am analyzing those between the ages of 18 and 25 years old.

Let’s start broadly, comparing the religious composition of different generations beginning with the Silent Generation (who were born between 1925 and 1945).

In this generation, half of all respondents indicated that they were Protestant, while 22% said that they were Catholic. Just 8% of the Silent Generation say that they were atheists or agnostics and nearly the same share describe their religion as “nothing in particular” (10%). In sum, the oldest Americans are 72% Christian and 18% none.

Now, for Generation Z things are much different.

Just 22 % of the youngest adults describe themselves as Protestant — a more than 50% decline from the Silents. Catholics make up 14% of Gen Z, an eight percentage-point dip from the Silent Generation.

Of course, the share of nones is much larger. Seventeen percent of young people describe their religion as atheist or agnostic, and 31% say that they are attached to no religion in particular. Taken together, 36% of Gen Z are Christians, while 48% are nones.

For journalists, there is the news hook: This is the first generation in history in which the nones clearly outnumber the Christians.


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Thinking about Thanksgiving and beyond: Always coronavirus winter, but never Christmas?

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I am very sorry, but I need to talk about the Baby Boomers.

Trust me, I know that Americans are tired of hearing about the 73 million or so Baby Boomers. I know this is true because I am a Boomer and I’m tired of hearing about us. As a 66-year-old gravity challenged male with asthma, it seems like every time I turn on the television there is an advertisement about some medication that I may or may not need — soon.

Then there is the coronavirus pandemic and that pushy #BoomerRemover trend in social media. However, it’s certainly true that millions of Boomers fall into multiple COVID-19 risk categories.

This brings me to a sobering think piece that ran the other day in the New York Times by former ABC News religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer, whose byline will be familiar to many GetReligion readers.

On one level, this was a piece about Thanksgiving. But it also points forward into the entire holiday season, underlining many of the painful choices facing Baby Boomer grandparents, their children and, yes, their grandchildren. Here’s the double-decker headline:

‘Gram, Are You Sad?’ This Year, We’re Spending the Holidays Alone

None of our grandchildren will be at our table for Thanksgiving or Christmas. But the pandemic winter still leaves room for the imagination.

Yes, there are valid news stories hiding in this piece and some of them are linked both to religious rites and to family traditions that, for millions, are linked to religious seasons. For starters, what will happen to Midnight Mass? In my own tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, what happens to those glorious meals breaking the Nativity Fast?

Wehmeyer turned to the fiction of C.S. Lewis for a powerful image for what is ahead and what millions of people will be feeling in the weeks ahead. Emotions will really be running high during the Christian season of Christmas, which begins on Dec. 25th and runs for 12 days.


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Jess Fields meets Ryan Burge: As you would image, they're talking 'nones,' 'evangelicals,' etc.

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So here is the question: Is podcaster Jess Fields just going to work his way through the entire GetReligion team, sooner or later?

I think it would be logical to do that, since Fields is especially interested in topics linked to religion, current events and the impact of journalism on all of that. You can see that with a quick glance at his homepage at Apple Podcasts.

The other day, I spent an hour or so online with him and that podcast link was included in the GetReligion post that I wrote about Fields and his work: “Jess Fields got tired of short, shallow news interviews: So he started doing loooong podcasts.”

You may recall that Fields is a small businessman in Houston who also has worked quite a bit in nonpartisan think tanks linked to state and local governments. He is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and that has affected a few of his podcasts.

So now he has had a lengthy chat (very long, even by Fields standards) with social scientist, and progressive Baptist minister, Ryan Burge.

Why not? Burge is all over the place right now — writing and chatting about the tsunami of charts, survey samples and commentary that he keeps releasing, day after day, on Twitter. He also showed up the other day in an NBC special:


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Do it yourself tradition: Many Millennials are creating individualistic versions of Lent

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Headline writers love short words.

If you were a copy-desk pro, which of the following two terms would you prefer to use in a bold one-column headline when describing one of the biggest and most complex trends in American religion today (hello omnipresent Pew Research Center folks)?

Would you prefer to call people linked to this trend “religiously unaffiliated Americans” or “nones”?

You see my point, right?

Now, one of the problems associated with the term “nones” is that many people seem to think that this word means that these Americans have no religious beliefs.

That’s inaccurate and misses the main point, which is that the “religiously unaffiliated” are just that — people who have cut their ties of affiliation to organized religious groups. Instead of religious traditions, they have their own personal approaches to religion and ultimate issues. Does the term “Sheilaism” mean anything to you? It should. It’s a term linked to the work of the late sociologist Robert Bellah, author of the landmark book, “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.”

This brings us back to the season of Lent and to this weekend’s think piece, care of The Lily website operated by The Washington Post. The key is that large numbers of Millennials, many of them “nones,” have not given up on Lent. Instead, they have — this is America — created their own versions of the season, using the “give up one thing” motif as an opportunity to express themselves. Here is a key section of this breezy feature:

Millennials are leaving religion in greater numbers than ever before, but they are more likely to observe Lent than baby boomers, according to 2014 research from Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling group. Twenty percent of millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) responded that they were planning to fast, compared with 10 percent of boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964).


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Think about this: Digging down into that all-to-familiar 'God gap' in American politics

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I think that the first time I encountered the term “pew gap” was in the middle-to-late 1980s, as the side effects of the post-Roe v. Wade era began to emerge.

That was when people started talking about the impact of the Religious Right on the Republican Party and the growing secularization of the elites at the top of Democratic Party structures, where old-school labor union Catholics were being replaced by various kinds of white-collar groups linked to academia and feminism.

At the end of the 20th Century, the “pew” or “God gap” was a given. I know that I have used it before, for this piece of the “Blue Movie” essay that The Atlantic ran in 2003 remains perfect:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors — and better indicators of partisan inclination — than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).


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This week's religion charts: Are young folks the only problem in empty sanctuaries?

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For the past 17 years, your GetReligionistas have written about a growing trend in religion polls (here’s the late George Gallup Jr., 15 years ago) that has obvious implications for American life in general.

Here it is: When looking at the spectrum of American life — in terms of religious beliefs, as seen in the practice of faith — the number of “traditional” believers is remaining remarkably stable, while the number of atheists, agnostics and the religiously unaffiliated has risen sharply.

What’s vanishing is sort-of believers in the middle of the spectrum.

Young people in that cohort tend to grab the headlines, since that is the future.

But check out this week’s charts from political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University (who is also a progressive Baptist pastor. Religion-beat pros and news consumers need to bookmark the Religion in Public website — especially to dig into the details of the General Social Survey data that he uses, along with other polling sources.

So, let’s ask fearful religious establishment leaders: Are the kids the only problem out there? Maybe the infamous Baby Boomers have something to do with all of this angst?

Read on.


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