Millennials

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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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Demographics are destiny: How bad could U.S. Protestants’ money woes become?

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THE QUESTION:

Are U.S. Protestant congregations facing a dangerous plunge in income?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

Note the subtitle of this recent book release: “The Coming Revolution in Church Economics: Why Tithes and Offerings Are No Longer Enough and What You Can Do About It” (published by Baker). Will many churchgoers no longer be able to keep the doors of their churches open? How bad will it get?

Authors Mark DeYmaz and Harry Li are evangelicals who lead the Mosaix Global Network based in Little Rock, Ark., which promotes and aids multi-ethnic churches. In addition to the book, they discussed their scenario and solutions in an article for www.christianitytoday.com. Their analysis pertains to Protestant congregations, so this Q & A article will do the same.

When offering-plate proceeds do not cover the budget, the authors advocate leveraging of any available assets, for instance creating profit-making business sidelines, renting facilities, and developing any excess land. The Guy will leave aside those ideas and discuss only the debate over how bad future finances may become.

One lethal financial threat seems to be off the table — for the moment.

During his failed presidential campaign, Democrat “Beto” O’Rourke drew jeers when he advocated ending federal tax exemption for religious congregations if they oppose same-sex marriage. Even gay candidate Pete Buttigieg, among others, said targeting houses of worship went too far — though he does want to deny tax exemption to religious colleges and agencies that hold such traditional belief. DeYmaz and Li also warn that cash-hungry local governments “may someday” demand property taxes.

The authors see four reasons church planners need to worry.


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From Ryan Burge and Co. -- Has that rising 'religiously unaffiliated' tide started to slow?

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Here is a headline that I was not expecting from Ryan Burge and his colleagues at the Religion in Public weblog: “The Decline of Religion May Be Slowing.”

Argue with this crew all that you want. But what we have here is another snapshot of poll numbers that demonstrates why Religion in Public is a website that religion-beat professionals and their editors really need to have bookmarked. When in doubt, just follow GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge on Twitter.

In this case, Yonat Shimron of Religion News Service spotted this story pronto. We will come back to that report in a minute. But first, here is the top of the crucial Religion in Public post, written by Paul A. Djupe and Burge:

In a companion piece published … on Religion in Public, Melissa Deckman of Washington College finds that the probability of being a religious none in Gen Z (born after 1995) is the same as for Millenials (born between 1981-1994). This bombshell finding sent us running for other datasets. Like all good scientists, we trust, but verify. …

It is conventional wisdom at this point that the incidence of religious nones is on a steady rise after 1994. Driven by a mix of politics, scandal, and weak parental religious socialization, non-affiliates have risen from about 5 percent to 30 percent. That trend appears to be accelerating by generation, so the rate of being a religious none is much greater among Millennials than it is among Greatest, Silent, and Baby Boomer generations as the figure below shows using the General Social Survey time series. Those older generations are still experiencing some secularization (the rates are rising across time), but not nearly as rapidly as the young. From this evidence, we expected that the rate of being a none among Gen Z might be even higher, leading to a bump above Millennials. The initial, small sample estimate from the General Social Survey, however, suggests that Gen Z is not outpacing Millenials and may have even fallen behind.

The assumption for some media-beat pros, including me, has been that the percentage of actively involved religious believers would remain fairly steady — somewhere around the 20-22% numbers that appear in Gallup Organization work for several decades.

However, it seemed like the “nones” were going to keep growing by feeding on the vast, mushy, sort-of-religious middle of the American marketplace.


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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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Will millennials decide to become nuns? NJ.com and RNS offer contrasting answers

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As nuns age, the huge question has been about who can be found to replace them. The future of Catholic religious orders in the United States is pretty dire at the moment. Two publications recently came out with stories on millennials and nuns, with very different conclusions.

One story is a splashy, detailed look at a handful of millennial women who entered Catholic religious orders in New Jersey and their reasons for doing so. Another is a Religion News Service story, datelined Grand Rapids, Mich., about older nuns who meet with agnostic/seeking millennial women and try to connect on a spiritual plane.

The New Jersey story, available on NJ.com (a group of news sources including the Newark Star-Ledger) follows three women who joined religious orders. There’s Anna, a Rutgers grad; Chiara, a one-time nursing student at Villanova; and Lauren, a former Australian actress now living with a contemplative religious order.

They’re millennial women who have chosen a path more popular for generations before them — one that involves kneeling before an altar, vowing to live in poverty, obeying God and abstaining from sex.

“I didn’t see a lightning bolt that fell out of the sky,” Sister Anna said. “I didn’t see an angel who told me what I was going to do in my life.”

In our hyper-connected, media-saturated age, it’s hard enough to get people to slow down and engage with the spiritual world, much less get them to consider a life lived in service to the church. Yet handfuls of millennial women across the state have taken that path. These women are serving as Catholic sisters or missionaries, many working through the process known as discernment to become “women religious,” commonly referred to as nuns. If the young sisters make it through the discernment process — which takes years and sometimes pulls them thousands of miles from family and friends — they are choosing something permanent, and forsaking the lures of marriage, kids, autonomy and material goods.

I know reporters may feel they have to dumb down religion stories for the masses, but the “kneeling before an altar”? Is that simple act so beyond the experience of most 20-somethings?


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New York Times scribe has big problem with 'New South' -- it's full of backward church people

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To be honest, I had shoved the Ginia Bellafante feature at The New York Times — “Abortion and the Future of the New South” — so far back into the “think piece” folder of guilt that I almost forgot that this “Big City” masterpiece still existed.

In this case, the term “masterpiece” is defined as a piece of first-person journalism that has to be in the running as one of the greatest summary statements of Gray Lady-speak ever put on paper.

I mean, Rod “Benedict Option” Dreher — a former Brooklyn resident — had already produced this truly fab summary statement of what’s going on here. Before we get to the latest response to the Bellafante opus — at Scalawag, hold that thought — let’s let Dreher kick off this thinker-fest:

I’m so sorry. Really, just very sorry. Here entitled Yankees like the NYT’s Ginia Bellafante thought the American South existed to give Millennial Brooklynites a place to reproduce Park Slope, but more affordably, and now we’ve gone and ruined it for them with our deplorable social and religious views.

Ah, right. All that icky religious stuff. That really messes things up for “Tess” and other relocated New Yorkers. Here is the essential Times-talk overture:

Tess wanted her own kingdom, and New York — forbidding, impossible — wasn’t going to let her build it. The start-up costs for the baking and catering business she envisioned were going to be too high; the rent on her apartment in Bed-Stuy was increasing. When she moved in it was $1,800 a month; just a few years later, it was approaching $3,400.

This young woman was a citizen of the New South now. Her business, Tess Kitchen, was thriving. Her New Orleans apartment, at $1,900 a month, had three bathrooms.

I called Tess on the day that the Louisiana House Health and Welfare Committee backed legislation to prohibit abortions once a fetal heartbeat was detected. This came 24 hours after Alabama passed the most restrictive abortion law in the country, one that does not allow exceptions for rape or incest. That followed the passage of another restrictive abortion law in Georgia.

Living in a very liberal city in a very conservative state is a trick mirror. “You really forget that you are in the Deep South here,’’ she said.

Need more? It’s all about the word “backward,” you see. You see the people who are, to New York-raised reformers, still yearning for the “Old South” are still fighting the Civil War.


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Keeping up: Transgender challenges ahead for news media and 'mainline' Protestants

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Keeping up: Transgender challenges ahead for news media and 'mainline' Protestants

The New York Times reported this week that the Donald Trump Administration is considering, for federal purposes, a definition that a person is male or female “based on immutable biological traits identified by or before birth,” supplemented if necessary by genetic testing. That would overturn a policy under President Obama to recognize transgender identities.

The Times team repeatedly used the new “Mx.” identifier preferred by Jill Soloway in a lengthy October 14 feature about pro-transgender media. Formerly a married heterosexual raising two sons, Soloway now identifies as “non-binary” after “peeling off” physical femininity (breasts, clothing, hair, makeup) so that “I’m like nothing. Just human.” Soloway produces films and plans to publish a book about “gender-creative” parents who keep their child’s gender “a secret.”

Weeks before that, the Times “Ethicist” column fielded a questioner’s “moral aversion” against attending friends’ “gender reveal party” to celebrate their firstborn because that would affirm “gender binarism.” Prof. Kwame Appiah’s response deemed attendance OK assuming the parents would be equally happy if an infant girl later becomes “a boy, or neither a boy nor a girl.”

There are challenges here not only for elite media policies but for members of “mainline” Protestant churches, clergy and seminiarians. Consider Yale Divinity School’s Reflections magazine edited by Ray Waddle, former religion writer with Nashville’s Tennessean. The current issue — texts not yet posted online — blends support for the budding transgender cause with opposition to patriarchy and #MeToo abuse.

The trans movement says gender identity is “assigned” by the culture, and thus changeable, avoiding considerations of birth genitalia (Yale doesn’t mention chromosomes).

This approach is gaining. Ligonier Ministries’ biennial survey on Americans’ beliefs finds 46 percent of Millennials under age 35 agree “somewhat” or “strongly” that one’s “gender identity is a matter of choice.”

Journalists will ponder words in Yale’s “gender identity & affirmation” guide (.pdf here and note that the “worlkplace” typo in URL is needed for access). Each person’s “PGP” (preferred gender pronoun) is to be followed, and new labels observed — “transgender” not “transsexual,” “gender-affirming surgery” not “sex change,” “cross-dresser” not “transvestite,” or “cisgender” instead of “binary” male or female.


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CNN: Was 'The Last Jedi' officially Buddhist or a dose of Hollywood existentialism?

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Not long ago, my daughter and I went to see the latest Star Wars movie. The content has always been New Agey and I’ve been under no illusions as to it being otherwise.

So I was interested to see how CNN’s Dan Burke dissected “The Last Jedi” in terms of its religious content, or lack thereof.

You may ask if this is really a "news" subject. Look at the size of the "Star Wars" audience and its influence over multiple decades. Next question?

Burke sees this new movie as a symbol of a higher indifference to traditional forms of religion found among today’s Millennials and suggests that this attitude got picked up by the filmmakers. I’m not so sure the makers of “Jedi” thought it through to that point. Still, read on:

"Star Wars" has always kept its fingers close to America's spiritual pulse. 
In the '70s and '80s, the interstellar saga explored Eastern traditions, mainly Buddhism and Taoism, just as many "spiritual, but not religious" dabblers were doing the same. 
At the turn of the millennium, "Star Wars" caught the McMindfulness craze. "The Phantom Menace" opens with two Jedi talking about the benefits of meditation. Riveting, it was not. 
But the latest film in the saga, "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," touches on trends in American religious life in some surprising ways, especially for a franchise that's so nakedly commercial. ("The Last Jedi" was the highest-grossing movie in the United States last year and raked in nearly $1.3 billion worldwide.) 
"It is very much a movie of this time," said the Rev. angel Kyodo williams, a Buddhist teacher, social justice activist and "Star Wars" aficionado who lives Berkeley, California. "It draws on ancient teachings, as well as what is happening in this country right now."

Is the movie trying to make a statement about organized religion or its demise? And if “Star Wars” really kept its finger on America’s pulse, it sure didn’t reflect any of the Christian revivals that happened in that same period. And there was a lot more going on in America amongst the monotheistic religions than the non-theistic ones.


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