University researchers led by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. Twenge have found that millennials are the least religious generation of the last six decades, and possibly in the nation’s history.
The study may be the largest ever conducted on changes in Americans’ religious involvement.
The researchers — including Ramya Sastry from SDSU, Julie J. Exline and Joshua B. Grubbs from Case Western Reserve University and W. Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia — analyzed data from 11.2 million respondents from four nationally representative surveys of U.S. adolescents aged 13 to 18 taken between 1966 and 2014.
Recent adolescents are less likely to say that religion is important in their lives, report less approval of religious organizations, and report being less spiritual and spending less time praying or meditating. The results were published this month in the journal PLOSOne.
“Unlike previous studies, ours is able to show that millennials’ lower religious involvement is due to cultural change, not to millennials being young and unsettled,” said Twenge, who is also the author of “Generation Me.”
“Millennial adolescents are less religious than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age,” she said. “More of today’s adolescents are abandoning religion before they reach adulthood, with an increasing number not raised with religion at all.”
Compared to the late 1970s, twice as many 12th graders and college students never attend religious services, and 75 percent more 12th graders say religion is “not important at all” in their lives.
Compared to the 1990s, 20 percent fewer college students described themselves as above average in spirituality, suggesting that religion has not been replaced with spirituality.
“These trends are part of a larger cultural context, a context that is often missing in polls about religion,” Twenge said. “One context is rising individualism in U.S. culture. As Americans become more individualistic, it makes sense that fewer would commit to religion.”
