Christianity Today recently documented the fact that America’s churches are not only “failing to attract younger worshipers,” but they are also “not holding on to the ones” raised in the church. Research studies indicate that “70 percent of young people leave the church by age 22” and that figure “increases to 80 percent by age 30.” The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) revealed that the “percentage of Americans claiming ‘no religion’ almost doubled in about two decades” (8.1 percent in 1990 and 15 percent in 2008).
According to Christianity Today, most current unbelievers are, in fact, church dropouts; the “vast majority” are former believers who have quit going to church. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported in May 2009 that “young Americans are dropping out of religion at a disturbing rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago).”
In his Weekly Standard review of Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell’s “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” Joseph Bottum finds that the “massive increase” — from five percent to 25 percent — of those with “no religion” is because of a “fear of religion’s apparent lack of tolerance.” In Bottum’s view, Putnam and Campbell see the source of intolerance as sex: “[T]he percentage of Americans who held that premarital sex was not wrong leapt from 24 percent to 47 percent” in the early 70s and “has continued upward ever since.” Indeed, the divisiveness of “libertines and prudes” fighting over sexual morality is what prevents the Putnam and Campbell ideal of a “gentle, get-along religion” that would attract and keep young people in the fold.
Drew Dyck, author of the Christianity Today article, concluded that most young people leaving the church “had been exposed to a superficial form of Christianity that effectively inoculated them against authentic faith.”
We have failed to “meaningfully share the core content of the Christian faith” with our young people; is it any wonder that they see the church as insignificant and our God as unimportant? No wonder they shrug off that insignificant faith and ignore that irrelevant God when they enter college. Such banal, faux Christianity is unlikely to bear up under scrutiny and highly unlikely to survive into adulthood. There is a tremendous price to be paid if we do not teach and model the “real thing” for our young people.
