Losing their religion: Millennials, including Utahns, leaving church

[trotsky]

http://kutv.com/news/local/losing-their-religion-millennials-including-utahns-leaving-church

Nearly 60 percent of all millennials raised in a church have stopped going.

They're not in search of a new faith, they simply want out.

The mass exodus from church pews nationwide has been studied at length in recent years by the Pew Research Center, which tracks Millennials by state, religion and faith. It's research has found that no religion has been safe in these drastic membership losses each one is still grappling with a way to bring them back.

...

Millennials like Samantha are not leaving because they're lazy, according to research. They are doing their due diligence before walking away from something they see as more hurtful than helpful.

[Vogon_Glory]

1. Blowback Inspired By The Religious Right

The Religious Right has successfully linked Christianity to their hateful, nasty, narrow-minded, bigoted agenda. It sounds like a lot of Millenials have decided that if the Radical Right's agenda is what Christianity is about, they don't want any.

[trotsky]

2. Truth be told - hate, nastiness, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry...

have ALWAYS been part of the Christian story.

[trotsky]

6. I have learned this post was alerted on.

Alert stalkers suck.

If it's deleted, what I said was:

Truth be told - hate, nastiness, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry...
have ALWAYS been part of the Christian story.

Because they have. Running away from history doesn't mean it didn't happen. Sad that the alerter is only proving my point.

[Heddi]

7. Sad!!!

Sad!

[trotsky]

10. The privileged always have difficulty dealing with criticism. n/t

[guillaumeb]

12. I would say more ironic than sad.

If you know what I mean.

[Bradical79]

8. Yes, true

It's a very recent development (historically speaking) that liberal Christian denominations have been able to exist in any large numbers. That seems to be true for most religions, infact.

[DetlefK]

3. THAT mindset is the real threat to religion. Not the atheists.

The atheists at least care about religion. They do not believe in God, but they are invested in the topic and think about it and discuss it.
The "Nones", to them religion isn't even important enough to have a particular opinion on it.



“My generation grew up in the information age," Shelley said. "So we have a totally different way of determining truth, or at least our ability to determine truth may be different.”

It's all about the mindset. The methods HOW to determine truth have changed. The religious method, aka "just-believe-what-you-are-told", no longer fits to the way society works. There is a psychological border that separates them from a mindset succeptible to religious thinking.

Organized religion is being replaced with a disorganized, individualistic search for spiritual enlightenment.

It's somehow a repeat of the religious situation during the Renaissance. During the Middle-Ages, the christian mindset was by today's standard "violent religious extremism". But some people were unhappy with the church, because it did not provide answers to some questions. So they started their own spiritual quests: Organized religion got a new competitor in disorganized, spiritual individuals.

A second Renaissance might be upon us... Organized religion yet again threatened by the individual's search for enlightenment... Will it survive another bloodletting?

[trotsky]

5. Genuine apathy, yes.

But then again, growing up with like-minded individuals has provided an opportunity to be apathetic about religion.

Previous generations, being more religious, have also been tougher for individuals to be nonreligious as they were more of a minority, and more subject to the harmful effects of dominant religion. They didn't have the luxury of being apathetic.

[AtheistCrusader]

4. "each one is still grappling with a way to bring them back" Just let them go.

Good grief. Be at peace, and let them go.

[Bradical79]

9. Pray

That's the solution, right? Prayer is supposedly so powerful, but all their problems are primarily addressed by strategizing, scheming, and propaganda campaigns.

As someone who is a former true believer, the most Christian way to try and draw in believers is praying and being a good example yourself. Through prayer God will intervene directly if he chooses, and give the individual a choice. It's not complicated.

Of course beyond personal comfort and focus, I found prayer didn't work for anything. One of numerous reasons I'm no longer religious, lol. But if you believe in the power of prayer and an omipotent omniscient god, it seems odd to not make this your primary tool for anything and everything.

[guillaumeb]

11. And of course they will never change their minds.

After reading many of these posts predicting, or inferring, that faith is dying out, I will infer that there is a certain amount of hoping and wishing that motivates these posts.

Research can show many things.

[trotsky]

13. No one claimed they couldn't. Just like so many religious people change their minds.

I.e., why people are *leaving* religion. They changed their minds.

You can certainly "infer" whatever it is you'd like to believe - I can't stop you. But denying the fact (yes, fact) that people are less religious and less interested in religion than ever before, backed up not only by repeated surveys by multiple polling firms but also by actual church attendance figures... well, since you've made quite clear you think argumentum ad populum is one of the strongest arguments for religion, I certainly understand why the whole concept makes you uneasy.