Itâs sad.
Not much surprising there, and perhaps most of the data can be explained through basic sociology, separate from specific influences of religion. It is certainly encouraging to see young people moving away from destructive religious beliefs, while also sobering to see the hold that evangelicalism still has on people.
Itâs certainly no surprise that teenages disagree with their parents. 
I see a potential for bias in the methods, with the parent needing to approve their teen taking the survey. That might be partially correctable with proper modeling. I didnât look at the methods.
Ha! But what might be more interesting is that there seems to be strong directionality here. Teens are disagreeing in an apparently specific way.
VERY interesting, and good point. Iâd be curious to see refusal rates in the various religious categories of parents.
Nothing surprising in the result that teens raised in the mainline denominations are less likely to identify with the religion of their parents than those raised in more conservative denominations. Since the mainline denominations have over the years moved closer and closer to teaching a nearly vacuous religion that maintains mainly the name and trappings of Christianity with little of the contents, teens, sensing the vacuousness, have less reason identify with those denominations.
Raised in a mainline denomination among people who often attended just out of family and cultural habit, and exposed to ministers who appeared to have nothing to say beyond bland liberal platitudes coated in Christian wrapping, and never having seen anything resembling Christian adult education in my church, I remember my surprise at attending more conservative churches where the vast majority of the congregation was there out of conviction rather than habit, where the clergymen gave sermons based on detailed and semi-scholarly study of the Bible (and actually appeared to believe in something, instead of just blowing with the secular wind), and where there was Christian education beyond Sunday school, for adults (Bible studies, special speakers, adult lessons on Sunday evenings, etc.) and for teens (youth groups often led by trained pastors where intellectual questions could be asked). It does not surprise me that teens raised in such churches would tend to affirm the religious positions of their parents.
I see Eddieâs not âThe Right Sort of Christiansâ is raising its head again. 
Before we get into denominations and their teachings, perhaps we should follow @sfmatheson and look at the sociology. I would suspect that parents of Eddieâs âmore conservative denominationsâ (by which I presume he means the âCatholicâ and âEvangelical Protestantâ lines on the top table) would be less accepting of apostasy than Mainline Protestants, leading to a higher cost of an early establishment of an independent religious identity. Likewise, from what I have heard, Evangelical parents tend to be more controlling of their childrenâs access to outside social influences than the norm. This may have the result that instead of lowering apostasy, it simply delays it (until after 17), until they are sufficiently independent and/or sufficiently far away (especially in the case of college), that they can enjoy a fuller range of social influences, and independently establish their own religious identity.
Addendum: it has since occurred to me that Evangelical and Catholic Christians greater utilisation of home-schooling and religiously-affiliated schools would also tend to delay outside social influences. Itâs a lot more difficult to see that nice atheist or gay guy or girl openly sitting next to you in class (as opposed to them being closeted or expelled) as evil, than to think the same thing when all you know about them is what your preacher thunders from his pulpit.
As for âthe name and trappings of Christianity with little of the contentsâ, I would point out that many Catholics in the US disagree with their hierarchy on such hot-topic issues like divorce, abortion, etc, often rendering themselves indistinguishable from the general population. They would therefore seem to stick with their denomination for precisely these âtrappingsâ â identity, heritage and community.
And given the degree to which Eddieâs âmore conservative denominationsâ seem to be all too frequently abandoning Jesusâ core teachings of kindness and humility for wedge issues (e.g. abortion, gay rights), playing politics from the pulpit (praising Trump and demonising Democrats), and ostentatious and authoritarian empire-building, it seems questionable as to which side of the divide is more âvacuousâ.
Further addendum: I would also note that, as Mainline teenagers are twice as likely to become Unaffiliated as Evangelical, and six times as likely to become that than Catholic, it does rather raise the question of whether their more rigid doctrinal stances are actually what is appealing (especially given other data that tends to indicate that younger generations are less attracted to doctrinal rigidity than their seniors).
Supporting @Eddieâs point:
1. There has been little change in the percentage of Americans who identify as âborn-again or evangelicalâ over the past 27 years.
From time to time each year, we at Gallup include this self-definitional question in surveys: âWould you describe yourself as âborn-againâ or evangelical?â This provides us with the great advantage of being able to track a consistent wording over time.
The most interesting finding from our 27 years of tracking this question is the lack of meaningful variation. We have seen year-to-year fluctuations, to be sure, but nothing meaningful or sustained. The 42% of Americans who on average identified as born-again or evangelical in 1991-1995 is little different from the 41% over the past three years.
1. There has been little change in the percentage of Americans who identify as âborn-again or evangelicalâ over the past 27 years.
I personally fall into an opposing example of young people leaving religion. I was raised not attending church in New England, where the majority of people do not attend church. My mom was atheist, my dad was agnostic, but I became born-again when I was in college, after meeting many people who took their faith seriously and I started attending churches that took a scholarly approach to the Bible.
Contradicting @Michelleâs point (using a survey weâve discussed before):
This shows a small drop in Born-Again/Evangelical (28 to 25% of the population, i.e. about a 10% drop off from the 2009 figure).
I would note that Pewâs total Protestant is of a similar order of magnitude to Gallupâs Born-Again/Evangelical.
Dueling surveys, it would seem.
From time to time each year, we at Gallup include this self-definitional question in surveys: âWould you describe yourself as âborn-againâ or evangelical?â
We all know that it can be extremely difficult to phrase a survey question unambiguously (or, at least, not in a way which some people will interpret variously.) This is yet another example.
Firstly, some people consider âborn-againâ and âevangelicalâ to be equivalent terms while others do not. This trends differently depending upon region of the country and even rural versus suburban. Of course, there are a great many southern Bible Belt Christians who proudly call themselves âborn-againâ but recoil at the label âevangelical.â (I learned this one of the first times I preached in a Texas church and one of the elders recoiled at my use of the term âevangelicalâ. To him it was tantamount to being called âa liberal.â It took a bit of conversation to determine that he processed the word âevangelicalâ as meaning âneo-evangelicalâ, which to him was a fundamentalist-gone-bad.)
Strictly speaking in a Boolean sense, âWould you describe yourself as âborn-againâ or evangelical?â, would work out to the same statistic whether a respondent says âYesâ or âIâm born-again, not evangelical!â Yet, Iâve known people who would respond with an angry and dismissive âNo!â because the word evangelical caused a purely emotive reaction and thatâs all that they heard in the question.
Secondly, even a clearly Biblical term like âborn-againâ (Jesus talking with Nicodemus in John 3) can produce a negative reaction in some fundamentalists, oddly enough. I know various survivors of the 1970âs who have associated âborn-againâ with Jimmy Carterâs self-description, considered him a âBarth-loving theological liberalâ, and were appalled at his 1970âs Playboy Magazine interview. Thus, some people have too many negative associations with the term to use it as a self-description.
I still know a few people who would answer the question âWould you describe yourself as âborn-againâ or evangelical?â with âNo! Iâm a Bible-believinâ fundamentalist!â or âNO! Iâm a proud KJV-only Bible Baptist!â
Meanwhile, I know of a number of churches which have removed the word âevangelicalâ from their names because it has become associated with particular political leanings.
Whatever the most appropriate label for the born-again/evangelical/fundamentalist category, Iâm personally inclined to suspect that that percentage of the U.S. population has declined in recent decades. Yet, Iâm not so sure I can settle the matter via the peer-reviewed literature.
I recall reading an article back in 2000 or so about how more young people were becoming born again after being raised in families that did not attend church, but I know it would be hard to dig that up again now. It has resonated with me at the time, because that had been the experience of me, my sister and my cousin. Itâs certainly hard to pin these types of statistics down.
Yet the statistics are firmly on the side of those raised âUnaffiliatedâ becoming increasingly likely to stay that way:
This conclusion is confirmed by another study here:
https://www.prri.org/research/prri-rns-poll-nones-atheist-leaving-religion/
(Which has Unaffiliated retention rates also growing to a very similar figure, 66% â unfortunately the graph isnât a bitmap, so I canât simply paste it here.)
That means 1/3 unaffiliated are like me and later become affiliated later in life
In bulk in 2016, yes, but the data show this changing pretty quickly. From the article weâre discussing:
One important reason why the unaffiliated are experiencing rising retention rates is because younger Americans raised in nonreligious homes are less apt to join a religious tradition or denomination than young adults in previous eras. About three-quarters (74%) of Americans under the age of 50 who were raised nonreligious have maintained their lack of religious identity in adulthood. In contrast, only about half (49%) of Americans age 50 or older who were raised unaffiliated still identify that way.
33-34% may strike you as a striking number, but the 39% of Evangelical leaving their childhood religion is even more striking. I would also note that, with the exception of Mainlines, religious upbringing is still the main determinant of religious affiliation.
Whether one group of Christians or the other is the ârightâ one was not the focus of my remarks, but rather whether one group of Christians, as adults and parents, showed more conviction regarding its nominal beliefs than the other. And the sociological/psychological point was the same, i.e., that teenagers who see that their parents (and ministers, and church elders, and other adults attending church activities) really believe something in earnest, as opposed to giving it a rather perfunctory and sometimes bored nod, are more likely to pick up an earnest attitude to their religion. Young people are often good detectors of sincerity versus hypocrisy.
Catholicism is a special case of its own, as its doctrines, on paper, are quite conservative, but in practice, there is massive disregard for those doctrines in both theory and practice. Thus, while there are many conservative Catholics corresponding, in their Catholic ways, to very conservative Protestants, there are also many âcradle Catholicsâ for whom religion is a matter of habit and family tradition rather than deep conviction. So I did not actually have Catholics in mind, but mainly the contrast between âmainlineâ Protestant denominations and more âevangelicalâ or âfundamentalistâ groups (both terms of course being slippery in meaning, but commonly used by both survey-writers and people here).
I have considerable personal experience of the difference between the two sorts of Protestant I was contrasting, which I why I said that it did not surprise me that the more conservative groups were better and bringing up their kids to voluntarily follow in the footsteps of the parents, even as adults.
Of course, there are cases where the âconservativeâ faith is so narrow and repressive that it drives some young people away, but, despite the images portrayed by the media (and by the atheist sound-bite machines), not all conservative faith is like that. There are many millions of conservative Christians in the USA and elsewhere that are not anti-science, that donât reflexively oppose things like dancing or playing card games, that donât object to members drinking in moderation (even if they use grape juice rather than wine in their sacraments), that donât forbid young people to go to movies or watch television shows (even if they caution young people to always remember their faith as they imbibe cultural values transmitted in pop culture media, and discern wisely the wholesome from the unwholesome), etc.
The core thing for the believing conservative Christian is neither politics nor petty moral rules, but the religion â the stance toward Jesus, God, the Bible, often the Apostlesâ Creed, and key doctrines such as Trinity, Redemption, salvation by grace, etc. Those attitudes and doctrines are more likely to last into adult life where the adults who are the teenagersâ models themselves live out those attitudes and doctrines, in all their lifeâs activities. Teenagers who see that Christianity can be a constructive model for living and thinking and feeling are likely to be impressed; those who see it as a layer of hypocrisy on top of a fairly worldly existence are less likely to think itâs important to keep it up once they leave the parental home.
Well, yes, just like many mainstream Protestant members. See my remarks on Catholics above.
It may be âall too frequentâ, but there is still an impressive involvement of conservative Christians in compassionate social service. For example, a good number of the missionaries to the most impoverished areas of the world, who work not only at saving souls but at helping the poor communities (e.g., building a school for a village that had none before, as a group of teenagers from my town did in South America), come from âconservativeâ or âevangelicalâ churches. And to give a more personal example, my wife is daily soliciting food donations and giving them out to the homeless, walking into the most unpleasant parts of town, even during these epidemic times, with the support of some of the more conservative Christians in our town, but not much support from the people in the more middle-class, traditional mainstream churches. The Christians in the more middle-class liberal mainstream churches may more often than conservative Christians vote on the political left for policies that redistribute the wealth through impersonal government action, but finding them dirtying their hands working personally and lovingly with the people who have fallen between the cracks of society is relatively rare.
In making these remarks, I stress that I come from middle-class, mainstream church background, and so am criticizing tendencies I recognize in myself and in other raised like me. I used to despise more conservative Christians as less enlightened, less educated, narrower, etc. than myself, but came to see that at least some of the time, those conservative Christians, however much I might dislike their intellectual formulations of their faith, some of their hymns, their more drab church buildings and liturgy, etc., showed more consistent and sincere faith than most of the people I was brought up with, including myself. I have found myself forced into more respect for conservative and evangelical Christians by the integrity I often see there. Of course, this does not take away the flaws that conservative churches and groups and individuals often display. But it does mean that self-righteousness coming from more liberal Christians is often inappropriate. Yes, some conservatives have many motes in their eyes, but a lot of mainstream Christians have rather large beams.
Yet I wasnât speaking primarily of âdoctrinal rigidityâ in some narrow sense. Insisting on core doctrines of Christianity is not the same as âdoctrinal rigidity.â If you wanted to join a communist group, but said you believed in unlimited capitalistic activity and were opposed to labor unions, the members of that group would rightly suggest that you are seeking membership in the wrong club. You donât have to be doctrinaire Leninist to be a communist, you donât have to adhere to every line that Engels or Marx ever wrote, but you canât be a 19th-century robber baron. You donât have to be a doctrinaire supporter of transubstantiation or consubstantiation or the âitâs only a memorialâ interpretation of the sacrament to believe that Christians should partake of the sacrament together. You donât have to be a follower of any particular sectarian reading of Revelation to believe that Jesus will return to set the world right. You donât have to take a rigid stand on Arminian vs Calvinist doctrines of grace and will to believe that God knows the future and has made it known through his prophets.
"People forget that when âfundamentalismâ first made its appearance, it wasnât the thing often meant by fundamentalism today. It meant getting back to the fundamentals of Christian faith â to doctrines that all mainstream Protestants had affirmed since the Reformation; it did not mean adhering to petty rules about not dancing or not drinking or keeping oneâs hair off oneâs ears, to being politically right-wing, etc. The young people in evangelical/fundamentalist settings I was speaking about are often impressed not by fine points of doctrine or petty moral rules, but by consistency and depth of Christian life and conviction.
Thatâs all consistent with the behavior of the mainline teenagers you are talking about. Having almost never seen a real consistency and depth of conviction in the Christian congregations of their upbringing, they have nothing to be attracted to, only something to be repelled by (hypocrisy, and dead practice of ritual without understanding or existential commitment). So yes, they tend to drift toward âUnaffiliatedâ or to agnosticism or atheism. Theyâve not been made aware of the possibility of a more vibrant, living Christian faith. All theyâve seen is adults slowly drifting into secular humanism, but for some sentimental reason clinging to some of the old language and symbols. Not very inspiring, for young people looking for something meaningful. If the only alternatives known to them are dead religion or no religion, many young people understandably opt for no religion. Thatâs why, though the numbers of the UCC, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist and some other denominations have been in something approximating free fall for quite some time now, conservative evangelical faith has not picked up all the slack.
But itâs not to be unnoticed that many people do leave the mainstream churches for more conservative ones, if they chance to stumble on a conservative church where they see something real that they never saw in their upbringing in blue-blood suburban Protestant churchgoing. There is a palpable difference between listening weekly to a sermon in which the foppish minister seems embarrassed by the Bible and is always trying to liberalize its message to make it more acceptable to modern middle-class people, and listening weekly to a sermon in which the minister is proud of the Bible, loves the Bible, and seems to want to spend his entire life learning from it, digging out its rich teachings, applying them to the betterment of Christian life, etc. Any rational and sensitive young person, on observing the difference between two such churches, is going to either chuck Christianity altogether, or switch to the more conservative church.
Thus, the mainstream churches are filled with grey-haired people, and are moribund. A church that canât keep its young canât survive. And the bleeding is split between more conservative churches and âunaffiliated.â Virtually nobody is moving toward the liberal mainstream churches.
This kind of degrading disrespect for younger people is both deplorable and ironic, because the moral failure (on the part of the condescending representative of the older generation) is a strong incentive to reject these corrupt religions. My hope is that comments like this will help more people, of all ages, to see how religion degrades people.
I wasnât being disrespectful or degrading to young people. I suppose I used the term teen because I saw it in the titleâŚI was making a comment on how the internet will change society in the future, which includes me and you. That same internet allows for all kinds of misrepresentation and miscommunication (like this interaction) and puts focus where it ought not to be. Social media corrupts the social development of everyone at every age, it will be a problem eventually as people seek comfort in their false online identitiesâŚnothing disrespectful or degrading about that commentary, odd that you took it that way.
