https://www.deseret.com/2022/4/23/23013578/perspective-young-adults-are-losing-their-religion-are-their-parents-to-blame-gen-z-generation-x

According to the PRopoganda arm of the MORmON CULT,

“Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 aren’t going to church in numbers like their grandparents and great-grandparents did, and the numbers seem to decline every year. A recent survey by Deseret News and Marist Poll found that only 21% of young adults report going to church once or twice a month. And for all that generation’s talk about being spiritual, these young adults aren’t even inclined to pray. Slightly more than a quarter say they pray daily, compared to nearly 70% of Americans who are 60 or older.
…
However, older Americans who understand the importance of religious communities as a failsafe for a wide range of trouble — to include economic hardship, loneliness and existential despair — are too quick to use the “Kids today!” trope when confronting headlines such as “Gen Z is the least religious generation” and “Gen Z is spiritually illiterate.

While these things are true, it’s not Gen Z, but their parents who are to blame. This is a hard truth for the older generations, who earnestly wanted to do right by their kids, even while doing things that would ultimately turn their children away from an institution that offers them companionship, hope and support.…


…This is not to say that latchkey children of divorce can’t emerge as adults with strong religious faith; I did, thanks to a mother and grandmother who made sure I had a robust religious upbringing that was disciplined but also full of joy, soaring music and meaningful rituals. (I’m sure a lot of prayer was also involved, particularly when I was in my 20s.)

But any discussion of the decline of religious faith — and the attendant societal problems such as loneliness, anxiety and deaths of despair — is incomplete without acknowledging that the young adults of Generation Z didn’t lose faith all on their own.

Losing one’s religion in America, it seems, is a family affair, just as becoming religious is, too.”

Maybe GenZ is just bored by the same old group think their parents inherited without question and they’re looking for real answers, instead of the bigoted cliches that satisfied their parents.

Perhaps the cure for, ”economic hardship, loneliness and existential despair” is not attending a Doomsday CULT once a week and praying to a non-existent God, but, developing real knowledge, marketable skills, and forming connections with an authentic community and nature and appreciating being alive.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/29/2022 03:44PM by schrodingerscat.

I'm in my early 50s so I think I'm a qualified Gen X person.

I watched a church which offered a sense of community with meaningful (non spiritual) activities dwindle into a "we're only here to promote your testimony of a church- we don't entertain anyone."

I can honestly say that the church did not support my BSA activities. I went door to door selling Sylvania light bulbs, advertisement space for a flyer at an ice cream social- as well as mowing pastures for 5 bucks. All so I could pay a 400 scout camp fee.

I didn't play church basketball or other sports, but my bishop charged a yearly 15 dollar fee to use the cultural hall. We were always told of how great it was to sacrifice for the poor church- we were encouraged to send buckets of saved coins to the LDS children's hospital.

Serving a mission didn't open doors for me in terms of employment or school. It actually set me back because I lost my catalog rights in college. So I had to fulfill new class requirements because of a 2 yr mission.

The article even quotes nut job Brad Wilcox,

”As Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, has said, “Because regular church attendance is less common for fathers than mothers, in some ways his religiosity is more important because it’s more unusual. So kids who see both mothers and fathers regularly attending church are more likely to take their faith seriously compared to kids who see just their mother attend church.”

When two religiously observant parents get divorced, however, their children are less likely to be observant themselves, according to research by sociologists Jeremy Uecker of Baylor University and Christopher Ellison at the University of Texas at San Antonio. According to their study, “Adults from single-parent families are more likely to disaffiliate from religion altogether and more likely to make a major switch in their religious affiliation. They are also less likely to attend religious services regularly.”

This is not the Brad Wilcox from BYU.

It is this person:

https://sociology.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/wbw7q

The article also starts out with a Mark Twain quote "the reports of my death..."

Why on earth would you even use a Twain quote when he spoke the absolute truth about the BoM and chloroform?

"And for all that generation’s talk about being spiritual, these young adults aren’t even inclined to pray."

Right, because as everyone knows, the only way for a person to be spiritual is to pray. </s>


"even while doing things that would ultimately turn their children away from an institution"

Like ramming the church down their kids' throats until they choke on it? Using physical coercion while they can, then pivoting to emotional manipulation when force is no longer possible? Or showing off their families as stage props to gain social standing in the ward?

Correlation led to the Darth Vader effect. The harder you squeeze, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. I see the current leaders as more like Dark Helmet.

They do have BYU, but BYU is not there to do legitimate religious research that would guide the evolution of Church doctrine. The church started as an eclectic mashup of different religious ideas. Keeping that tradition would have worked. Instead, you have a guy with a lighted pen and a jar of Metamucil.

Isn’t people turning their backs on religion a biblical end times prophecy? If you are religious this should be something to celebrate. The coming of the Lord is at hand.

I think there are other reasons as well. Most women work nowadays, and that leaves little time on weekends to attend to everything else. I also think that family budgets are tighter, with little to no room for church donations.

I also have to wonder if the Christian narrative holds less appeal to the younger generations.

summer Wrote:
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> I also have to wonder if the Christian narrative
> hold less appeal to the younger generations.

Increasingly, young people know so many people of other ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender preferences that they no longer feel a need for the artificial divisions imposed by traditional religion. The archaic systems of in-group/out-group thinking, and the mythologies underlying them, have become irrelevant.