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July 27th, 2013
08:33 AM ET
Why millennials are leaving the church
(CNN) - At 32, I barely qualify as a millennial. I wrote my first essay with a pen and paper, but by the time I graduated from college, I owned a cell phone and used Google as a verb. I still remember the home phone numbers of my old high school friends, but don’t ask me to recite my husband’s without checking my contacts first. I own mix tapes that include selections from Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but I’ve never planned a trip without Travelocity. Despite having one foot in Generation X, I tend to identify most strongly with the attitudes and the ethos of the millennial generation, and because of this, I’m often asked to speak to my fellow evangelical leaders about why millennials are leaving the church. Armed with the latest surveys, along with personal testimonies from friends and readers, I explain how young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. I point to research that shows young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith, between science and Christianity, between compassion and holiness. I talk about how the evangelical obsession with sex can make Christian living seem like little more than sticking to a list of rules, and how millennials long for faith communities in which they are safe asking tough questions and wrestling with doubt. Invariably, after I’ve finished my presentation and opened the floor to questions, a pastor raises his hand and says, “So what you’re saying is we need hipper worship bands. …” And I proceed to bang my head against the podium. Time and again, the assumption among Christian leaders, and evangelical leaders in particular, is that the key to drawing twenty-somethings back to church is simply to make a few style updates - edgier music, more casual services, a coffee shop in the fellowship hall, a pastor who wears skinny jeans, an updated Web site that includes online giving. But here’s the thing: Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters, and we’re not easily impressed with consumerism or performances. In fact, I would argue that church-as-performance is just one more thing driving us away from the church, and evangelicalism in particular. Many of us, myself included, are finding ourselves increasingly drawn to high church traditions - Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc. - precisely because the ancient forms of liturgy seem so unpretentious, so unconcerned with being “cool,” and we find that refreshingly authentic. What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance. We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against. We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers. We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation. We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities. We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers. You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, deep down, we long for Jesus. Now these trends are obviously true not only for millennials but also for many folks from other generations. Whenever I write about this topic, I hear from forty-somethings and grandmothers, Generation Xers and retirees, who send me messages in all caps that read “ME TOO!” So I don’t want to portray the divide as wider than it is. But I would encourage church leaders eager to win millennials back to sit down and really talk with them about what they’re looking for and what they would like to contribute to a faith community. Their answers might surprise you. Rachel Held Evans is the author of "Evolving in Monkey Town" and "A Year of Biblical Womanhood." She blogs at rachelheldevans.com. The views expressed in this column belong to Rachel Held Evans. soundoff (9,864 Responses)« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 Next »
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Opinion by Rachel Held Evans, Special to CNN
http://www.angeloftruth.com/christianity
I was raised Episcopalian but did not practice it after Confirmation. My spouse was raised Church of the Brethern (an anabaptist tradition) but did not practice it once off to college. Our now 20yr old practices no religion and says he used to believe in Santa Claus & the Easter Bunny too until he grew up. He also subscribes to the "religion is the opiate of the masses" philosophy and believes only the weak and those of limited intellectual capacity need the "crutch" of religion to explain that which they cannot understand.
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August 17, 2013 at 5:49 pm | Report abuse | Reply
If you don't pay attention and do something soon your grand kids will be praying to allah if they want to live. Do you think Europe even saw it coming 30 years ago? Google "muslims problems" in Europe or almost any country there. Google "no go zones". Go to utube and watch Bridgette Gabriel x world news anchor and born in Lebanon. Wake up America!
It's a sad day indeed when American children are threatened, "If you don't learn to pray to Jesus, you'll soon to be praying to Allah." Instead, why don't you teach your children to study hard and get a good education at a "real" college where they can learn "real" subjects like biology and astrophysics, instead of relying on a priest or a minister to teach them that mythical being created man and the universe?
Why would praying to allah be any worse than praying to any other god?
I must be a new breed of Evangelical Christian...in my 40s but with values resembling what this article describes for millennials. This feeling and God's leading has turned me into a pastor planting a new local church that is a spearheading a movement for peace between science and faith.
I too must be a part of the older millennium Im 55 I became disenchanted with the church as they preached love and acceptance but they shut out gays and they how we could live a rich life but the only ones getting rich were the preachers off of their congregation. This is the church were talking about though not God. Unfortunately some of our pastors have become more about themselves and less about God. Which is a sad sight to behold
When we can recreate substance (like Hydrogen) in nothing out of nothing the God myth may be at risk....until then....
@JCARSON:
1) this universe is full of everything............namely ENERGY. which if you don't know comprises EVERYTHING.
so the whole "something from nothing" only fits with religion, not science.
john 1:1 "in the beginning there was the word and the word was god" basically meaning nothing exsisted before "god" i call BULL.
2) atoms which are comprised of energy and thus create everything else we can and can not see can be constructed from placing the proper atoms into their appropriate structed forms.
if you want hydrogen 1 proton,1neutron,1 electron and you have 1 atom of hydrogen; the hard part is it would cost us more energy than we can afford at this point in our technological stage to accomplish such a feat. just give it time, then food replicators will be everywhere.
Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
Too bad for him. Canada's a nice place.
Beginning with the baby boomers, we've witnessed three generations of people who are very much afraid of commitment. When the going gets tough, they quit early. Sometimes the demands of ordinary love are too much for them. No wonder they leave Christianity. Because Christianity is not about even ordinary love. It is about radical love. "Do good to those who hate you", "take up your cross and follow Me (however long that takes)", "turn the other cheek". And finally, the radical love of the cross. None of this could be palatable to the modern secular mindset.
No, its because we have too much access to information nowadays to believe the supernatural bullsh.it of Christianity.
Or more likely, information and knowledge are freer and far more easily accessed now than at any point in history. It's very difficult to continue believing in a god - or a devil, a heaven, a hell - when there is no evidence that any of them exist. Sometimes the truth is simply more powerful than the desire to believe.