America's Teenagers Are the Least Religious Group in History

[My Freemasonry]

According to the Daily Mail today, America's teenagers are the least religious group in history. Click here for the full article.

Religion and faith is having less of an influence on people's lives, especially the young, according to new research. The US study claims that millennials - recent teenagers - are the least religious generation of the last six decades and possibly in the nation’s history.It said recent adolescents are less likely to say that religion is important in their lives and spend less time praying or meditating - and future generations are likely be even less religious.Researchers led by psychology professor Jean Twenge from San Diego State University analysed data from 11.2 million respondents from four nationally representative surveys of US adolescents aged 13 to 18 taken between 1966 and 2014. They found that millennials, also known as Generation Y, are less likely to belong to a religious group, or say that faith plays an important role in their daily lives.‘Unlike previous studies, ours is able to show that millennials’ lower religious involvement is due to cultural change, not to millennials being young and unsettled,’ said Professor Twenge, who is also the author of Generation Me.‘Millennial adolescents are less religious than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age.‘We also looked at younger ages than the previous studies. More of today’s adolescents are abandoning religion before they reach adulthood, with an increasing number not raised with religion at all.’​

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[dfreybur]

My suspicion is that young people find moral values in areas that traditional religion has not addressed well. For example many young people have strong commitments to the well-being of planetary life systems, human brotherhood and transparent and equitable government.

Spiritual versus religious.

Further, organized religion has failed to live up to some community ethical standards for at least a century.

It is very easy to judge the entire system by the acts of the members. In fact I suggest that it is not just easy to do but mandatory to do. The question is whether one decides to get over that, to become an internal influence for improvement, to become an external influence for improvement, or to ignore the history. For myself I had to achieve some combination of getting past the history plus deciding to be an internal influence before I could convert and settle into a religion.

I suspect that young people have higher ethical standards than the previous generation - but they are different standards.

The idea that higher standards can be had grates on some. The idea that different standards can have value grates on some. This is why Masonry teaches an open minded approach and also avoiding discussion of religion. How to discuss philosophy in lodge without discussing religion? Maybe this is why the practice reduced as the total number of brothers increased.