New Age

We are witnessing a religious shift that is unprecedented in size and scope in American history. With each passing year, the percentage of Americans that claim no religious affiliation is growing, and this trend is especially pronounced among our young people. If things continue to steadily move in this direction, that is going to have enormous implications for the future of our society. The United States was founded by people that were extremely committed to their faith, and now we are rapidly becoming a nation where people are choosing no religion at all. We live at a time when there is a mass exodus from Christian churches, and while it is true that some smaller faiths are growing, the reality of the matter is that most of the people that are leaving are remaining unaffiliated. According to PRRI, if you go back to 1991 only 6 percent of all Americans were “unaffiliated”, but today that number has shot up to 25 percent…

In 1991, only six percent of Americans identified their religious affiliation as “none,” and that number had not moved much since the early 1970s. By the end of the 1990s, 14% of the public claimed no religious affiliation. The rate of religious change accelerated further during the late 2000s and early 2010s, reaching 20% by 2012. Today, one-quarter (25%) of Americans claim no formal religious identity, making this group the single largest “religious group” in the U.S.

The most dramatic change during this time period has been among our young people.

If you go all the way back to 1986, just 10 percent of Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age group were “unaffiliated”. Today, that number has skyrocketed to 39 percent. Here is more from PRRI…

Today, nearly four in ten (39%) young adults (ages 18-29) are religiously unaffiliated—three times the unaffiliated rate (13%) among seniors (ages 65 and older). While previous generations were also more likely to be religiously unaffiliated in their twenties, young adults today are nearly four times as likely as young adults a generation ago to identify as religiously unaffiliated. In 1986, for example, only 10% of young adults claimed no religious affiliation.

And just because Millennials claim a religious affiliation of some sort does not mean that they actually go to church.

In fact, a study from the Pew Research Center discovered that only 27 percent of Millennials say that they “attend religious services on a weekly basis”…

Millennials – especially the youngest Millennials, who have entered adulthood since the first Landscape Study was conducted – are far less religious than their elders. For example, only 27% of Millennials say they attend religious services on a weekly basis, compared with 51% of adults in the Silent generation. Four-in-ten of the youngest Millennials say they pray every day, compared with six-in-ten Baby Boomers and two-thirds of members of the Silent generation. Only about half of Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty, compared with seven-in-ten Americans in the Silent and Baby Boom cohorts. And only about four-in-ten Millennials say religion is very important in their lives, compared with more than half in the older generational cohorts.

Of course not all of those that are “attending religious services” are going to Christian churches. Some are going to mosques, others are attending synagogue, and yet others are involved in other faiths.

At one time you could count on fast growing groups such as the Southern Baptists and the Mormons to produce positive growth numbers, but those days are long gone…

The Southern Baptists have lost more than a million members over the last decade, according to LifeWay. Giving and attendance are down, and Baptists are seeing more gray and silver heads in the pews.

Meanwhile, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has seen its once-enviable U.S. growth rate slow to under 1 percent in each of the last two years. Mormonism, which grew by just .75 percent in this country in 2017, is barely keeping pace with the growth of the U.S. population (+.71 percent).

Europe has been described as a “post-Christian society”, and we are well on our way to joining them.

So what is causing this to happen?

Well, there is certainly a lot of debate about this within Christian circles. From the outside, many experts are pointing to demographic changes. The following comes from a recent article by Jana Riess…

One of the biggest demographic trends of our time is that millennials are delaying marriage or not getting married at all. And since there’s a strong correlation between being married and being involved in religion, the fact that fewer Americans are getting married is worrisome news to clergy.

In addition to a decline in marriage numbers, experts also point to the fact that Americans are having fewer children these days…

The number of children a family has is related to the couple’s religious involvement — couples without kids are a bit less likely to be religious. So the fact that fertility is on the decline is, again, worrisome news for organized religion.

But are those factors a cause of the decline of religious faith in America, or are they the result of it?

It could be argued that churches have always heavily promoted marriage and family, and if young Americans are no longer as engaged in church it would make sense that they put less of a priority on those things now.

The good news for churches is that even though atheism is rapidly growing, most Americans (even the unaffiliated ones) still believe in God…

Despite their lack of connection to formal religious institutions, most unaffiliated Americans retain a belief in God or a higher power. A majority of unaffiliated Americans say God is either a person with whom people can have a relationship (22%) or an impersonal force (37%). Only one-third (33%) of religiously unaffiliated Americans say they do not believe in God. Strong majorities of Americans who belong to the major Christian religious traditions hold a personal conception of God. Compared to Christians, Americans who identify with a non-Christian tradition are significantly less likely to hold a personal conception of God (33%) and are more likely to say God is an impersonal force in the universe (49%).

Americans still have a keen interest in spiritual things, but many of them are now attempting to fill that void in alternative ways. For example, it has been claimed that Wicca (a very popular form of witchcraft) is now the fastest growing faith in America.

Many like to focus on the political changes that are happening in this country, but the truth is that these cataclysmic shifts in our faith numbers are going to have far more to do with determining the future course of this nation.

If we ever hope to restore the Constitutional Republic that our founders once established, we must return to the Christian values and principles that this nation was originally founded upon.

Any other approach is simply not going to work, and time is running out.

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

Never before in U.S. history have so many Americans chosen to be unaffiliated with any particular religious group. As you will see below, the percentage of “nones” in this country has absolutely skyrocketed over the past decade. But not all faiths are losing members in the United States. In fact, Islam, Buddhism, Wicca and various New Age organizations have all experienced excellent growth in recent years. Sadly, almost all of the growth for the “nones” has come at the expense of Christianity. Americans are leaving the Christian faith in droves, and this is why many of our churches are less than half full on Sunday mornings. What we are doing right now is clearly not working, and hopefully we can get the church in America to wake up while there is still time to do so.

Earlier today I came across a brand new study from the Pew Research Center entitled “Why America’s ‘nones’ left religion behind“. One thing that particularly stood out to me was the fact that most “nones” were once affiliated with a particular religion but have now discarded that label…

Perhaps the most striking trend in American religion in recent years has been the growing percentage of adults who do not identify with a religious group. And the vast majority of these religious “nones” (78%) say they were raised as a member of a particular religion before shedding their religious identity in adulthood.

Overall, the percentage of “nones” in this nation has been absolutely soaring in recent years. Back in 2007, “nones” made up 16 percent of the population, but now that number has risen to 23 percent. The following is from a different Pew Research Center report that was published last year…

Religious “nones” – a shorthand we use to refer to people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” – now make up roughly 23% of the U.S. adult population. This is a stark increase from 2007, the last time a similar Pew Research study was conducted, when 16% of Americans were “nones.” (During this same time period, Christians have fallen from 78% to 71%.)

I want you to notice one particularly sobering fact in the excerpt posted above. The seven percent increase in the percentage of “nones” was matched exactly by a seven percent decrease in the percentage of Christians.

It is time to face a very hard truth – Christianity is in rapid decline in America.

So why is this happening?

Is there an explanation for why so many people are leaving the church?

Well, here is some of the feedback that the Pew Research Center received while conducting their new survey…

About half of current religious “nones” who were raised in a religion (49%) indicate that a lack of belief led them to move away from religion. This includes many respondents who mention “science” as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings, including one who said “I’m a scientist now, and I don’t believe in miracles.” Others reference “common sense,” “logic” or a “lack of evidence” – or simply say they do not believe in God.

This is such a tragedy, because during my decades of research into these things I have found that logic and reason should always point people toward the Christian faith and not away from it. There is an absolutely gigantic mountain of evidence for Christianity out there, but unfortunately most people don’t know about it or they are not interested in considering it.

The biggest cultural shift has been happening among our young people. Most of them have been raised in an environment where God has been removed from almost every corner of public life, and the results have been beyond catastrophic.

In America today, 35 percent of all Millennials are “nones”.

Millennials are more than twice as likely to be “nones” as Baby Boomers (17 percent), and they are more than three times as likely to be “nones” as the Silent Generation (11 percent).

In other words, the younger you are the more likely you are to be religiously unaffiliated.

And this shows up in the church attendance numbers as well. Millennials are much, much less likely to be in church on any particular Sunday morning than the oldest Americans are. The following information comes from another Pew Research Center report…

Millennials – especially the youngest Millennials, who have entered adulthood since the first Landscape Study was conducted – are far less religious than their elders. For example, only 27% of Millennials say they attend religious services on a weekly basis, compared with 51% of adults in the Silent generation. Four-in-ten of the youngest Millennials say they pray every day, compared with six-in-ten Baby Boomers and two-thirds of members of the Silent generation. Only about half of Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty, compared with seven-in-ten Americans in the Silent and Baby Boom cohorts. And only about four-in-ten Millennials say religion is very important in their lives, compared with more than half in the older generational cohorts.

We are slowly losing an entire generation.

When you walk into most churches in America on Sunday morning, what are you going to find?

You are going to find that the congregation is dominated by “the greys”, and I am not talking about space aliens.

As the oldest Americans die off, the United States is becoming less and less Christian. We are on the exact same path that Europe has already gone down, but most churches are just going on with business as usual and don’t seem to even understand that we have a major crisis on our hands.

As I said at the top of this article, what we are doing right now is clearly not working, and if we continue on the path that we are currently on we will continue to lose young people by the millions.

America needs revival more than it has ever needed it before.

Let us pray that one arrives very soon.

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

Mass Exodus From The Church: The Percentage Of Young Adults With No Religious Affiliation Has Nearly QUADRUPLED Since 1986

More Americans Than Ever Are Losing Their Religion