Walking Away From Church - Loosing the 20/30 Somethings

One of the growing trends in church attendance that's emerged over the last several years is the Emerging Church.  People who are tired of the same old way of doing things.  They want a faith that is relevant to the world we live in and not in the time period of their parents from the 1940's-1990's.  Tired, worn out legalistic ways which have not adapted to the changing world we live in.

You see this happening in  Armstrongism too.  So many of the splinter groups claim they are 'holders of the truth once restored', (meaning pre-1986.)  The world today has not heard of HWA nor do they care.  His message is not relevant to the world today.  The myriad of splinter groups are loosing their young members.  They have nothing to offer them. So the groups are aging themselves out of existence.  99% of all the splinter groups are made up of people who were members of the WCG in the 1960's-1980's.  Somewhere I read that the average age of COG members is in the mid 50's age range. In twenty to thirty years the COG will no longer be.  Sure a few die-hards will be holding on - middle aged single men, never married and bitter to the world they live in.

Some excerpts from the article.  Click the link below for the entire article

Los Angeles Times

latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/

Walking away from church

Organized religion's increasing identification with conservative politics is a turnoff to more and more young adults. Evangelical Protestantism has been hit hard by this development.

By Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell

October 17, 2010

The most rapidly growing religious category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. While middle-aged and older Americans continue to embrace organized religion, rapidly increasing numbers of young people are rejecting it.

As recently as 1990, all but 7% of Americans claimed a religious affiliation, a figure that had held constant for decades. Today, 17% of Americans say they have no religion, and these new "nones" are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990.

Between 25% and 30% of twentysomethings today say they have no religious affiliation — roughly four times higher than in any previous generation.

So, why this sudden jump in youthful disaffection from organized religion? The surprising answer, according to a mounting body of evidence, is politics. Very few of these new "nones" actually call themselves atheists, and many have rather conventional beliefs about God and theology. But they have been alienated from organized religion by its increasingly conservative politics.

This backlash was especially forceful among youth coming of age in the 1990s and just forming their views about religion. Some of that generation, to be sure, held deeply conservative moral and political views, and they felt very comfortable in the ranks of increasingly conservative churchgoers. But a majority of the Millennial generation was liberal on most social issues, and above all, on homosexuality.

The fraction of twentysomethings who said that homosexual relations were "always" or "almost always" wrong plummeted from about 75% in 1990 to about 40% in 2008. (Ironically, in polling, Millennials are actually more uneasy about abortion than their parents.)

Just as this generation moved to the left on most social issues — above all, homosexuality — many prominent religious leaders moved to the right, using the issue of same-sex marriage to mobilize electoral support for conservative Republicans. In the short run, this tactic worked to increase GOP turnout, but the subsequent backlash undermined sympathy for religion among many young moderates and progressives.

Increasingly, young people saw religion as intolerant, hypocritical, judgmental and homophobic. If being religious entailed political conservatism, they concluded, religion was not for them.

Nevertheless, predictions of the demise of religion in America would be premature. More likely is that as growing numbers of young Americans reject religious doctrine that is too political or intolerant for their taste, innovative religious leaders will concoct more palatable offerings. Jesus taught his disciples to be "fishers of men," and the pool of un-churched moderate and progressive young people must be an attractive target for religious anglers.

To be sure, some of these young people will remain secularists. Many of them, however, espouse beliefs that would seem to make them potential converts to a religion that offered some of the attractions of modern evangelicalism without the conservative political overlay.

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times