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God has lost the young-probably

By razib on March 10, 2009.

One of the issues that often comes up when I report data which show that the young are more secular (or liberal) than the old is that people change with time. And age is presumed to correlate with greater religiosity and conservatism. I'll take politics off the table. The Inductivist suggests that the GSS doesn't indicate that the young become anymore religious with age. In other words, religiosity at age X is a very good predictor of religiosity at age X + n.

Christian Fundamentalist pollster George Barna observes the same in his surveys:

The research data showed that one pattern emerged loud and clear: young adults rarely possess a biblical worldview. The current study found that less than one-half of one percent of adults in the Mosaic generation - i.e., those aged 18 to 23 - have a biblical worldview, compared to about one out of every nine older adults.

Earlier Barna reported:

One of the most fascinating insights from the research is the increasing size of the no-faith segment with each successive generation. The proportion of atheists and agnostics increases from 6% of Elders (ages 61+) and 9% of Boomers (ages 42-60), to 14% of Busters (23-41) and 19% of adult Mosaics (18-22). When adjusted for age and compared to 15 years ago, each generation has changed surprisingly little over the past decade and a half. Each new generation entered adulthood with a certain degree of secular fervor, which appears to stay relatively constant within that generation over time. This contradicts the popular notion that such generational differences are simply a product of people becoming more faith-oriented as they age.

Conservative Christians do have more children than the young, but the atheist childless seem awful good at seducing the souls of the innocent.

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The Bible has a hard time competing with television and public education, so only those Christian fundamentalist groups that strictly limit their interactions with the mainstream culture - such as Old Order Mennonites and the Amish - seem to hold on to the hearts and minds of their young.

Of course, these groups are so small relative to the general U.S. population (there are only around 250,000 Amish in North America) that their cultural impact, at least in our lifetime, will be limited to inspiring quaint photography.

As a young Christian (and a priest) I'd be interested to see what Barna defines as a "biblical worldview." I'm somewhat cynical of worldview language.

Jody+: from the link:

Defining Terms

For the purposes of the survey, a âbiblical worldviewâ was defined as believing that absolute moral truth exists; the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches; Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic; a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or do good works; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today. In the research, anyone who held all of those beliefs was said to have a biblical worldview.

This definition of a 'Biblical worldview' is arguably a poor proxy for 'religiosity' (unless we are adopting a very narrow scope for the latter term). Few Christians I know would not align themselves with the position outlined in Barna's definition - a young agnostic could easily grow into an ageing believer without ever going so far as to adopt the extreme of Barna's 'Biblical worldview' (in fact, I would expect the religiosity that comes with age to be a more metaphysical thing). The conclusion that people overall do not become more religious as they age may well be true (I hope so!), but Barnum's proof of this thesis looks invalid (as does his claim that not holding to the abovedefined worldview in its entirety equates to 'secular fervour'!).