After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion

After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. By Robert Wuthnow. Princeton University Press, 312 pp., $29.95.

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A WISE FRIEND of mine says, "The plural of anecdote is not data." Robert Wuthnow would agree. He brings the eye of the sociologist to the life of the church and gives us insights that sometimes confirm but often confound our anecdotes. In After the Baby Boomers, he examines data about adults between the ages of 21 and 45 and concludes, "If I were a religious leader, I would be troubled by the facts and figures currently describing the lives of young Americans, their involvement in congregations, and their spiritual practices."

As he conveys large doses of data (along with a few anecdotes), Wuthnow keeps reminding readers not to hastily draw conclusions "from where the action is" but rather to reach their conclusions on the basis of "a full consideration of where the action is not." He goes on to say that "social reality is ... complicated," and "we need a more sophisticated view of society if we are going to understand why American religion is patterned as it is."

I recently completed 24 rewarding and challenging years of leading what Wuthnow would describe as a youthful congregation. Over the past several years I've also been traveling extensively in North America and around the world, trying to understand the sweeping changes in our culture and world and to articulate what they mean for the church. What I've seen in hundreds of churches in dozens of denominations often causes me to wonder whether congregations as we know them can survive.

Wuthnow anticipates the disquiet many of us feel: "My view is that congregations can survive, but only if religious leaders roll up their sleeves and pay considerably more attention to young adults than they have been." Always one to qualify, he adds: "We should not ignore the possibility that congregations will survive from sheer inertia.... But survival and vitality are two different things. The question is not whether congregations have a future, but what the future of congregations will be."

For people like me who have been focused on the philosophical and cultural changes associated with terms like postmodern, postcolonial and posttypographical, Wuthnow's findings about the religious lives of younger adults are neither contradictory nor corraborative. They simply come from another angle, and in that way they are complementary. If you asked me to boil them down into a few sound bites, I'd begin by reviewing what Wuthnow says about changes relating to family life.

Young adults are marrying later, having fewer children and having them later, moving more often, going to college in higher numbers, living with more immigrant neighbors and therefore more ethnic and religious diversity, and living in the suburbs even more than their baby boomer parents. "The net result," Wuthnow says, "is fewer young adults contributing to the activities of local congregations or receiving support from these congregations." If one turns the book's subtitle into a question--How are 20- and 30-somethings shaping the future of American religion?--the simple answer may be, "By staying away."

The biggest single social factor related to declining church attendance among younger adults is not TV, the Internet, increasing skepticism regarding Christian orthodoxy or the specter of "secular humanism" or "relativism." No, Wuthnow says, "being married or unmarried has a stronger effect on church attendance than anything else. ... Children also make some difference.... This means that the postponement of marriage and children continues to suppress church attendance at least until adults are in their early forties."

"Ah," some overtired pastors may be saying. "Good. Leave them alone in their 20s and 30s, and they'll come home in their 40s, bringing their toddlers behind them." But that would be a conclusion of delusion--especially for mainline Protestants, but also for evangelicals. Since the early 1970s retention rates for both mainline and evangelical Protestants have fallen, so that as a proportion of the U.S. population neither group--contrary to popular opinion--has been growing, and this is especially true among younger adults.

Most of the mainline decline occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, Wuthnow explains, and it seems to have leveled out in the 1990s. Still, Wuthnow cautions, "the diminishing numbers of younger adults affiliated with mainline denominations is a significant aspect of American religion and one that does not bode well for the future of those denominations." With the average adult age of mainline congregations 52 and of evangelical congregations 48, the loss of young adults, especially those in their 20s, is indeed cause for alarm. The only groups receiving some consolation from the statistics are Catholics, Jews and black Protestants, whose percentages of young adult affiliates "have remained remarkably stable."