On the face of it, the recent Church of England report into the faith of under-30s, so-called Generation Y, will worry believers.
Although it shows that only one in eight is an atheist and that, despite the best efforts of the New Atheists, few are actively hostile to Christianity, it also shows that only 1 in 2 believes in God (lower than the national average), that levels of religious observance are very low, and that the overwhelming feeling is one of disinterest and disengagement. Christianity is not so much untrue as irrelevant.
On reflection, however, the results are not so shocking. The study found that of the 300 young people interviewed, most were not looking for answers to “ultimate questions”. That may be a pity but no-one should imagine it was a surprise. Rare is the 23-year old who spends his evening wrestling with Nietzsche or Aquinas. Most have other things to do.
Nor is it a surprise that they should operate almost exclusively within what philosopher Charles Taylor has called an immanent frame, “a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular.” (A Secular Age, p.542) The culture in which they have been immersed is overwhelmingly immanent. Horizons are short, speed is imperative and morality often relative. There is not much in popular culture that lends itself to reflection on first or last things. It would be a shock if Generation Y were anything but immanent in outlook.
One of the reasons why the trends revealed in the research are not surprising is that they are not new. When British Social Attitudes first asked people, in 1991, if they agreed that “there is a God who concerns Himself with every human being personally,” 23% of under-24s agreed, compared with 29% of 45-54s and 45% of over-65s. When asked in the same year whether they thought that “to me life is meaningful only because God exists”, only 5% of under-24s agreed, compared with 17% of 45-54s and 43% of over-65s. Twenty years ago young people were similarly, disproportionately disengaged.
But we can do better than twenty years. A Mass Observation study published in 1947 entitled Puzzled People: A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics, Progress and Politics recorded that “both in regard to formal observances and general attitude, the younger generation show a much more critical outlook, and much less interest [in religion]. Two young people (under forty) express doubt about the existence of God for every older person who does so. It is mostly the younger generation who dismiss religion with apparent disinterest.
Indeed, we can go at least a generation earlier still. Thirty years before the MO study, a survey of the religious attitudes of trench soldiers in the First World War, the vast majority of whom were under 30, reported that they had the impression “that there is little or no life in the Church at all, that it is an antiquated and decaying institution, standing by dogmas expressed in archaic language, and utterly out of touch with modern thought and living experience ... they believe that the Churches are more and more governed by the middle-aged and the elderly; they think ministry professionalised and out of touch with the life of men.” Sound familiar?
So, is last week’s report just more of the same? Have we simply been here before? I don’t think so. This time there is something genuinely different going on but it has less to do with God than with the circumstances in which we encounter him.
The Faith of Generation Y reports that young people today have only a “faded cultural memory” of Christianity. The “chain of Christian memory” has become “eroded” in modern
Young people of earlier generations may have been similarly critical of religion but they nevertheless shared and for the most part appreciated the Christian cultural memory that helped form them. The institutions, narratives, rituals, and practices in which Christian commitments were preserved, modified and passed on remained strong, even among those who participated in them only periodically.
Today that cultural chain is much weakened. Generation Y is “a largely unstoried and memoryless generation”, a remarkable state that naturally erodes commitment to traditional forms of religious identity.
And not just religious: take national identity, for example. Between 1998 and 2006 the percentage of 18-24 year olds identifying themselves as ‘British’ fell from 76% to 63% according to BSA. More noticeably, the proportion of the same age group identifying themselves as ‘English’ fell from 61% to 56%, even when the overall percentage of people who did so increased.
An Ipsos MORI study for the Camelot Foundation in 2007 http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=271 confirmed this. It argued that there was “a fundamental lack of emotional resonance amongst young people with the concept of Britishness”. Young people saw British identity “as a legal construct used only in official circumstances”. According to the report, “being British does not seem to add anything to the daily narrative or the social reality that young people are faced with.” Change Britishness for belief in God and you have last week’s report.
This may not matter. Indeed, for those modernisers who see national identity, religion and such traditional markers as arcane relics that serve only limit the freedom to choose our own identity, it is to be positively welcomed.
But for many others, myself included, the dissolution of such narrative and social markers is concerning. It is not simply because we cannot come to terms with the fact that the old order changeth, although I suspect there is an element of that. Rather it is because human beings naturally flourish within larger narratives in which they locate themselves, and through which they develop virtues and character. Floating free, whether it is from God and religious structures or Britain and national ones, may seem liberating at first, but is unlikely to help society as a whole or young people themselves to flourish in the long run.
