Can parties at hot nightclubs and free pizza bring young adults back to religion? The Archdiocese of New York is betting they can.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported, more than 200 millennials gathered at Sankeys NYC, a Midtown dance club, to drink and dance the night away. It was a kind of after-party for a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Archdiocese has recently hired a number of staffers specifically to do young-adult outreach and launch new programs to target this demographic.
The church has good reason to worry. According to a 2013 survey by the Barna Group, 65 percent of Catholic-raised young adults say they are less religiously active today than they were at 15.
In fact, nearly every religious denomination in the country is facing the same crisis: Young adults are dropping out.
In fall 2012, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life made headlines with its report that fully a third of American adults under 30 claimed no religious affiliation, compared with only 9 percent of those 65 and older.
The bad news has been building for a while. In a 2007 survey of more than 1,000 young adults by Lifeway Research, seven in 10 Protestants 18 to 30 — evangelical and mainline alike — who went to church regularly in high school said they’d stopped attending by age 23. And more than a third of those said they hadn’t returned, even sporadically, by 30.
In 2001, a researcher at Hebrew Union College found that while 58 percent of Jews 65 and over had at least two religious affiliations (a synagogue, JCC or other Jewish organization), it was only 25 percent among those ages 24 to 34.
At least three things are driving this across-the-board decline. The first is that Americans are putting off marriage and childbearing — the two milestones that typically bring young adults back to religious institutions. The second is what researchers call millennials’ general “mistrust of institutions” (religious and otherwise). Third, being unaffiliated no longer carries any stigma in broader society.
If religious denominations can’t rely on social pressure to bring young adults in, what can they do?
One problem with the “Christian rave” approach, as one evangelical pastor called the big music events sometimes hosted by his denomination (and now being brought to New York Catholics, apparently), is that it makes the real church services seem pretty boring. And, as many religious leaders complain, it turns the faithful into spiritual “consumers” rather than spiritual “producers.” That is, they wind up coming to church to be entertained.
Happily, the Archdiocese here has other approaches, too. Colin Nykaza, one of its outreach staffers, tells me, “Our office also is involved in hospital ministry and homeless ministry. This gives young adults the opportunity to serve and volunteer, which many are hungry to do.”
When one in five members of Yale’s graduating class is applying to join Teach for America, you know that service — even intensive, full-time service — clearly attracts this generation.
Here’s something else that the young adults I’ve interviewed seem interested in: neighborhood.
One woman in New Orleans told me she had to drive 45 minutes to her old church. She liked the music, but, she complained, “It just doesn’t make sense to do that and not be able to invest in people’s lives.” Another woman told me that she liked the fact that attending a neighborhood church meant the “church scene” wasn’t a separate part of her life.
Young people seem to crave the kind of close-knit community that their grandparents once had. (Many say that they experienced such an environment in college.) Of course, they don’t (can’t) live in close proximity to a large extended family as Grandma did — so many young people have become part of urban tribes, groups of friends who hang out together and want to live within walking distance of “the group’s” coffee shop, restaurant and even church.
For boomers, attending church meant driving miles to find the preacher they liked and the music they liked — “church-shopping,” as some call it. For millennials, it seems, religious life will be about putting down roots where they live.
The Catholic Church, which has historically based membership on geography — where you go to church depends on where you live — should see this as good news. The seeds of renewal have already been planted.
Naomi Schaefer Riley’s new book, “Got Religion? How Churches, Mosques and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back,” is out next month.