Millinneal roads/church. Long line of people waiting to get into MVMNT. Photo: Pauline Dolle/A Journey through NYC religions
By Myriam Renaud Published in Religion and Politics.
The 18-to-29-year-olds missing from predominantly White evangelical churches span two generations. Using the Pew Research Center’s breakdown of U.S. generations, this cohort includes younger millennials (a generation born between 1981 and 1996) and older members of Generation Z (born after 1996).
At first glance, research seems to validate the alarm of Wheaton’s conference participants: A 2017 LifeWay study found that 66 percent of Protestants between age 23 and 30 said they stopped attending church regularly between age 18 and 22. However, some of these young people do eventually return. Indeed, during a recorded lecture, Wheaton College Professor David Setran explained that their hiatus from church—the so-called “driver’s license to marriage license” gap—has remained constant for the past 40 years. …
Some of the young adults who return to church—as Seversen and other presenters at the Wheaton conference made clear—bring with them worldviews that conflict with those of their elders. On issues other than abortion, younger white evangelicals tend to be more socially and politically progressive than previous generations.
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