Rise of the Nones

            A recent CNN poll showed a rather disconcerting trend among people in the US. A growing number of people have identified themselves as a “none” when asked about their religious affiliation, but the last poll made headlines when it became apparent that about a third of young people identified themselves as a none. Where did this trend come from? What happened to the usually so religious US?

A number of people with more knowledge and influence than I have already made their own more professional opinions. Here, I offer my take on it, speaking as a young person and watching my peers turn away from the faiths of their parents.

It seems to me that the number one reason young people leave religion is that they are bored of it. To Catholics with a firm grasp on the Eucharist, this is unthinkable. But to the vast majority of people out there, church is nothing special. If anything, it’s something that’s nice for their mothers and children. Religion is something that is a nice story, it’s great for people who needed some sort of consolation for what happens after death or to explain the hard questions children ask, but in today’s enlightened society, religion is no longer necessary. Once they hit around fifteen or sixteen years old, many of my peers have determined that they no longer need religion. They decide that it is time to end the feel-good fuzziness. It’s no longer good enough to answer questions with “because God made them that way.” Now is the age of science and rationalism and everything can be explained.

Unfortunately, the Church’s method of dealing with young people doesn’t help this much at all. At Catholic high schools, the priests are told that they will be ministering to “young people.” This can unfortunately refer to a very large range of people, all of whom are very different. It encompasses eighth graders, who are still trying to understand algebra, and college students, who are beginning to get married and plan their lives independent of their parents.

From this age

To this age- and beyond

It is this very dilemma that leads to the mis-evangelization of this demographic. At “youth Masses,” many of the homilies are meant to encourage young people and try to get them to live out their faith in a world hostile to it. This method works brilliantly on retreats where the youth are having a radical encounter with their faith. But these homilies don’t work every Sunday. As young people grow older and become more cynical, the homilies about living your faith become meaningless as more and more difficult questions are asked. In many places, instead of answering the questions and encouraging the young people to keep searching for truth, the answers are dumbed down until they barely make any sense. This may have worked for children, but when these simplified answers are given to seniors in high school and beyond, many of them take it as a personal insult to their intelligence and begin to hate the people who give them the basic answers. It starts the train of denial in their minds and they begin to seek out ways to undermine the authority of those who fail to meet their standards of intelligence.

This may seem somewhat cynical, but it has proven true at least a dozen times, in my limited experience. So what can the Church do to retain these nones? That will be the topic of discussion for the next post.