One of the stories I mentioned in yesterday’s weekly round-up was about the lack of belief reported by a survey of young people. The fullest two accounts of this survey are those in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph (where it fits their template of a society always going downhill as they see it). There are one or two shorter versions of the story as well, but all seem to be working from exactly the same press release.
David Keen usefully sums up some of the reported findings.
- 66 per cent of teens do not believe a deity exists
- 50 per cent have never prayed
- 16 per cent have never been to church.
- Teenagers rated family, friends, money, music and even reality TV shows above faith.
- 59 per cent of children believed religion has had a negative influence on the world
- 60 per cent only go to church for a wedding or christening
- Only 30 per cent of teenagers think there is an afterlife…
- … while 10 per cent believe in reincarnation
- 47 per cent said organised religion had no place in the world
- 60 per cent don’t believe Religious Studies should be compulsory in schools
- 91 per cent agreed they should treat others the way they wished to be treated themselves
Before commenting further, some caveats are in order. Firstly, these results are released to publicise a new book. Secondly, there is little sense from the report of what the questions actually are. Some questions talk about “religion” and others about “going to church”. It seems muddled. Thirdly, the only report I have seen that names the company responsible for the survey is on A Better Hope . The company is named as livity, which describes itself as “a socially responsible youth marketing agency” and its website seems fairly new. I’m not clear what expertise it has in constructing unbiased and accurate polls. There seems to be no link to the actual research, nor a description of its methodology.
Next I have a few observations. The first is the almost resounding silence about this story. There are a few blog reactions, but very few of the MSM seem to have picked this one up at all. It’s possible that they’re as uncertain as I am about the survey – though such unclarity has never stopped them before. More likely, I suspect, is that they simply don’t feel this is news. And I have to confess, I doubt it feels like news overall to many of us who go into school, or talk to young people in a variety of contexts.
One place I was surprised, I think, was in the finding that 60% “only go to church for a wedding or a christening”. This is where I would like to see the hard data, because unless an awful lot are going to funerals regularly, that means (as stated) that deducting the 16% who have never been to church, roughly a quarter of 13-18 year olds are going to church for different reasons. That seems quite high. And in all of these questions, does “church” include or exclude “mosque”, “synagogue” etc?
One of the quotations from the author of the publicised book, Killing God, likewise surprised me:
I can’t say I am surprised by the teenagers’ responses. Part of the reason that I wrote Killing God was that I wanted to explore the personal attitudes of young people today, especially those with troubled lives, towards organised religion and the traditional concept of God. How can the moralities of an ancient religion relate to the tragedies and disorders of today’s broken world? And why do some people turn to God for help while others take comfort in drugs and alcohol?
Now if the choice is indeed between turning to God for help or taking comfort in drugs and alcohol, then you’d have to be a pretty uncultured mega-despiser of religion to think it was the worse of the choices available. In fact life, and the survey, seem rather more complicated than that.
The Church Mouse sees this as evidence of a demographic time-bomb. I don’t doubt that there are some serious demographic issues which need to be grappled with, but I’d like to see the data for the same questions asked of a fairly wide range of age groups. I’m not sure that these young people’s views aren’t reflected across a rather wider age-range than the specified 13-18 demographic. I think there’s a much wider range of the population who have long since become disconnected from any sense of belonging to a broad stream of Christian believing.
That leads to what seems a completely different topic. Another post I noted in yesterday’s round-up was Halden’s attack on all those who try to put the blame for everything on “modernity” as though the history of Christianity and where we are now were not completely bound up with each other. We got here together, and in one sense, it’s no-one’s fault. The processes of intellectual change, technological growth and globalisation through a world media have always found bane and blessing in bed together. There is no one moment of fall, however powerful that myth. Nor is everything (despite the Daily Wail) always getting worse.
Just as, some 500 years ago, most people were Christian by cultural osmosis rather than conscious decision, so in today’s climate, the same process of cultural osmosis is far more responsible than any rational thinking. On this point the apologists and the atheists are alike deluded. Young people may provide a better diagnostic of what we instinctively absorb in our culture, but that doesn’t mean they’re any more or less thoughtful than any previous generation about it.
I would suggest that this means three strategic goals for the Church to ponder and work at. The first is building counter-cultural communities, which is slightly different from what is normally talked about as being “counter-cultural”. The latter nearly always seems to mean telling the rest of society they’ve got it wrong. In a society in which it is very easy to be individual, heterogenous and networked, being intergenerational groups of mixed interests and incomes meeting face to face may be a very necessary way of embodying the gospel.
The second route is to nurture and cherish new and creative thinkers who are able to communicate what they think with clarity, promote it with honesty, and defend it with rigour. The intellectual world is more anti-religion than the general populace, but nowhere near as much so as the publicity hungry of both sides would have us believe. The long-term future of Christian faith depends on recolonizing the intellectual hinterland of our culture, not simply responding to the presenting needs of the now.
(I do not wish, in any sense, to decry the work of personal evangelism, but most people will always be carried along on cultural streams. The reconversion of a culture won’t be done without individuals, but it is a rather larger task, in which we need to lay aside a Protestant existentialism that sneers at the herd instinct, and demands individual authenticity as a conscious intellectual process.)
Hence, the third route I propose is to encourage, pray for and work with the creative people who can tell those stories, make those programmes, present those startling images which help shape culture. If the recolonization of the intellectual hinterland is one task, so too we need people who in the short term will help us carry out raids on the inarticulate. They need to help us discover and represent those icons that set the imagination on fire for truth, beauty and goodness, and the ways that people image God.
Hmm … more than enough to keep us busy. Then again if it took us 500 years to get from a culture where doing God was natural to one where its a little bit weird, we shouldn’t be surprised if it will take us some time.
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