May 26, 2015
On May 12, the Pew Research Institute revealed the results of its latest survey. “The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the share of Americans who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. These changes affect all regions in the country and many demographic groups.” What you just read is a flat statement of fact. For example, the number of Catholics declined from 23.9 percent to 20.8 percent between 2007 and 2014. That’s a lot of folks. The number of people who are what demographers often call ‘nones’ is 29.9 percent when you include agnostics and atheists in that group. This is a stark increase from 2007, when 16 percent of Americans were “nones.”
Probably the more troubling aspect of the numbers is that young people (millennials) are the largest number among that group. The median age of the millennial group is 36 and the median age for all Americans is 46. I wish I had a quick, down and dirty explanation as to why young people do not believe it is important to have a religion, but I do not. Is it caused by the lack of good training in the faith? I doubt that. Is it that their parents and grandparents were not as caring as our parents were when it came to faith? I do not believe that. So, what is the cause? If I had the answer to that one, we could quickly turn the somewhat difficult numbers around.
When I was a young person, a parish was important. It was where you met people who very much like my parents wanted to raise their kids in the Catholic faith to be good, God fearing adults. Being a server was important. If you had a voice, you used it in the choir. Church was a place where you met your neighbors who believed the same way (for the most part) as you did.
That isn’t true today. But what remains true is that God is calling us to spread the Gospel today just as much as we did yesterday. Jesus did not say, “Hunker down and preserve the faith.” He said instead, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you.”
Those who no longer or never have committed themselves to follow Jesus need to know that the Church represents not just one moral issue that they have perhaps seized upon as what keeps them away from Church, but as Father Ronald Rolheiser says in Sacred Fire, it is “… a whole way of living that radiates more charity than selfishness, more joy than bitterness, more peace than factionalism, more respect than negative judgment, more empathy than anger, and more willingness to sweat the blood of sacrifice than to give in to the way of our natural emotions.”
Father Rolheiser issues a large challenge there. But it is no greater challenge than that laid down by Jesus when he sent each of his disciples to go into the world and create other disciples who would bring Jesus’ message of concern and love to the whole world.