So I presented my work as a blogger to a group of high school seniors interested in politics yesterday, and a bunch of them told me yesterday that they don't use email anymore. The exact quote was, "Email is for old people, I just Facebook or text everyone I know". This is fairly common among people under the age of 24, who see different tools as representing different generations much as older generations thought that rock and roll was a cultural differentiator.
Bloggers and activists David All, Karl Frisch, Jon Henke, and John Aravosis were on the panel, and it was interesting that part of the conversation centered on how the Republicans are obviously going to give way on gay marriage. The younger Republicans were obviously angry that their party didn't accept gay people.
In profound ways, we're quite foreign to this younger generation. Not to be all 'these damned kidz' about it, but I tried to explain that when I grew up it was very hard to talk to friends except over a landline. And it just seemed like they didn't quite believe me, or rather, that was completely alien to their understanding of the world.
So let's have a generational discussion. I first encountered the internet when I was 17, and really started using it when I was 18. That was in 1995, but I had been on BBS systems in the 1980s and my friends had AOL and Compuserve accounts in the early 1990s.
You? And if you haven't created an account at OpenLeft, now's a good time to sign up and chime in.
The introduction to 1968: The Year That Rocked The World, by Mark Kurlansky, contains the following passage describing the breadth of the cultural chasm between Boomers and their parents (page xix, emphasis mine):
Those born in the aftermath of World War II, when "Holocaust," was a new word and the atom bomb had just been exploded, were born into a world that had little in common with everything before. The generation that grew up after World War II was so completely different from the World War II generation and the ones before it that the struggle for common ground was constant. They didn't even laugh at the same jokes. Comedians popular with the World War II generation such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny were not remotely funny to the new generation.
Yesterday, I gave that book to my father for Christmas. Also yesterday, I attended church, something that I do only once a year when I am home for Christmas with my parents. As I sat in church, I thought of that passage, mainly because of the dearth of people my age who were in attendance. I also thought of the studies showing that a rapidly increasing number of Americans do not self-identify as Christian, and the studies showing that those Americans are predominately grouped within Generations X and Y (born 1965-1994). According to a 2005 study by Greenberg Research, only 62-63%% of Americans under the age of 40 self-identified as Christian, compared to over 80% of previous American generations. Further, fewer than 50% of the younger generations now self-identify as either Protestant or Roman Catholic. If not laughing at the same comedians represents a large cultural gap, what about not worshipping the same way? Surely, that constitutes a major cultural shift worthy of extended discussion nationwide.
The religious shift in America away from Christian self-identification strikes me as a demographic shift of at least equal importance to the growing income inequality gap, the rise of the creative class, and even to large the influx of Latino and Asian immigrants around the country. As a major ideological apparatus, religion impacts one's outlook on life in many ways, including voting habits. If Christianity is being abandoned by younger generations in large amounts, surely that seems worthy of a national news story. However, apart from an academic paper at the University of Chicago, and a bunch of conservative whining about the secularization of America, there is very little information about the increasing number of Americans who do not self-identify as Christian. Considering the large amount of text I have produced on this subject over the past three years, I feel like I am either typing into the void on this one, or entirely off base on the demographic data.
I have to admit, I just don't get why few other seem to be talking about this one. Demographically speaking, this is a generational gap at least equal to anything that separated the Boomers from their parents. On a national level, it is reshaping America much more rapidly than immigration. However, instead of even so much as a peep about this in national news outlets, over the last few years places like CNN have hired "faith and values correspondents." Maybe news outlets are too cowed by the Republican Noise Machine to report on this trend, or perhaps seeing their children attend church once a year has too easily placated editors and producers. Whatever the cause, no one is telling this story. The rise of non-Christians in America is truly a silent revolution.
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