{"id":5463,"date":"2015-06-08T08:21:55","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T13:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5463"},"modified":"2015-06-06T19:31:50","modified_gmt":"2015-06-07T00:31:50","slug":"those-godless-millenials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=5463","title":{"rendered":"Those Godless Millennials"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a new study of the Millenial generation on the PLOS<\/a> web site which says that Millenials are significantly less religious (much less likely to participate in religious services or identify themselves with a major religious tradition) than Baby Boomers and Generation X’ers did when they were the same young age. Well, I guess that’s not a big surprise. Millenials were mostly raised by Baby Boomers, whose parenting style avoided confrontation and directives and tried to emphasize reasoning in the young mind (i.e., the mind that’s not yet fully set up for reasoning). My parents basically told me at some point (maybe around age 7) that I was going to church on Sunday and that was that, no further discussion. I really didn’t want to go to church, there were plenty of other fun things to do with a Sunday morning. <\/p>\n

If my parents had tried to reason with me at age 8 about how going to church would make me a better person, I would have reasoned right back at them that the weekend was short, and come Monday morning I’d be back spending the week doing things that I don’t want to do (namely, going to school). Eating up even more of one’s precious play time just to watch a bunch of adults pray and sing would not seem reasonable to a 7 or 9 year old. I suspect that many Baby Boomer parents just accepted this and moved on to other more immediate issues (such as putting clothes away or taking out the garbage or putting away the smartphone at the dinner table). <\/p>\n

So now we have a young generation for which church and its moral teachings are unfamiliar. Of course, many Baby Boomers and Generation X people gave up on regular church attendance in their adult years, but they still largely retained an interest in prayer and “spirituality”. The new study indicates that the Millenials aren’t latching onto “do it yourself” spirituality<\/a> either. They also have significantly lower levels of belief in God<\/a> compared with past generations, although 68% of them still hold such a belief. <\/p>\n

Some people speculate that technology has filled the gaps left by the absence of spiritual and religious participation. First off, social networking web sites (yes, of course Facebook, but several others including Twitter) provide the community feeling<\/a> that church-attendance once conveyed to old fogies like myself. Second, there seem to be more hero-against-tragedy fantasy movies out these days, especially the “superhero” films (e.g. Spiderman, Iron Man, Batman, X Men, etc.). They are indeed popular with Millenials<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Given how easy it is now to watch a movie where ever you are and whenever you want, Millenials can participate in the hero\/savior mythology whenever they like. Unlike the old days when you had an infinite God out there who was way beyond whatever you amounted to, the movie superheros aren’t really all that different from any young person. So it’s not hard to picture yourself as the super-hero getting all the attention and accolades. And perhaps that contributes to the elevated levels of narcissism<\/a> that Millennials seem to exhibit. <\/p>\n

Well, I suppose that every distinctive generation of youth are criticized by their elders. I’m old enough to remember when Boomers were the “Hippy Generation”, and almost everyone over 40 thought the world would go to hell in a handbasket once they [we] took over. (And actually, that’s not entirely inaccurate, although not in the dramatic way that Baby Boomer parents had predicted.) Maybe the Millenials will be all right once they get older and take the controls (and start bringing up the post-Millenial generation, whatever that will be like!). But to the degree that Millenials are a mess, let’s not forget who brought them up . . . yes indeed, talking ’bout my [wonderful Baby Boomer] generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a new study of the Millenial generation on the PLOS web site which says that Millenials are significantly less religious (much less likely to participate in religious services or identify themselves with a major religious tradition) than Baby Boomers and Generation X’ers did when they were the same young age. Well, I guess that’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5463"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5466,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463\/revisions\/5466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}