Why Did These Millennials Leave Church?

Here is a lengthy comment by a reader named Tony, from the “Donald Trump Is Not The Messiah” thread. It was so long and interesting I wanted to give it its own page. Tony begins by quoting something from reader Jonah R. (in italics):

“The biggest Trump supporters I know, including my own extended family, are nominal patriarchs of families where middle-ages kids are shacked unmarried with their latest boyfriend or girlfriend. Their grandchildren, glued to social media on their smartphones, know nothing about Christianity and have rarely if ever set foot in a church. MAGA Grandpas rarely attend church themselves. Despite having a solid work ethic and many other admirable qualities, they’ve failed to preserve and pass along their faith and their culture within their own families, and they want to blame “the left” for what their kids and grandkids have become.”

This struck a nerve with me, particularly the part about ‘the left’ being blamed for what ‘their kids and grandkids have become.’ I’m of the age to be considered one of ‘the kids’ in question here, even though my own family, while Southern and somewhat conservative, are not diehard Trump people. (The ones who are endorse Trump for reasons that are less cultural than political. I don’t agree, and they know that, but we’re all able to still drink beer and love each other during the holidays, and for that I’m grateful.)

I’m an elder Millennial. I come from a conservative Catholic community in south Louisiana. I went to Catholic schools from kindergarten all the way to 12th grade. I got involved in campus ministry at my high school, and even stuck with it well into college. I knew the history of the Church, I knew all about the pre and post-Vatican II controversies, I knew all about the faults and shortcomings of modern American culture, and I even thought about being a priest for a little while. Maybe even more strangely for someone at those ages, I loved to pray. I spent a lot of time alone, trying to know God. I spent a lot of time with others, trying to know God. I made a lot of friends throughout that time, friends who are still in my life, and who I hope are in my life forever.

I ended up leaving Christianity. (I’ve been trying to piece something of a faith back together for the past couple of years, but that’s another story.) I know of at least one other person in my group who did, too, and I know of more who dropped out of being ‘involved’ in their faith at all, whether or not ‘faith’ remained something vital in their lives. And in the past few years I’ve met not a few people in my age group who also grew up in very religious communities (families went to church often, kids were involved in Bible studies/retreats, etc.) who now, in their 30’s, want absolutely nothing to do with religion in any form, much less Christianity.

We’ve shared our stories with each other. There are themes. And I think they speak to what this commenter said about the faith not being ‘passed on’ to people in my generation and in subsequent generations, because what was ‘passed on’ to us was not, from my current vantage point, ‘faith’ at all. Often it was things that were much, much worse.

Some of this might be a little graphic, so I’ll warn you ahead of time right now.

First, the Bible studies. Everyone I know who grew up in religious communities at the same time I did, be they Catholic or Protestant/Evangelical, east coast or west coast, south Louisiana or South Carolina, has a Bible study story. Often several. And it’s always the same story.

Bible studies, frankly, weren’t Bible studies. They were Masturbators Anonymous meetings. Even if you attended a meeting with the intent of learning about the Word, or understanding your religion in a deeper way, or even just hearing how other people related to Christ in their own lives, nine times out of ten you weren’t going to get that. It would start there, and then the leader, often a parent or someone your parents’ age, would inevitably guide the meeting to a discussion about masturbating.

The merits of traditional Christian sexual morality are beside the point here. Imagine, instead, that you are a teenager, likely even below the age of 18, and your youth minister is pushing you to tell a group of your peers, in a ‘Bible study,’ how many times a week you’re masturbating, and what you plan to do to let Jesus help you overcome this struggle. Worse still, imagine that you are that same teenager in a ‘Bible study,’ and your youth minister (who, again, is much older than you) is confessing to you about how often they masturbate and/or watch porn, and about how it’s threatening their marriage, and all the while they’re wailing and gnashing their teeth in front of you begging God to help them overcome this struggle. (Again, this is not an adult sharing this with another group of adults. This is an adult sharing this with children. Furthermore, nothing–not the sacraments, not the relationship with Christ, not the growth in discipleship or how to pray–will ever, ever get as much air time as this particular topic will, at the behest of the adult leader. Who, as a kid, you are trusting implicitly.)

Yeah. It’s weird. And in my experience and in the experience of people I came up with, that kind of thing was normative. What was the hot topic at Bible studies? Masturbating. Men’s meetings? Masturbating. Women’s meetings? Masturbating. Retreats? Masturbating. And it was never the kids who wanted to talk about it. It was the adults.

This kind of thing sets up a weird dynamic for a young person. And it does something to you, even if you don’t know it’s happening, even if you’re bought in 100%. Or even if you’re not bought in 100%, and all this masturbation talk weirds you out a little, but you can push that aside because you’re really here to try to bring Jesus to other people inasmuch as you understand what that sort of thing actually means when you’re a young person. (That was me near the end.)

Second, emotional manipulation of young people was rampant in these sorts of settings and communities. Say, for example, you’re a chronically depressed 16 year-old. You’ve thought about suicide several times, and one time you even came close to attempting it. But you don’t know who to turn to with this information, you don’t think anyone will understand, and you don’t even know what to do, but dammit, you need to tell someone. Who’s the one person in your life who, at least in your mind, represents unconditional love and acceptance? Who really ‘gets’ you, but could also probably help you? More significantly, who’s the person in your life and in this community who has actually gone out of their way to present themselves as this unconditionally loving, competent, empathetic person?

Your youth minister, of course.

So you tell your youth minister. And he listens. And he tells you that he can help you, but not only that, Jesus can help you, and not only that, you can help others by ‘being brave’ and sharing this with others in the open. At a retreat. And you can tell your peers about how Jesus saved you from this dark time in your life. Wouldn’t that be great? Imagine what you sharing this with your peers would do in terms of bringing them to Jesus. (Again: this is not an adult and an adult. This is an adult and a child, a child who is looking to this adult for real help with a really distressing, dangerous situation in their lives.)

Yeah. It’s weird. And dark. (It’s also the sort of thing that cults do to obtain new membership and solidify current membership. You can look that up if you don’t believe me.) I happen to know someone who witnessed that exact thing. I have a similar story, though mine is not nearly as egregious as that example, and I have heard other stories that were every bit as bad as that one. Again, this sort of thing does something to you when you’re that age, whether you’re aware of it or not.

The third thing that comes up often is fear. The people in my life, myself included, who came up in these sorts of environments or were involved in these sorts of environments will often say that the main dynamic in them was fear. The stories here are varied: your parents wouldn’t let you watch Disney movies when you were growing up because they were secretly Satanic. (Ditto any kind of music that wasn’t explicitly ‘Christian,’ of course.) You had to be homeschooled (poorly, in this example–I’m not at all against homeschooling per se) because public schools were ‘a den of demons’ (I know someone whose father actually still believe this. Nevermind that Christians are capable of existing in public schools, too.) Sexual contact of any kind before marriage is sinful in a way that other sins are not sinful, so you better guard your ‘purity’ in a way that you don’t guard anything else. (‘Purity culture’ in particular was very influential when I was growing up, and I know people for whom this obsessive focus on sexual sin resulted in an anxiety around having sex even with their spouses once they were married. I shouldn’t have to explain why I don’t believe that scaring the living daylights out of people when it comes to sex to such a degree that they are dysfunctional when they are trying to have healthy sexual relationships with their spouses has anything to do with the mission of Jesus in this world, though obviously others disagreed.)

I could go on. The way the religious life was framed as non-stop ‘struggle’ or ‘battle.’ (Wild at Heart was big at the time.) The way you were encouraged–sometimes explicitly–to not associate with people who were not ‘in it’ like you were. The way people who ultimately did leave the faith–whatever faith–were pitied, or ostracized, or shamed. What any of that, or any of the rest of it, had to do with with the kind of life offered by Jesus is something about which I currently have strong opinions, but only because Jesus is someone I still care very much about, even if I’m not entirely certain what that might mean.

But most people in my age group with whom I’ve had these conversations over the years just don’t care. At all. I said before that all of that weird stuff does something to you, even if you don’t realize it. What it does is create something like a trauma response in adulthood: exposure to anything that reminds you of those particular settings and situations triggers emotions that are unpleasant, even aversive. Simply put, exposure to anything religious grosses you out. You may not know why. And then you start talking to other people, and you realize that you’re all grossed out because of similar experiences you all had at the hands of the adults who were entrusted with passing on the faith to you. Had you been given Jesus and the freedom of a way of living in the knowledge that God loves you unconditionally, and of the responsibility you subsequently have to love others unconditionally, and how sin and grace and all of that orbit around that center of gravity, you’d probably feel differently. But chances are you weren’t given that. What you were given instead were sermons about how Satan is hiding in children’s movies, and how your mental health issues could be leveraged to bring more people into the Jesus Club, and the fact that adults seem really, really, really fixated on talking about jerking off.

I’m not dumb enough to believe that everything I’ve said here is the only reason why Christianity is declining in America, much less the West. I’m not dumb enough to believe that this is even the only reason why people my age (and younger) want nothing to do with religion, or even that my experience here is necessarily representative of the broad experience of church camp kids who are now Millennials. These are, admittedly, just anecdotes, and anecdotes are not data. But they are anecdotes experienced by me and others over nearly a decade and in numerous places and regions nationwide. And at some point, that points to something.

So, yeah. It’s easy for Trump-supporting Christians (and maybe even Christians who don’t support Trump) to point at their Millennial and middle-aged kids who are shacking up with their significant others (or whatever other horrible sins they’re indulging in) and bemoan the lack of religion or morals in public life. It’s easy to blame ‘the libs’ or ‘the left’ for it, or whatever boogeyman happens to be convenient. What’s not convenient is facing the fact that a lot of people in my generation think about Christianity and are not just apathetic, but angry and outright grossed out, and a lot of it stems from the sick behavior of the people we were trusting to give us something that was more real than the rest of the world.