It’s no news that twentysomethings are the least religious generation of all time.
According to a study from Pew Research Center earlier this year, 35 percent of millennials identify as no religion—a far higher percentage than those who identify as evangelical Christians (21 percent). It’s also double the number of unaffiliated Baby Boomers (17 percent).
But despite these numbers, it appears millennials who are Christians may actually claim a deeper, more rooted faith than Christians of previous generations.
David Kinnaman, who is the president of faith-based research organization the Barna Group, says we’re seeing in this generation a “countertrend.” He says the trend toward “noneness” is being “counterbalanced by a different one of younger Christians being as or more committed to the Bible, Christian practice and even theology,” than the Christians before them. From a merely statistical perspective, “The light of millennial Christians is shining actually brighter than that of Boomer or Gen X Christians,” Kinnaman says.
He says there is “real evidence that those who are staying connected in churches and connected into their faith are taking matters of faith even more seriously than do previous generations of Christians.”
Millennial Christians, he says, seem to have “a more holistic understanding that theology matters, that Scripture matters, that worship should be taken seriously, that being a Christian is a whole-life commitment, rather than something you just do
on Sundays.”
