Religion fading in the eyes of Gen Y: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDOct 5 2010

A new study by the Church of England including people born after 1982 shows that religion in its traditional form is largely irrelevant to the young Briton. Results show that less than one in five young people believes in a God “who created the world and hears my prayers”. Most adolescents were more likely to believe in the “nicer” parts of religious doctrine than the devil and punishment.

The results appear in a new book, The Faith of Generation Y, whose authors include Sylvia Collins-Mayo, a sociologist, and Christopher Cocksworth, the Bishop of Coventry.

According to authors, “It is undoubtedly the case that the Christian memory is very faint and in many respects Generation Y are a largely unstoried and memoryless generation.” Over 300 young people were interviewed for the study.

Dr Collins-Mayo said that many youngsters today were not looking for answers to “ultimate questions”. “For the majority, religion and spirituality was irrelevant for day-to-day living,” she said. Also for most, religious observance stretched as far as praying in their bedrooms during moments of crisis on a “need-to-believe basis”.

Authors found that for most teenagers today the definitions have changed with a “secular trinity of family, friends and the reflexive self” that gives them an “immanent faith” based on relationships in this world.

The 2001 census found that 62 per cent of young Britons still call themselves Christian, although in a more recent survey only 27 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds felt they belonged to a Christian denomination. Only two-fifths of children are being baptised into the faith as “fewer and fewer young people are being brought up in households with religiously inclined parents”. There was however no hostility towards religion as such among the age group, the study found.

The authors feel, “Generation Y have fewer cultural hang ups about the Church than did their predecessors. The challenge for the Church is to provide them with the opportunities to explore and to learn about belief of which they know little.”