Welcome to Commune, where each week we explore the ideas and practices that bring us together

and help us live healthy and purpose-filled lives. Today, one in four

Americans are religiously unaffiliated, making the unaffiliated the largest religious group in the

country, a trend that has been driven in large part by millennials. In 1986, for example, only 10% of young adults claimed no religious affiliation. Today, nearly

40% of young adults are religiously unaffiliated, a huge generational change. Clearly, they

differ significantly from their elders, but how has the millennial experience changed the ways

in which young people are gathering?

Just because they're plugged in doesn't mean they're necessarily connected.

There's a recent study that identified Americans' motivation for leaving their childhood religion.

The top answers were, number one, they stopped believing in their religion's teachings,

number two, their family was never that religious when they were growing up,

and number three, their experience of how religious institutions treat gay and lesbian people.

That could also explain why nearly half of LGBT Americans are religiously unaffiliated.

In that regard, we wondered if the polarization of

politics might factor in, too. So, out of curiosity, we compared the blue state of California

to the red state of Texas, and in both states, millennials make up about 25% of the overall population.

Turns out, in California, the percent of all religiously

unaffiliated adults is 27. And in Texas, as you might expect, a smaller number, 18% of adults

are religiously unaffiliated. Pretty big differences between the states. But then, we zoomed

into just the millennial populations of California and Texas and found that

37% of millennials identified as unaffiliated in California. And in Texas, that number jumped to a

comparable 34%. It certainly seems as though the vast majority of American millennials are

...