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The Tikvah Podcast

Daniel Cox on Millennials, Religion, and the Family

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6620 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2020

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

That the young are less religious than the old is not news. But the alienation of today’s millennials from religious faith may indeed be something new, and far more permanent than many have thought.

That’s one of the ominous implications of a new report published by the American Enterprise Institute, titled, “The Decline of Religion in American Family Life.” The report found that young people often leave faith at an early age and that the proportion of young people involved in regular religious activities and being raised in religious homes is declining.

In this week’s podcast, Jonathan Silver, the incoming editor of Mosaic and the host of the Tikvah Podcast, sits down with one of the report’s co-authors, Daniel Cox, for a discussion of millennials, religion, and family life. Though Cox’s work, and this conversation, do not focus on Jews in particular, his findings about the state of Christianity in the U.S. have deep implications for American Jewry and American Jewish flourishing.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

This podcast was recorded in front of a live audience of Tikvah alumni and Society members in Washington, DC. If you want to learn more about joining the Tikvah Society, click here.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Last month, Daniel Cox, a scholar from the American Enterprise Institute, published a report,

0:15.0

analyzing recent survey data that looks at the role of the family in the religious formation

0:19.4

and the religious identity of Americans.

0:22.5

That the young are less religious than the old is not new, and the report certainly found that

0:26.3

to be the case. But it also suggests that unlike previous generations of Americans who got

0:31.3

more religious as they got older, the detachment of millennials from religious life could be a

0:36.2

great deal more permanent. Here are a couple of outstanding points from the AEI report, the decline of religion in American family life.

0:43.3

First, it's not only that the young are less religious than previous generations, there is an accumulative effect at play.

0:51.3

The rising generation of religiously unaffiliated Americans was raised in less

0:55.8

religious homes than their parents were. They were less likely than previous generations to attend

1:00.9

religious services, sanctify the ordinary activity of their daily lives through prayer or blessings,

1:07.1

or attend institutions of religious learning, like a Sunday school or a Hebrew school, to say nothing of day schools.

1:13.9

Second, we tend to think that religious students go to college and get lured away from the faith of their fathers

1:19.0

by some combination of sophisticated new friends, ideologically secular faculty members, and the hedonistic campus.

1:26.2

But the report finds that that is not the case.

1:29.2

70% of people now in their 20s who are not affiliated report that they had already left their

1:34.8

religious identity behind by the time they were 18 years old, that is, before college. And as

1:40.8

Daniel Cox points out, that means that someone who is today 30 years old and religiously

1:45.9

unaffiliated has probably been that way for more than a decade.

1:50.3

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

1:54.1

Today we take a preliminary look at the state of religion among American millennials.

1:59.1

But before we start, let me say that while, of course, at Tikva,

...

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