After finally watching “Jesus Camp” this week, I’d been feeling a little depressed about the ability of America’s younger generations to resist the ego-stroking glitz of evangelical Christianity. Never before have humans been so good at soaking guilt and repression in the syrupy goodness of Vanilla Ice-style pop and the joy of breaking stuff; how could any kid be expected to turn his or her nose up at it?
To combat their message, I’d been working up my own atheist rap-metal single called “Abortin’ Your Soul” with my band, The Self-Loathing Pastors. Thanks to Sara Robinson at Orcinus, though, I can shelve my secular stylings. She discovered a study done by the Barna Group, an Evangelical polling and research firm, that shows younger generations turning away from Christianity in droves.
The Barna chart says it all:
Perhaps as importantly, Sara notes that the folks who aren’t identifying as Christians have grown fed up with fundie baloney:
Ten years ago, “the vast majority” of non-Christians had generally favorable views of Christianity. Now, that number stands at just 16%. When asked specifically about Evangelicals, the number are even worse: only 3% of non-Christian Millennials have positive associations with Evangelicals. Among the Boomers, it’s eight times higher.
When Kinnaman asked senior pastors if they were seeing this too, half of them told him that, yes, they are finding their work to be an uphill battle — “because people are increasingly hostile and negative toward Christianity.” And his research bore this out. When he ranked young non-Christians’ most common perceptions of Christianity, nine of the 12 most common attributes they named were negative ones. According to the study, “Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%).”
I have to disagree with old fashioned, though. This is wicked fresh: