The hint is “describe themselves as Christian” as the Christian population shrinks due to more people not calling themselves Christian at all, the true believers become a bigger share of the remaining Christian pop, which leads to an illusionary increase in regular churchgoing
It’s really important to understand this distinction, or else folks will draw the wrong conclusions (and reading through the comments, it seems like many are).
Young people are not becoming “more religious” or more Christian. Young people are still leaving Christianity in droves and each generational cohort is less religious than the previous one. On top of that, the whole thing about young people leaving the church but then coming back after getting older isn’t really holding either.
This data takes one subset - people who identify as Christian - and trying to gauge how more or less devout they have become. Frankly, when I was a Christian I wouldn’t have considered going to church once a month all that devout anyway. But I think it is showing that young people who were already “in the tent” and crucially remain in the tent while tons of other young people are leaving it are by one measure becoming more devout.
The idea that all Gen Z and Alpha are becoming a bunch of TradCath Crusader LARPers is a total myth that feels real when you are way too online.
It doesn’t measure a question of “do you identify as Christian”. It assumes that about someone who goes to church once a month for the purposes of the title. They asked everyone a multiple-choice question of how often they went to a regular church service.
The population sampled in the poll is the general population of the UK.
Especially because these younger groups are less likely to self describe as christian. Whereas in the older groups, its normal to still consider yourself christian even if you haven’t been to church since Easter 1999
Yeah it’s unclear. Not that it couldn’t be real, but there’s no source and the phrasing is weird.
I read it as being percentages of the whole population of each age category, not just of christians themselves, but your comment made me second guess for a minute
Your first reading was more reasonable if you look closely at the wording.
That doesn’t make sense. Yes, a higher proportion of the Christian population are zealots, but fewer people calling themselves Christian definitionally means a lower percentage.
this graph is the share of “christians” attending church. if the “culturally christian” or nominals stop IDing as christian then they aren’t on that graph anymore so the portion of regular church-goers increases.
You’re misreading it. The base is even stated in the bottom corner, it’s the “whole population”. The percentage is people who meet both criteria, i.e. being self-identified Christians and going to church monthly, which is also what the phrasing at the top suggests. Atheists, Jews, and Buddhists are on the graph in the same grouping as Christians who don’t attend church at least once a month (and anyone who attends a “church” regularly but isn’t Christian, not that there are many of those). The percentage is people who meet the two conditions and everyone else is the remainder. A constant zealot population would only be a larger percentage in terms of the number shown on the graph if the overall “whole population” shrank by more than the zealot population, not if nominal Christians go to church less (which shrinks the percentage shown).
@CyborgMarx@hexbear.net so I’m not copy/pasting my response.
I think you might be right, but it’s hard to say for sure without access to the survey itself.
wack.
For the poll to be coherent they have to take into account the shifting demographics of the overall Christian population since 2018, if you have a group of 100 Christians with 30% being zealots in 2018 and by 2024 ten became ex Christian and 30 zealots became 40 zealots
Then you can torture the poll to give you the above results by simply not taking into account the fact the overall population has shrunk while churchgoing among the remaining population has gone up in percentage, despite the fact it’s gone down in absolute numbers
Wrong. It’s because Hozier got popular again recently for some reason.
I mean, if we’re talking about that kinda church…
IDK if this chart is even correct, but what other third places are left where you don’t have to spend a ton of money?
Exactly yes
Religion is the opiate of the masses, and life is pretty painful for a lot of people right now.
…but more likely it’s a sampling bias of some kind.
Religion is the opiate of the masses
People are miserable.
ah yes I’m sure this poll got responses from a very representative group of 18-45yo people
Loneliness, if I had to guess
This is a major reason in my case. I don’t identify as Christian anymore but I attend a church anyway because I’ve been having a really hard time making friends locally. The face-to-face conversation that I had with the church secretary several days ago was among the most meaningful ones that I have had in years.
The few occasions when I have tried to befriend the locals in my neighborhoods have mostly been, to put it briefly and mildly, traumatizing.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. Opiates are medicine for people who are hurting. There are lots of people hurting right now.
Is this just self reporting?
Because it could be that people who describe themselves as Christians have become more likely to lie about going regularly to church.
Social media pushing people to adopt disingenuous positions in order to make the haters upset + people confusing that with an actual belief system and seeking out similar people in the last public gathering place that isn’t a Walmart. Reddit atheism died and was replaced with algorithms that prefer trad lifestyle influencers.
Or religion is the fentanyl of the masses.
Yeah I know a terminally online elderly man who simultaneously believes a bunch of heinous racist shit about everyone who isn’t German like he is, LOVES the Orthodox Church, but also won’t go to one because he can’t coexist with Serbs. People are picking up weird shit from their online spaces.
-Meaning. As crises compound and the world gets more confusing people turn to a place that offers them stability, identity and meaning. “Religion is the opium of the people” and all that.
-Political shift. Back in the day the cool edgy conservatism was libertarianism. This was pretty closely linked to the new atheism, and the religious right was considered pretty uncool by most. Now it seems the religious right has become the cool edgy conservatism, so this might explain some of the rise of young people.
-As people are saying, the chart is regular churchgoing by people who consider themselves Christian. Sort of unknown if churchgoing is the increasing across the population. I’d guess that it is, but we can’t be sure.
Sort of unknown if churchgoing is the increasing across the population. I’d guess that it is, but we can’t be sure.
Second table in that link specifically addresses that question.
That is US polling; the OP is based on UK polling.
This makes me pretty skeptical of the graph OP shared.
the chart is percentage ov total population, so I think it practically indicates increase in churchgoing of the general population.
The “correct” answer is that the current right-wing hellscape believes welfare should only exist via the church and not the government.
Church attendance is directly correlated with poverty (and most direclty, hunger) statistics.
That accounts for the dip, younger and older people are usually the most destitute.
This is a UK poll, but the poverty statistic effect checks out.
I’ve got some protestant, British, in-laws so I genuinely figured it would work for either location.
All pretenses were dropped.
“We are the church, we’re basically an easy-to-access neo-nazi chapter. You get to smugly declare your superiority over conformists and advocate for the genocide of everyone isn’t a white man like you” ain’t exactly a hard sell for white men.
We need the reddit atheists back. Someone like the old anti-SJW rantsonas (but left-wing) in the early 2010s is sorely needed.
The Quiet Revival shows that men (13 per cent) are more likely to attend church than women (10 per cent). And as well church decline being reversed, the Church is also becoming more ethnically diverse, with one in five people (19 per cent) coming from an ethnic minority. Close to half of young Black people aged 18–34 (47 per cent) are now attending church at least monthly, according to The Quiet Revival.
Dummies recognizing the world is fucked so they are trying to curry favor with the sky daddy instead of doing something tangible.
It’s like that episode of American Dad when the rapture happens
Never watched, but I assume it’s a bunch of heathens finding god in the face of adversity. Which isn’t very satirical when you think about it lol, it’s exactly what the rubes do.
Social media is highly alienating and people feel lonely, this is one of the few places where you can attempt to join a community.
Personally love being queer and having a way to partake in community without needing to deal with religious nutjobs
Worsening material conditions has people looking for ways to cope.
