Millennials

A 2025 report from the American Bible Society suggests that Bible use is rising—especially among young adults who, until recently, were among the least likely to open a Bible at all.

According to State of the Bible: USA 2025, the percentage of U.S. adults who read the Bible outside of church at least three times a year increased from 38% to 41% in the last year. That’s roughly 10 million more adults engaging with Scripture—marking the first increase in Bible use since 2021.

The sharpest rise appears among millennials, where reported Bible use jumped by 29% in a single year. Gen Z also showed noticeable movement. It’s a striking turnaround, especially considering that both groups have typically lagged behind older generations in religious activity. But the numbers may not be as clear-cut as they seem.

The study also found that Scripture engagement—a metric that factors in not just Bible reading, but how much Scripture influences someone’s choices, relationships, and worldview—rose from 11% to 15% among Gen Z, and from 12% to 17% among millennials.

The study defines Scripture engagement broadly, factoring in a range of self-reported behaviors and attitudes. It also relies on a survey sample of just 2,656 adults—a relatively small group to draw sweeping generational conclusions from, especially when measuring a spike as large as 29%.

Still, even if the numbers are more hopeful than definitive, they point to a growing spiritual curiosity among younger Americans. You can read the full report here.

A Wall Street Journal article begins with this story about the increased debt load many Americans are carrying:

Danielle Smith and her family thought they had finally escaped the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle they had fallen into. They saved money during the pandemic while they were stuck at home. They used stimulus checks to chip away at $20,000 in credit card debt and enjoyed a reprieve from monthly payments on their $160,000 in student loans.

Lately, they have been hit with one unexpected expense after another, from an out-of-pocket MRI to a broken water heater. They also took trips with their four children that they had put off because of Covid, including to Walt Disney World, local museums, and the zoo. By 2022, their credit-card debt had doubled to nearly $40,000. Ms. Smith said, “It’s just a never-ending cycle of playing catch-up.”

The article noted that American millennials in their 30s have racked up debt at a historic clip since the pandemic. Their total balances hit more than $3.8 trillion in the fourth quarter, a 27% jump from late 2019. That is the steepest increase of any age group. It is also their fastest pace of debt accumulation over a three-year period since the 2008 financial crisis.

More millennials attend church weekly now than before the start of the pandemic. According to a Barna Group survey of 13,000 adults, roughly 16 percent of regular churchgoers have not returned to services at all in 2022, but weekly attendance among those born between 1981 and 1996 has risen from 21 percent to 39 percent this year.

The trend can be partly explained by life stage. Across age cohorts, church attendance is highest when people have young children, drops off for “empty nesters,” and then increases again when friends start to pass away. The oldest millennials are 40 and 41

Christianity could become a minority religion in the U.S. by 2070 if Americans continue to leave the faith at the current rate, according to new projections by the Pew Research Center.

The projections used surveys and other data to figure out what religion in America would look like in the next 50 years. Pew estimates that nearly a third of people raised in the Christian faith currently leave the religion before turning 30 years old, and another seven percent do so after that age. If those rates continue, the group projects that 46% of Americans would identify as Christian by 2070 and those with no religious affiliation would stand at about 41%. That would mean Christianity would no longer be the majority religion in the U.S., according to Pew.

In the early 1990s, about 90% of Americans identified as Christians. By 2020, Pew estimated that about 64% of Americans were Christian; 30% had no religious affiliation (“nones”); and 6% were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or part of another religion. If the latest projections become reality, the U.S. would fall more in line with other Western European countries, where Christianity has already lost its majority.

According to a 2021 study many young people consider themselves spiritual but don’t identify with an organized religion. The survey found that half of young people ages 13 to 25 don’t think that religious institutions care as much as they do about issues that matter to them. Those include issues related to racial justice, gender equity, immigration rights, income inequality, and gun control.

For decades, we’ve thought of women as more religious than men. Survey results, conventional wisdom, and anecdotal glimpses across our own congregations have shown us how women care more about their faith, though researchers haven’t been able to fully untangle the underlying causes for the gender gap across religious traditions and across the globe.

Now, data shows the long-held trend may finally be flipping: In the United States, young women are less likely to identify with religion than young men. The findings could have a profound impact on the future of the American church.

Percentage who identified as nones in 2021:

18 to 25-year-old men – 46%

18 to 25-year-old women – 49%

40-year-old men – 45%

40-year-old women – 44%

60-year-old men – 32%

60-year-old women – 36%

65-year-old men – 25%

65-year-old women – 20%

There’s also a gender gap in church attendance. This pattern has been so stark that Pew Research Center found in 2016 that Christian women around the world are on average seven percentage points more likely than men to attend services; there are no countries where men are significantly more likely to be religiously affiliated than women.

It was a typical Monday morning at a cloud services company in Denver, except for a weeping 29-year-old project manager crouched in the emergency stairwell. Kieran Tie felt like “absolute trash” that day. He could no longer bring himself to sit through pointless management meetings and pretend to (care) about on-demand enterprise data storage.

In the preceding months, he’d found it increasingly difficult to complete the simplest of tasks. Plagued with insomnia and regularly forgetting meals, he’d developed a remarkably short temper. He had stormed out of meetings when he disagreed with higher-ups, something he’d never done before in a professional setting.

Tie said, “I felt like a failure because I didn’t know what to do.” The predicament confounded him because he had a great job at a growing company with talented colleagues. The hours, like the compensation (low six-figures, plus bonus) were “very fair,” and he could ride his bike to the office, 10 minutes from his house. And yet, as he rocked weeping in the fetal position in a stairwell underneath a fire extinguisher for the better part of an hour, it was clear something needed to change.

Across the country, more and more people are succumbing to emotional collapse at work. The World Health Organization included the colloquial term “burnout” in the International Classification of Diseases, listed as an “occupational phenomenon” with three symptoms:

1. Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion

2. Increased mental distance from one’s job or feeling negative toward one’s career

3. Reduced professional productivity

Not surprisingly, 94 percent of American workers say they’re stressed at work, 75 percent of Millennials believe they’re more stressed than their parents. and 80 percent say they’re in the midst of a quarter-life crisis. So, in the next five to ten years, we will see burnout increase and a lot more mental health problems begin to emerge as a consequence.

You know the person. You work with them, or you’re friends with them, or maybe you even that person. They are youngish. Fit-ish. Always tracking their steps, sleep, heart rate, and meditation streaks. But these trackers overlook one metric: blood pressure. Those two numbers measure how well your blood vessels handle the 2,000 gallons of blood your heart pumps around your body in a day. And young people’s vessels aren’t doing the job so well.

Blue Cross Blue Shield recently released data from the claims of 55 million people. From 2014 to 2017, the prevalence of high blood pressure in people ages 21 to 36 jumped 16%. So, what exactly do we mean by “high”? We mean blood pressure that measures above 130 systolic or 80 diastolic. And when that happens, your blood vessels stiffen up, forcing blood pressure even higher. ... And a higher risk for heart attack and stroke.

For the longest time, most young people didn’t have to worry about this. Youth has always been a relative Teflon coating. Blood-pressure issues were strictly for older people, and the idea that this protection might be eroding is forcing doctors to examine what’s really going on. Here’s what they’re finding:

Millennials carry more than $1 trillion in debt. A large chunk of that is due to student loans—Millennials owe more than four times what Gen Xers do. Add this to other issues (such as bad eating habits and being overweight) and it makes sense that Millennials reported the highest average stress level of any generation, at 5.7 out of 10. (Gen Xers came in at 5.1, Gen Zers at 5.3, and boomers at a relatively zen 4.1.)

What is the goal of life? To accumulate the most money. This is what one can learn from reading the obituary of Reuben Klamer, the creator of the board game, The Game of Life, who died September 14, 2021, at 99.

When The Game of Life was introduced, in 1960, the purpose was to earn the most wealth. The way you got there was simple enough—by going to college, getting a job, buying insurance, saving for retirement. That was “indicative of what sold in that era,” a former Hasbro VP said.

Over time, designers realized that the game didn’t reflect consumers’ changing views of #lifegoals. So they gave it a big update in 2007, allowing players to score points for virtuous deeds like saving an endangered species, opening a health-food chain, and recycling. And instead of starting the game at point A and finishing at point Z, there is no fixed path: You decide how you want to spend your time.

One question that popped up is: If the popular view of what matters in life changed so much in less than 50 years, who’s to say it won’t shift again in the next 50? How will you win life in 2057?

But as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker, the redesign teams always had a hard time addressing the fundamental criticism of the game — that the only way to reward a player for virtuous acts was with money: “Save an Endangered Species: Collect $200,000. Solution to Pollution: $250,000. Open Health-Food Chain: $100,000.”

And so, the company’s 2007 overhaul, the Game of Life: Twists & Turns, was almost existential. Instead of putting players on a fixed path, it provided multiple ways to start out in life — but nowhere to finish. “This is actually the game’s selling point; it has no goal,” Ms. Lepore wrote. “Life is … aimless.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

What is the meaning of life? This is the question that many of today’s young people wrestle with. Many of them do not find a truly satisfying answer that satisfies their deepest longing for significance. Only in Christ do we find the answers to life, our purpose in the universe, and what awaits in eternity.

Ligonier Ministries asked Americans a practical question about worship. “Must churches provide entertaining worship services if they want to be effective?”

Frequent attendees of evangelical churches (monthly or more):

Strongly agree: 9%

Somewhat agree: 25%

Somewhat disagree: 25%

Strongly disagree: 39%

Infrequent attendees of evangelical churches (holidays only/rarely/never):

Strongly agree: 8%

Somewhat agree: 32%

Somewhat disagree: 27%

Strongly disagree: 29%

Millennial attendees of evangelical churches (ages 18 to 34)

Strongly agree: 11%

Somewhat agree: 29%

Somewhat disagree: 22%

Strongly disagree: 37%

Boomer attendees of evangelical churches (ages 50 to 64)

Strongly agree: 7%

Somewhat agree: 31%

Somewhat disagree: 22%

Strongly disagree: 37%

In a recent issue of Wired, Zak Jason writes:

In the 2003 Major League Baseball season, Oreo Queefs stood five-foot-zero, weighed 385 pounds, and, impossibly, stole 214 bases, obliterating the century-old single-season record of 138. A walrus with the legs of a cheetah, Queefs also regularly blasted the ball 500 feet to the opposite field. Over just two seasons with the Florida Marlins, he batted .680, hit 203 home runs, and was ejected for charging the mound 46 times. Then, before even reaching his super alien prime, Queefs vanished into thin air.

A few weeks ago, I received a text from the Marlins manager about what happened to the former Golden Glove winner. Queefs has fallen on hard times. The now 43-year-old lives with his uncle in a rented trailer in Nevada, where they run a failing off-off-Strip sausage stand called Queefs’ Kielbasa Kiosk. He is twice divorced, hasn’t seen his 15-year-old son in 12 years, and is on probation for attempted robbery of a bait-and-tackle shop.

In reality, Oreo Queefs exists only on a PlayStation 2 memory card, now likely corroding in a landfill. The manager is my childhood friend Chris, onetime owner of the EA Sports game MVP Baseball 2003. We conceived Queefs one summer night the only way two 13-year-old boys know how: (via) the game’s Create-a-Player screen. We chose his height, weight, speed, and batting hot zones. We watched with pride as he eviscerated the league. I haven’t played any of these games in a decade, but over the years my friends and I have updated one another on the lives of our created characters. They’ve all plummeted from glory.

The media has been overanalyzing why millennials can’t grow up ever since the oldest millennials have been legal grown-ups. Still, I can’t help but take the fact that at 32—an age when Jesus Christ was leading his friends and much of humanity to eternal salvation—my friends and I text one another during the workday about the video game characters we created when we were teenagers.

The writer Sam Anderson recently quipped that “the world of sports media is basically where American men go to avoid therapy.” As kids, we lived our dreams vicariously through video game characters record-shattering successes. As adults, we process our real setbacks and failures through their imagined setbacks and failures.

Layoffs, anxieties, illnesses, divorce, fertility issues—these are a few of the realities of adulthood that men are generally less than forthcoming about. Instead of discussing these directly, they cope through abstraction. When we talk about our created characters becoming has-beens, we’re (childishly) saying we’re not children anymore. When we bring them up, they finally open the door for us to talk intimately about struggles in our own lives. These children of our childhood are now ad hoc therapists of adulthood.

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found a massive shift in American values:

Two decades ago, Americans of various ages overwhelmingly said that patriotism, hard work, belief in God, and having children were the values most important to them. “Hard work” remains strong, but the other three values have dropped dramatically.

Among American teens:

95% say that finding a job or career they enjoy would be extremely or very important to them as an adult. 81% said that about “helping others in need.” 50% said “having a lot of money” would be important. 39% thought having children would be important.

For their part, many millennials are buying into the “work 80 hours a week for us because we’re changing the world” rhetoric popularized by Silicon Valley. But even those skeptical of it are working their tails off. As Anne Helen Petersen put it in a popular Buzzfeed article earlier this year: “We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.”

An Atlantic article states, “The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves.”

But our desks were never meant to be our altars. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the US are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s.

The latest survey (2021) from Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center found that belief in God has declined between generations:

• 83% of those in the Silent Generation (born 1927-1945) profess belief in God
• 79% of baby boomers (born 1946-1964) believe in God
• 70% of Generation Xers (born 1965-1983) identified as Christian.
• 43% of millennials (born between 1984 and 2002) said they “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.” Only 57 percent said they were Christian.

The report underscores the declining importance of religious faith in American life, as highlighted in pandemic reopenings when politicians prioritized restaurants and tattoo parlors over houses of worship.

Wellness preachers are wildly popular on Instagram. The New York Times calls them “quasi-spiritual influencers” and “Instavangelists” who have replaced the televangelist. They have online followers anywhere from 900,000 to 7.5 million (Gwyneth Paltrow). They are the “neo-religious leaders of our era.” Their online followers are composed largely of Millennials, and according to the Pew Research Center, 22% are not affiliated with any specific religion. The new belief system is “a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.”

The article’s author, Leigh Stein, notes what is fundamentally missing:

Left-wing secular millennials may follow politics devoutly. But the women we’ve chosen as our moral leaders aren’t challenging us to ask the fundamental questions that leaders of faith have been wrestling with for thousands of years: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What should we believe in beyond the limits of our puny selfhood?

Stein longs for

… role models my age who are not only righteous crusaders, but also humble and merciful, and that I’m not finding them where I live (online). ... There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can provide. We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places. Maybe we actually need to go to something like church? ... I have hardly prayed to God since I was a teenager, but the pandemic has cracked open inside me a profound yearning for reverence, humility and awe. I have an overdraft on my outrage account. I want moral authority from someone who isn’t shilling a memoir or calling out her enemies on social media for clout.

Lloyd Alter wrote an insightful article about passing on family heirlooms:

I don’t like clutter. Yet cluttering up my dining room is an old cabinet filled with teacups and dishes that belonged to my late mother-in-law … My daughter was just setting up house, so at least the dining room set and sideboard found a home. But for many people, it's not so easy. Most baby boomers are already established and don’t need more stuff when they inherit it from their parents. Their millennial kids either don’t like it or don’t have a place to put it.

Financial advisor Richard Eisenberg notes that nobody wants the big old stuff anymore. “Dining room tables and chairs, and end tables have become furniture non grata. Antiques are antiquated.” One expert in getting rid of stuff moans about the millennials:

This is an Ikea and Target generation. They live minimally, much more so than the boomers. They don’t have the emotional connection to things that earlier generations did. And they’re more mobile. So, they don’t want a lot of heavy stuff dragging down a move across country for a new opportunity.

Eisenberg concludes with this tip: Prepare for disappointment. Tastes and the people think about stuff has changed. With today’s disposable culture, it's cheaper to buy a sofa from IKEA than it is to hire a truck for grandma’s giant sofa. An antique dealer said, “I don’t think there is a future for the possessions of our parents’ generation. It’s a different world.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

Example; Faith; Heritage; Parenting – Millennials and Gen Z may not want the furniture, china, and keepsakes of their parents. However, one thing that parents should make sure they pass on is the heritage of their faith in God.

You don't have to pack, deal with security lines, or face jet lag in order to show off your vacation pictures on social media. Just fake it! A Nebraska-based business is offering to bolster social media pages with expertly faked photos of the user on vacations they never took. The company, Fake a Vacation, offers packages starting at $19.99 for a service to superimpose the photos of a social media user in front of famous landmarks at popular vacation spots including Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Hawaii, and Walt Disney World.

The company’s ad reads “Make your friends envious of where you were and have them thinking of being where you are. Fake vacation is a perfect Meme for bragging to your friends.” The packages also include some facts about each destination to help the customer concoct the story of their fake vacation.

The company cited a study that suggests more than half of Millennials have lied about taking vacations for reasons ranging from last-minute cancellations, the high price of travel, and the desire for social media recognition.

According to internet market research firm YouGov, “the social media generation is the one that feels the most alone.” Their report details a surge in feelings of loneliness among the millennial generation, currently between the ages of 23 and 38. In their poll, thirty percent of millennials reported feeling lonely either always or often, compared to 20 percent of their boomer counterparts. Given that loneliness tends to trend upward as people increase in age, such an uptick among younger adults is concerning.

Researchers are also interested in the question of how internet accessibility factors into the equation. Millennials are the most likely to be frequently online, so it’s possible that consistent social media usage on personal devices could be contributing to feelings of loneliness.

No matter the cause, it seems that loneliness can have adverse effects on our health. It’s correlated with higher blood pressure and more heart disease, and increases risk of death by 26 percent.

Nevertheless, researchers were quick to point out that it’s not all bad news. Small doses of loneliness can help. Psychologist Maike Luhmann said, “As long as we then do what we should do—reconnect with people—then loneliness is a good thing. It becomes a bad thing when it becomes chronic. That’s when the health effects kick in. And it becomes harder and harder to connect with other people the longer you are in the state of loneliness.”

Potential Preaching Angles: Feelings of loneliness can overwhelm us, but God promises to be ever-present. Since so many of us suffer from loneliness, by extending ourselves and reaching out to others, we aid in our own recovery.

Tess Brigham, a licensed psychotherapist, specializes in treating those in the millennial generation. It wasn’t her decision; they just came flocking to her practice. Brigham says, “Ninety percent of my patients are between the ages of 23 and 38. (The rest are usually parents of millennials).”

In her practice, she’s noticed a dominant theme when it comes to the clusters of problems about which these millennials keep coming to seek help. They say, “‘I have too many choices and I can’t decide what to do. What if I make the wrong choice?’”

Psychologist Barry Schwartz has a theory as to why this is the case. In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz argues that people are more likely to regret their choices if they have too many options from which to choose. They either make poor choices, make good choices but feel bad about them, or refuse to choose--which is, itself, a choice.

Brigham counsels her clients to practice self-awareness and to identify their options, especially zeroing in on the things they can control. It’s easier to embrace the uncertainty of the outcome if they can offer themselves grace and acceptance.

Potential preaching angles: Rather than being paralyzed by the prospect of too many choices, those who put their trust in Christ and abide in the Holy Spirit can make confident choices. They trust God to reveal His will through the Word and through discernment.

The picture William Damon paints with his groundbreaking book The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life provides a wake-up call. His research shows that almost 25 percent of US youth ages 12 to 22 are “rudderless.” They have little to no direction in life and are at serious risk of never fulfilling their potential. Another 25 percent have purposeful goals but have taken few if any steps toward those goals. Approximately 31 percent have actively tried several purposeful pursuits without knowing why they are doing so or whether they’ll continue with these interests in the future. Only 20 percent have a clear vision of what they want to accomplish in life and why and have realistic plans.

As the maxim goes, it’s better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt. There’s at least one hipster-looking guy who will probably, in the future, take that to heart.

The MIT Technology Review recently published an article about a study out of Brandeis University on something called “the hipster effect,” the idea that a group of self-proclaimed nonconformists will eventually coalesce around similar behaviors and styles. It’s a partial explanation for the common idea that many hipster men tend to look alike--often bearded with flannel shirts and knit beanie caps.

After the story ran, editors received an email from an angry reader. He was upset about what he perceived to be unfair generalizations about people in his demographic, but also because he claimed to be the man in the cover photo and said the Review never obtained his permission to use his likeness.

Editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield and his team quickly contacted Getty Images, the stock photo provider, to ascertain whether the model in the photo had signed a release form authorizing its use. Getty Images confirmed that the model in the photo was a different person than the email complainant. The man responded "Wow, I stand corrected, I guess. I and multiple family members, and a childhood friend pointed it out to me, thought it was a mildly photo-shopped picture of me … Thank you for getting back to me and resolving the issue."

In a tweet, Lichfield summed up the situation: “The guy who'd threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn't the one in the photo. He'd misidentified himself. All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other.”

Potential Preaching Angles: First impressions matter less to God than a thorough examination of the truth. Fools who insist on speaking up often end up proving their critics correct.

In a poll of 2,000 Britons the 'Perfect Sunday' involved: waking at 8:30 a.m. to the smell of breakfast cooking, a cuddle, and three hours of television. A quarter of Brits thought an ideal weekend morning starts with a full English breakfast in bed and a third wanted to start their Sunday morning with a cup of tea or coffee, before pottering around the house for an hour.

The perfect roast is said to be best served at 3:15 p.m. with, ideally, four people. Other activities Brits enjoy doing on Sunday include reading a book, listening to music, and doing some gardening. Nearly one in 10 said they spend their Sunday afternoon at the pub, while one in seven think Sundays are made for doing food shopping to keep the cupboards stocked for the rest of the week.

Attending church did not appear in the poll. Graham Nicholls from Affinity, a network of evangelical churches, said:

I suppose I was sad that attending a gathering of God's people, in a church, wasn't kind of anywhere on the majority of people's lists. … It means that they're not hearing the gospel, they're not coming to an encounter with God … It's also that churches are great places for taking our families, for making friendships and for learning who we are and why we're here.