The Secular Left Abandoned Religion to the Right

There is no question that the role of religion in the lives of the public has greatly diminished in Western nations.

Christian denominations that were once filling churches as fast as they could build them are now selling off those same buildings amid a precipitous decline in attendance that has coincided with an increase in so-called nones who eschew religion altogether.

According to a Pew Research Center study from January, 28% of adults in the United States are religiously unaffiliated, a nearly twofold increase from the 16% that identified the same way in 2007. And while many people still claim an affiliation with a religious denomination, fewer are going to church.

For instance, less than 25% of U.S. Catholics reported attending Mass in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic plunged Mass attendance rates even further. In historically Christian and Catholic European countries, the number is even lower. Among young people, the decline is also quite steep, with millennials and Gen Zers attending church at much lower rates than their parents did.

The effect is this: As the more secular Left has moved away from organized religion and an entire generation has grown up largely seeing religious practices as a burden, the young people who still attend religious services are pushing the institutional church in a conservative direction.

Last week, the Associated Press ran a story titled “‘A step back in time’: America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways.” The “old ways” is, of course, coded language for conservative and traditional practices that were radically changed in the latter half of the 20th century.

The article quotes a couple of old baby boomer priests who are dismayed that the younger clergy of the nation’s largest Christian denomination are gravitating to the traditional practices of the Catholic church while placing a greater emphasis on sin, morality, and the existence of hell in their ministry. But it also notes that the number of Catholic baptisms is barely a third of what it was in 1965, as is the number of Catholic marriages.

While this decline may seem alarming in many ways, it is laying bare a generational divide between the younger people who continued attending traditional church services, and the older generations who viewed church attendance as a cultural expectation that was not to be abandoned.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the self-reported ideologies of Catholic priests. According to a recent study, 70% of Catholic priests ordained in the 1960s identified with the label progressive. Today, that number is less than 5%, with more than 80% of new priests identifying with the label of conservative or “orthodox.”

Religious adherence among younger generations is now a countercultural exercise that no longer carries much in common with the way people live their lives on a daily basis. The young people who abandoned the pews see organized religion as oppressive, boring, out of touch, and unnecessary, while those who remain are much more likely to be “true believers” and adhere to even the most outwardly controversial teachings of the denomination.

While some may argue (correctly in some respects) that religious adherence has always been countercultural, the proliferation of liberal ideas in organized religion for the past few decades may have ultimately been the last gasp of progressivism within the church, while planting the seeds for its conservative revival by culling those with secular inclinations from the ranks of the faithful.

The progressives of the generations that raised today’s young people may have attended church on a regular basis, but they instilled in their children the idea that religion was entirely optional and carries with it little in the way of moral obligations. As those older and more liberal generations whose children stopped attending church services once they reached adulthood age and die, all that will be left are the conservative reactionaries who were raised to discard religion as an unnecessary constraint on their way of life but yet embraced it in an act of defiance of the secular order.