By Dennis Sadowski | Catholic News Service
LINTHICUM, Md. – It’s no secret that for years, teenagers and young adults have been leaving the Catholic Church, putting aside organized religion for a more personal spirituality, another faith tradition or no faith at all.
A new study by St. Mary’s Press looks at the reasons for such religious disaffiliation, asking teenagers and young adults ages 15 to 25 a basic question: Why did you leave the Church?
The answers reported in the study, titled “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation of Young Catholics,” vary widely with respondents citing sociological, familial and spiritual reasons as well as opposition to organized religion.
“We wanted to hear in young people’s own words their lived experience and their stories. So we spent time listening to young people throughout the country, to hear their story in their own words, uncensored and unfiltered,” said John Vitek, CEO and president of St. Mary’s Press.
The study’s release Jan. 16 coincided with a three-day invitation-only meeting in Baltimore of 65 Catholic leaders, many of whom work in diocesan and parish youth and young adult ministries.
The two-year study found that religious disaffiliation is a process and often begins with questions about faith, doubts and hurts that accumulate over time “until it’s too much,” Vitek said. The process begins at an early age, sometimes as young as 10 years old.
The study also found that the median age for young people to leave the Church was 13 even though teenagers may have continued attending Mass with their families because they felt pressured to do so.
The study began in 2015 when St. Mary’s Press, based in Winona, Minn., contracted with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington to conduct a survey of young people from 15 to 25 years old who left the Catholic Church. It started with a pool of 3,450 randomly selected young people of which 1,435 completed the screening process.
The full report resulted from interviews with 204 young people – 20 teenagers and 184 young adults – who once self-identified as Catholic but now do not.
From the sample, the study estimated that 12.8 percent of U.S. young adults ages 18 to 25 and 6.8 percent of teenagers 15 to 17 are former Catholics.
In the larger pool, 20 percent said they were no longer Catholic because they stopped believing in God or religion; 16 percent cited an issue with family or parents leading to their decision to leave; 15 percent changed faiths on their own while their family remained Catholic and 11 percent said they left Catholicism because of growing opposition to the church or religious institutions in general.
The study also found that 74 percent of the sample said that they no longer identified themselves as Catholic from the ages of 10 to 20 with the median age being 13. More than one-third, 35 percent, have no religious affiliation, 46 percent joined another religion and 14 percent said they were atheists or agnostics.
The margin of error is plus or minus 6.9 percentage points.
The study broadly categorized respondents into three categories – the injured, the drifters and the dissenters – based on the reasons given for leaving the Church.
It also outlined a series of reasons respondents gave for their religious disaffiliation including family disruption; hypocrisy within the Church; disconnection between belief and practice of the faith; lack of companions on a spiritual journey; disagreement with Church teachings, particularly same-sex marriage, abortion and contraception; issues with teachings about the Bible including salvation, heaven and life after death; and disillusionment and frustration that their questions about faith were never answered or that they never had the opportunity to ask them in the first place.
The study follows a Pew Research Center study released in 2015 that outlined the religious landscape in the country and uncovered the rapid increase in people without any religious affiliation, who are sometimes referred to as the “nones.” Pew estimated overall that about 56 million U.S. adults had no religious affiliation.