Youth Survey: Teens Lose Faith in Droves

In an article entitled Youth Survey: Teens lose faith in droves, Macleans magazine reports on a survey by Reginald Bibby, University of Lethbridge sociologist.

According to new data from Project Teen Canada, more teens now identify as Muslim than Anglican, United Church of Canada and Baptist combined. As a group, the percentage who adhere to so-called “other faiths”—including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism—has grown fivefold since Project Teen began its surveys in 1984, while the percentage of teens who identify as Roman Catholic has declined by one third, and the percentage who identify as Protestant is down by almost two-thirds.

There is some very sobering data in this report, most of which points to the fact that many teens—from nominally Christian homes—are “rejecting religion entirely.”

For Canada’s Christian teens, meanwhile, the community is shrinking like never before. Since 1984, the percentage of teens who call themselves Christian has almost been cut in half while the number who call themselves atheist has grown to 16 per cent, up from just six per cent in the mid-1980s. Just as the boomers shifted toward agnosticism, teens are now going a step further and rejecting religion entirely. “Belief is learned, pretty much like the multiplication table,” Bibby writes. “So is non-belief.”

Bibby is concerned that since religion is a “source of stability” and “moral compass of sorts” this trend could begin to adversely affect our society’s ethics and behaviour.

I’ll come out and say this very clearly: In my opinion, all that’s keeping our civilization safe and manageable—as opposed to disintegrating into chaos and barbarism—is the Christian religion. But we’re fast approaching the tipping point and since the heartbeat of the Christian religion is the Catholic faith, unless there is a sweeping move of repentance and revival within the Catholic Church we’ll likely all be plunged into a worldwide cataclysm of the magnitude warned of by Our Lady of Fatima. How right it appears she was!

Again, in my opinion, the spearhead of any such revival is the Mass of the Ages, accompanied by a strict and faithful adherence to the Tradition of Mother Church and to the message of the Virgin of Fatima.

[cross posted to St. John's Latin Mass Community blog]