TruthBook Religious News Blog

MIKE HARTON TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Published: July 5, 2009

Two recent conversations haunt me. An old college friend, a leading-edge baby boomer (age 63) whom I knew to be a person of faith in college, told me he and his wife "had given up on the institutional church." The other con versation was with an educated professional friend, also a baby boomer, who describes herself as spiritual but not religious.

These friends' attitudes are consistent with American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS, 2008) findings that more and more of us are claiming no religious affiliation. A similar study by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 16 percent of the population has no religious identity.

Why did my college friends give up on church? Why is my spiritual friend not religious? In light of what we know about both boomers and many churches, it is not hard to speculate.

Baby boomers are as diverse a cohort as we have known. Their religious experiences run the gamut from no affiliation or faith identity to former "Jesus freaks" (from the 1960s) to very involved, regular church attenders. Some who formerly never darkened the doors of a house of worship are now actively engaged. Others who grew up in church have dropped out, many with no intention of returning.

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Labels: ARIS, Baby Boomers, church, faith, Mike Harton, religion, spirituality

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Sunday, March 15, 2009

The spirit moves Baby Boomers

December 2

AARP has found that Baby Boomers are intensely spiritual, believing in divine healing, miracles and guardian angels.

AARP's Knowledge Management division commissioned a study to measure, in its words, "what Americans 45 and older think about miracles and miraculous events, including what they believe about divine healings, guardian angels, the circumstances under which someone may receive a miracle, and how miraculous events have changed their outlook on life."

The telephone survey included an oversample of Hispanic respondents.

The survey found:

* 80 percent said they believe miracles occur today as they did in antiquity,
* 67 percent said they believe illness and injuries can be divinely healed,
* 37 percent said they witnessed a miracle,
* 27 percent have witnessed a divine healing,
* 11 percent of seen an angel.

In addition, younger Boomers hold to more spiritual beliefs than older Boomers: Respondents age 45-54 were more likely to believe in miracles (85 percent) than those age 55 and older (77 percent).

Also, from the oversample the survey found that Hispanic Boomers have stronger spiritual beliefs in this regard than their white counterparts:

* 86 percent believe in miracles,
* 86 percent believe in spirits and angels,
* 82 percent believe in divine healing.

Labels: AARP, angels, Baby Boomers, miracles, spirituality

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

Kids today ... find a new way to shock adults

Could it be that the kids get it and the adults don't?

A long, long time ago, in a decade known as the "'60s," many young people who were not in college ROTC or the Young Republicans club had a visceral distrust of anyone over, oh, say ... 30.

These were ... are, the baby boomers, perhaps the most self-indulgent generation in the long, often futile, history of humankind [I yam what I yam. ...]

The boomers have been followed by generations mostly known by chromosomal letters: "X" and "Y"

Anyway, since the boomers had a visceral distrust of the generations that went before them and thought they had invented the world and thus deserved to dominate it ...

And since succeeding generations have had to find their own difficult niches outside the distortions of the Me Generation ...

You would think ...

That kids today ... kids today ... would be rebelling against an adult world that can produce a lot of wealth but can come up pretty short on things that really count.

Then again, you might have missed a recent news story about an MTV/Associated Press study of young people between the ages of 13-24 and what makes them happy.

And the reason you might have missed it? Well, look no further than yet another news story about yet another survey — on the reading habits of Americans ... which found one in four adults read no books at all during the past year.

Of course, if you're reading this you probably are not one of those folks for whom the act of picking up a book and getting lost, lost, lost in it is a lost, lost, lost art.

"Religious" works and popular fiction were the most popular choices according to the poll, with the Bible, the Good Book itself, the most widely read book.

I'll admit to checking out the Bible now and then, and I do read a lot, which led me to the questions asked by MTV on what, if anything, makes kids today happy.

The shocking, shocking answer to what made the most young people happy is ... spending time with their families.

Don't know for sure about generations X, Y, Z, but where I come from — when Visigoths walked the earth — happiness was getting as far away from my family as possible.

By age 13, I was firmly convinced my parents were not only uncool, but hopelessly lacking in any skills that I as an all-knowing teen might find useful or necessary.

Yeah, there was a rather significant level of what we today call "dysfunction" in my "family of origin" [another psycho-babble term popularized in the 'aughts], but still ...

Anyway, this AP/MTV survey also showed that white kids call themselves happier than blacks and Latinos; that many, especially females, feel themselves just totally and irrevocably stressed out — and, get this, that money is not something that makes them happy.

Maybe this is because of the mind-boggling prosperity that has inflicted this country over the past couple of decades, so kids just take it for granted.

Sex? Kids 13-17 showed a lot of wisdom in saying that being sexually active at that age leads to diminished happiness; while the 18-24s were cautious. Yes, sex can lead to momentary happiness, they said, but hardly provides much of a foundation for anything lasting.

Drugs and alcohol — more unhappy than happy.

School makes many respondents in the poll happy, and they also said they believe in the institution of marriage and want to have kids of their own. Significantly more kids from families whose parents have remained married reported waking up happy, compared to kids from divorced families.

Nearly half named their parents as their heroes and three-quarters said their relationship with their parents is what makes them happy.

Family, friends and God, that's who they want to be with.

Nearly half said religion and spirituality are important to them and more than half said they believe God influences what makes them happy. Being part of a religious group also was seen as happiness-inducing.

Of active believers in God, 80 percent said they are happy, compared to 60 percent of the young people who said faith is not important to them.

Perhaps the young people surveyed by MTV already have already learned the spirituality of happiness.

Maybe some have already learned where true joy resides.

This brought to mind a passage written some 1,950 years ago, by Paul of Tarsus, who perhaps was addressing a group of young people in the ancient Greek city of Phillipi.

Paul wrote:

"I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

"I can do everything through Him who gives me strength"

Want to comment on this column or other topics? Check out Don Miller's blog at http://www.santacruzlive.com/blogs/donmiller. Contact Don Miller at dmiller@santacruzsentinel.com.

Talkin' 'bout your g-g-g-generations:

Back in the day, Gen X-ers were known as '20-Somethings,' 'slackers' and 'Baby Busters' and turned away from anything smacking of Baby Boom self-indulgence or narcissism.

Of course, Gen X-ers are now parents and have their own disaffected youths to worry about ...

Generation Y.

'Why, why, why' they might cry, are we going to have to foot the bill for boomers when they start tapping Social Security? Y-ers, also known as 'millennials,' have birthdates between 1984-1993. Naturally, the kids born after 1993 are now being called Gen Z.

The people who mark such things say hallmarks of Y are apathy, childhood obesity, a predilection for pharmaceuticals and, oh yeah, an intimate, sometimes consuming, relationship with all things digital.

Or so they say.

Labels: Associated Press, Baby Boomers, Don Miller, family, Gen X, Gen Y, God, happiness, MTV, teenagers