Some forces propelling secularization have come into better focus during the past ten years. One such has gone inexplicably unnoticed. That is the relationship between the decline in churchgoing, especially among Millennials and Zoomers, and the simultaneous rise of cancel culture on practically every campus in the Western world.
This connection between the rise in unbelief among twentysomethings and the rise of punitive anti-Christian social codes is obviously more than a coincidence. It’s a commonplace that many students, not only in America but all over, lose their religion in college. An atheist or other nonbeliever might propose one way of making sense of this: College is where students learn higher reasoning, and higher reasoning drives out the superstition of faith. This is another hypothesis that makes intuitive sense to some, even as the facts say otherwise. As we have seen already, better-educated people, as a group, are actually more likely to be found in church than those without higher degrees.
The more likely dynamic is that, thanks to the new intolerance, the social and other costs of being a known believer in the public square mount by the year — and students take note. Intimidation in higher education, multiplied over many years and campuses, has become another unseen catalyst of secularization. Cancel culture gives intimidated young people, including those raised in a faith, one more reason not to go to church. From New York to Paris to Sydney to Buenos Aires, it manifestly is doing just that.
The past decade also suggests that secularization continues to be driven by the fact that people are marrying later and having children later, if they have children at all. These trends appear to be even more entrenched than they were ten years ago, as the median age of marriage in the United States continues to rise. By 2022, it is over 28 years of age for women; for men, for the first time, it is over 30 years.
This delay of entry into adulthood, too, interferes with the possibility of apprehending the sacred. From time immemorial, mothers and fathers have regarded the creation of new life as the zenith of their own lives as human beings. The human patrimony reflects this primordial fact in all eras and incarnations, the Western canon perhaps exceptionally; from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Succession, and everywhere in between, this civilization’s art and literature are unthinkable apart from incessant recourse to family and children.
The West’s increasing rejection of traditional family life undermines attachment to Christianity in more ways than one. Simultaneously, the broken-home situation from which more and more people hail cannot help but spur resentment for what has been lost. Many of today’s “nones” thumb their noses at the churches, even as the same churches teach the beauty of intact families, which more and more have never known, and whose missing benefits they cannot imagine.
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