Secularization Begins at Home

By basing their book on retrospective surveys of adults, Davis, Graham, and Burge overlook one essential descriptive fact about religion in America: most of the decline in religion is actually among children, and virtually all of it among people under age 22. Secularization, or what they call “dechurching,” is happening among children and then trickling upwards into the general population as those children age. This essential fact suggests that any story of secularization in America has to begin with home life: what changed for children born in the 1980s and 1990s that they never fully absorbed religious belief as children?