Decline in liberal protestantism

Tony Jones is blogging through Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults by Christian Smith and Patricia Snell. The book is the result of years of research in to religiosity and spirituality among 18-23 year olds. Tony has a vested interest in all of this as somewhat of a youth minister in exile. He's written about the subject before, most notably in his Postmodern Youth Ministry (back before everyone got tired of the P-word), a book I personally got a lot out of, especially as I enjoyed it together with his practical guide Soul Shaper: Exploring Spirituality and Contemplative Practices in Youth Ministry. The working thesis of Tony's thought is that young people have a postmodern outlook, viewing propositional pronouncements as suspect, and are on the look out for spiritual experiences. Souls in Transition seems to refute that thesis. Instead of seeking experiential encounters with the divine, young people are largely and increasingly apathetic towards religion. Tony quotes from page 295,

“A solid majority of emerging adults simply are not that interested in matters religious or spiritual”

In his blog posts Tony showcases some graphs he has made comparing the findings of Souls in Transition and Smith's earlier book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. One such graph shows how belief in God diminishes as teenagers become emerging adults. It does so in all groups except among black Protestants. And especially so in liberal Protestant churches. The decrease in belief in God from age group 13-17 to 18-23 is 17%. This is the fascinating reason that Smith and Snell offer for that:

“Liberal Protestantism’s core values — individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience — have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving… [H]aving won the larger battle to shape mainstream culture, it becomes difficult to sustain a strong rationale for maintaining distinctively liberal church organizations to continue to promote now omnipresent values.”

There are other ways to interpret the data, of course. But if it's true, it's a pretty strong argument (as if we needed another one) against engaging in culture wars: You might just win it! And if you do, you lose.