Generational divides on attending church compound the stress of the holidays as an older generation tied to the church comes at odds with their children, who are less likely to attend and less likely to view Christmas as a religious holiday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017, 52% of baby boomers see Christmas as a religious holiday, while that number was just 32% for millennials.
"Millennials attend religious services at far lower rates than older people," Pew's domestic religion lead researcher Gregory Smith told the Journal. "The generation gap we see in the ways Americans approach religion is both statistically and substantially significant."
The decline of Christianity in the U.S. is dramatic and has been most apparent at Christmas, where attending church or not is dividing families along generational lines, according to the report.
"Our tradition from when the girls were little has gone right out the window," Valerie Schultz, 62, of Lancaster, California, told the Journal.
It is not just at Christmas; it is just most often revealed then because of it being the time families come together.
About half of boomers attend church at least once a month, while 40% of millennials seldom or never do, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll.
"Parents have expectations and when a child breaks expectations, all hell breaks loose – then there is the added layer for those who believe if you don't go to church, you endanger your immortal soul," Megan Sutker of Philadelphia, who has three adult children she is not going to force into church, told the Journal.
"They have families of their own and there's a lot of competing interests. I'm not going to layer my expectations on top of them."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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