This bombshell finding sent us running for other datasets.

Like all good scientists, we trust, but verify.

In this post, we run through evidence from the General Social Survey, 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (a RIP favourite), and the recent release of the Voter Study Group panel.

The takeaway is that the finding is validated - the rate driving up the religious nones has appeared to be slowing to a crawl. We then discuss some reasons why the rate might be slowing.

It is conventional wisdom at this point that the incidence of religious nones is on a steady rise after 1994.

Driven by a mix of politics, scandal, and weak parental religious socialization, non-affiliates have risen from about 5 percent to 30 percent.

That trend appears to be accelerating by generation, so the rate of being a religious none is much greater among Millennials than it is among Greatest, Silent, and Baby Boomer generations as the figure below shows using the General Social Survey time series.

Those older generations are still experiencing some secularisation (the rates are rising across time), but not nearly as rapidly as the young.

From this evidence, we expected that the rate of being a none among Gen Z might be even higher, leading to a bump above Millennials.

The initial, small sample estimate from the General Social Survey, however, suggests that Gen Z is not outpacing Millenials and may have even fallen behind.

Even though it is highly reliable, the GSS is just one dataset and needs to be confirmed, especially with data sources with a larger number of cases.

Therefore, we turned to the 2018 CCES, which has 60,000 cases and 5,000 Gen Zers - plenty with which to generate reliable estimates.

The figure below shows the probability of being religiously unaffiliated for each generation in the data (we combined the few remaining Greatest with the Silent generation).

The lesson is clear - the rate has drastically increased with each generation through to Millennials and has since slowed so that Gen Z is so far no more unaffiliated than Millennials.

In 2018, 42.8% of Millennials were nones (combining atheists, agnostics, and those ‘nothing in particular'), while 42.9% of Gen Zers were nones. Continue reading

Millennials, in staggering numbers, are choosing to start their married lives under high eaves and exposed beams, looking out over long, stripped-down wooden benches and lines of mason jars.

According to an annual survey from The Knot, an online wedding-planning platform and magazine, 15 percent of couples chose a barn, farm, or ranch for their wedding reception in 2017, up from just 2 percent in 2009.

Meanwhile, more traditional wedding locales are losing their appeal. (The number of couples choosing to celebrate in banquet halls dropped from 27 percent in 2009 to 17 percent in 2017; similarly, hotel receptions dropped from 18 to 12 percent.)

Even if a couple isn't actually getting married in a barn, there's a good chance they'll make their venue look like one, said Gabrielle Stone, a wedding planner based in Boston, Massachusetts.

"There is this term that people use now: rustic chic." Typically, that means couples will fill the space with homemade chalkboard signs and distressed, vintage furniture.

"And wooden water barrels," Stone said. "Lots of water barrels."

When I asked my first question—are barns popular because they're cheap?—Gwen Helbush, a wedding planner from San Francisco, laughed. "Don't we wish it were so," she said.

While there are, surely, many relatively inexpensive barn weddings thrown in actual barns, by couples who actually live in rural areas with easy actual-barn access, anecdotal evidence suggests those probably aren't what's driving this trend.

Over the last few years, a wave of faux-barns, designed exclusively to host weddings, have popped up across the country.

Venues like Virginia's Pippin Hill Farm, built in 2011, offer an experience that its owner Lynn Easton Andrews called "expensively understated."

"We're not seeing bales of hay in the middle of the barn," Stone said.

"No one is wearing overalls, per se."

The tarnished brass lamps and faded couches are generally hauled in from boutique vintage rental companies—another business booming with the barn-wedding industry—more akin to props than random, left-over farming accoutrements.

Like earlier generations of Americans, Millennials want a beautiful (read: expensive) wedding. According to one widely-cited set of statistics, the average wedding cost has been steadily increasing, from US$27,021 in 2011 to US$33,391 in 2017.

But, despite these price tags, many young couples today don't want to be showy about it.

Happier at a brewery than a fancy restaurant, accustomed to wearing jeans to work, many Millennials are proudly casual. Continue reading

• Caroline Kitchener is an associate editor at The Atlantic. She graduated from Princeton in 2014 with a degree in History and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
• Image: Yale

Three-fourths of Americans in their 30s have dogs, while 51 percent have cats, according to a survey released by research firm Mintel. That compares to 50 percent of the overall population with dogs, and 35 percent with cats.

The findings come at a time when millennials, roughly defined as the generation born between 1980 and 2000, are half as likely to be married or living with a partner than they were 50 years ago. They are also delaying parenthood and demanding flexible work arrangements — all of which, researchers say, has translated to higher rates of pet ownership.

"Pets are becoming a replacement for children," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of "Generation Me."

"They're less expensive. You can get one even if you're not ready to live with someone or get married, and they can still provide companionship."

Millennial men, it turns out, are more likely to look for companionship in pets. Among those surveyed, 71 percent of men between ages 18 and 34 had dogs (versus 62 percent of women), while 48 percent had cats (versus 35 percent of women).

"Men are more willing to put in the time and effort of taking care of a pet," said Rebecca Cullen, an analyst at Mintel. "Women are more likely to feel they are away from home too much and that pets require too much work."

All of this is has big implications for the $63 billion pet industry, which has grown three-fold since 1996.

Last year Americans spent $11 billion on pet-pampering alone. One-third of owners said they bought toys for their pets, while 17 percent bought pet costumes and 10 percent shelled out for pet strollers, according to Mintel, which surveyed 2,001 adults for its findings. Continue reading

Sources

• The Washington Post, article by Abha Bhattarai, a reporter in Washington, D.C.
• Image: Millenial Magazine

Raised by a Catholic family and forced to attend religious education classes until I was almost 13, I'd had enough of what I perceived to be an overly-conservative institution that relied on "Catholic guilt" and strict adherence to doctrine.

So, I sought out a way to be spiritual; a way to be a good person without being handed a rule book on how to do it. Buddhism seemed like it fulfilled this need.

However, a year later I found myself a college freshman on the campus of one of the largest Jesuit universities. A year after that, I was confirmed in the Catholic Church, marking a complete 180 from my momentary fling with Buddhism.

Despite my own spiritual journey back to Catholicism—a journey which is similar to that of many other young adults, many media reporters are claiming Millennials, such as myself, are rejecting religion in droves.

If anything, Millennials are aligning themselves with a new and perhaps more effective way of practicing their faith.

As a 22 year old on a Catholic campus, I would say Millennials are even more in touch with their faith than any other generation.

For me and my peers, Catholicism takes on a range of different forms, from participation in mass and religious-affiliated student organizations to a fierce dedication to service work.

My personal faith manifests itself in what I do for those around me. I take part in my campus' Labre organization, which provides food and friendly conversation to people experiencing homelessness in Chicago.

Although I may not find myself in a pew every Sunday, I find God in quiet prayer on the beach while the sun rises and in discussions with my friends about the issues facing the world today. Continue reading

• Shanna Johnson is a student at Loyola University Chicago, currently interning at U.S Catholic magazine, in which this column was published.

How else can anyone account for tour parties travelling around the world to gasp in awe at the Weta cave or the newly unveiled model of Smaug the dragon at Wellington Airport?

We're told that The Hobbit pilgrims from overseas burst into tears on arriving at Hobbiton.

Perhaps someone should have gently explained that it wasn't really where Bilbo Baggins lived.

It was a farm in the Waikato.

It reminded me of the time I was driving over Haywards Hill and noticed a group of people standing beside a tourist bus gazing in awe at the hillside quarry where the Helm's Deep battle sequence was filmed for Sir Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I felt like shouting, "It's a just a bloody quarry, for God's sake".

But I probably would have risked arrest.

Given the national reverence for Jackson and the contribution his fantasy epics have made to the country's gross domestic product, there could well be laws prohibiting such heresy.

Thirty years ago I read The Hobbit for my children.

They were enthralled, but the story struck me as rather slight - certainly compared with The Lord of the Rings.

How Jackson could stretch it into three films, with a cumulative length of nearly eight hours, almost defies belief.

I can only assume each film in the trilogy is padded out by the same interminable battle scenes that, to me, made theLord of the Rings films indistinguishable from each other.

Interchangeable sequences seem to be a common feature of fantasy films.

I've tried to watch several of the Harry Potter movies on television, but after the first 30 minutes or so I can never tell which one it is.

They all ultimately morph into one long, generic Harry Potter film in which the plots and mumbo-jumbo dialogue (another feature in common with the Lord of the Rings movies) hardly seem to vary. Continue reading

• Karl du Fresne in The Dominion Post

Karl du Fresne is a freelance journalist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand.