Oh Come All Ye Faithful - Religious institutions marketing towards young adults

American Demographics, June 1, 2001

Religious institutions have long struggled to attract young adults to active religious practice. It's even more difficult today as young adults spend more time experimenting with careers, cities, and even life partners before they settle down and return to regular religious practice. The lack of young adults in America's houses of worship is even more noticeable these days because the number of people in this age group has declined, as tiny Gen X moves through this life stage. To combat the drop, religious leaders have ramped up their marketing efforts, and are tailoring religious practice to meet the needs of today's thirtysomethings. Welcome to the next phase of marketing faith.

FORTY PERCENT OF AMERICANS SAY THAT THEY DIDN'T ATTEND A CHURCH OR SYNAGOGUE LAST WEEK, A FIGURE THAT HAS REMAINED VIRTUALLY UNCHANGED FOR OVER HALF A CENTURY.

"Want to feed your soul?" implores a subway ad for Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. "We've got a great menu." Indeed, as the ad proceeds to detail, Marble has something on its plate for almost every type of hungering spiritual consumer. There are ministries for senior citizens; young singles; older singles; gays and lesbians; entrepreneurs; artists, actors, and writers; men; women; children; and people who love singing gospel music, to name a few. Long the pulpit of the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the church is currently at work on yet another program - created specifically for those unlikely to ever darken the door of a church. Called the New Spirit Cafe, it's a hip kind of spiritual oasis-cum-eatery designed to feed the souls - and stomachs - of those who may be disillusioned by organized religion. "Dr. Peale used to say that the six most important words in the English language are "find a need and meet it," says Marble Senior Minister Dr. Arthur Caliandro. "That's what we've tried to do. And, as our ads suggest, the result has been a wonderful smorgasbord."

Marble is not alone in its find-a-need-and-meet-it approach. As religious organizations seek to maintain their flocks in this fragmenting world, they're increasingly tailoring their core product - religion itself - to the needs of specific demographic groups. In the face of flat religious attendance, churches and synagogues have long borrowed marketing tools and tactics from companies selling more worldly goods to attract people to their congregations. During the last decade, however, the task has become more urgent. Instead of just convincing people who are not religious to come back to faith, religious institutions now have to scramble just to keep their flock away from the church down the street. Today, Americans treat religion much the same way they treat anything else that requires an investment of time: with a pragmatic, consumer mentality. "We don't join churches just because we've always been members, or because our parents have always been members," says Donald A. Luidens, professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. "We look for places that are going to serve our needs and interests."

The group that religious institutions are especially eager to attract is young adults in their so-called "pre-household-formation years." It is in this spiritual life stage - the years between leaving the nest and building one's own - that adults are the most likely to experiment with religion, and the least likely to commit to one church or synagogue. In fact, according to the Gallup Organization, just one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds say they've attended a religious service in the last week, the smallest share of any age group. "Kids are pretty religious, teens are incurably religious, but then when young people head off to college, the practice levels definitely fall off," says George Gallup, Jr.

A key reason for the drop-off: The time between leaving the nest and starting a family has lengthened. Since 1960, the median age of first marriage has increased by four years for men, to 27, and by five years for women, to 25. And as marriage gets pushed into later life, so does childbearing. In 1960, 80 percent of women aged 25 to 29 had a child at home. By 1998, just 57 percent had a child at home. Because today's young adults take longer to establish their own stable households than young adults of decades past, they are also taking longer to return to active religious practice.

This is true across faith groups, and likely true across ethnic groups. When Dean Hoge, professor of sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., surveyed a nationally representative sample of Presbyterians aged 33 to 42, he found that a whopping 75 percent had dropped out of church between the ages of 16 and 22. About half returned, by an average age of 37. He found a similar trend in a separate study of Catholics, 59 percent of whom became inactive at some point since their confirmation. He also conducted a separate study of Latino Catholics and found that 62 percent had dropped out of active religion at some point in their teens. There's a similar pattern for Jews, says Sherry Israel, associate professor of religion at the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University. "People go in and out of their Jewish connection, and their connection to Jewish institutions, in particular during their post-college, pre-family years, where there's so much mobility," she says.