Gen Y Free for Anything Except Belonging

By Michael McVeigh

A recent survey in Australia, titled The Spirit of Generation Y, has highlighted some worrying trends for churches concerning the faith of young people.

Even among those young people calling themselves Catholic (around 18 per cent of Gen Y), faith is no longer directing people's lives the way it once did.

According to the survey, around 75 per cent of young Catholics believe it's OK to "pick and choose" beliefs without accepting the teachings of their religion as a whole, while 56 per cent believe morals are relative. Speaking recently at a Catholic education conference, Cardinal George Pell said that more and more young people "seem to believe that life offers a smorgasbord of options from which they choose items that best suit their passing fancies and their changing circumstances".

What's most telling, however, is that the report found Generation Y's beliefs differed only slightly from Generation X, and from the Boomers before them. It highlighted that what we're seeing is a gradual decline in faith that's been in progress since the '60s.

Redemptorist Fr Michael Mason, a researcher from Australian Catholic University (ACU) and one of the authors of the report, says "young people are what their elders have made them".

He says since the '60s, there seems to have been a concerted campaign to take authority away from institutions like the church, government, and the media. The Catholic faith-based traditions of previous generations have been replaced by a skeptical, cynical and narrowly empirical view of life. The consequence is that young people don't trust anything that they can't verify through their own experience, or through "science" in an empirical sense.

Eureka Street online vol. 16 no. 18, 2006