Christians have been alarmed at the decline of churches for many years. Blame goes to schools, Hollywood, and so on, and rightly so. But Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute says there’s another factor: parents.

Over the last decade, there has been a steady stream of news stories about how young people are abandoning their formative faith commitments. These articles frequently argue that despite their parents’ best efforts, young people are bent on forgoing any association with organized religion, along with all the benefits that come with it. This story is compelling, and for many concerning, but it’s not entirely right. Or rather, it’s only half the story.

Compared to young adults a generation ago, young people today are less religious by every conceivable metric we have for measuring religious commitment. They go to church less, say religion is less important, have more doubts about the existence of God, and increasingly identify with no religious tradition. But this trend isn’t exclusive to young people: The same pattern is evident among every single age cohort. Americans in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s are less affiliated and less involved in formal and informal worship than people the same age were a few decades earlier.

Young people, Cox says, “are showing the greatest movement away from religion.” Ergo, a lot of effort is expended looking for reasons that often have “little actual support.” Instead, he says:

These explanations ignore the single most important predictor of adult religiosity: our religious experiences in childhood.

Much of the decline in current religious commitments can be traced back to the way young adults have been raised. A new report, “Generation Z and the Future of Faith in America,” documents the waning religiosity of young Americans in the country today. Each successive generation reports having grown up with less formative religious engagement than the one preceding it. For instance, 57 percent of Baby Boomers say they attended religious services each week during their childhood. But only 40 percent of adults who are part of Generation Z say their families did the same. Further, only 42 percent of Generation Z attended Sunday school regularly. For Baby Boomers, this was a common experience: Sixty-one percent said they did so weekly while growing up.

The most straightforward explanation for why young Americans appear to be less religious is one of the most obvious. Young people are leaving a religion they were never particularly connected to in the first place.

Cox says, “More Americans today are being raised in secular households than ever before.” So it’s little wonder that we see less engagement with religion, and he says “it’s difficult to see” a major “return to religion,” especially with young people reporting a clash in values with Christianity.

Part of that problem, Cox argues, is that too many “churches lead with politics,” which “not only alienates people whose political views differ, but also those who are not looking to engage in politics at all.” After all, he concludes, “If you exclude all young people who are liberal, moderate, or apolitical, there are not a whole lot of people left to fill the pews.”

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.