Stat of the Day:
45% of Millennials did not live with a nuclear family of their own in 2019 (Pew)
Why It Matters:
This rate shows a significant change from the norms of previous generations. Only 15% of the Silent Generation lived without a nuclear family in 1968, and that figure more than doubled to 31% when measured among Baby Boomers in 1987. It increased only slightly from Baby Boomers to Gen X adults, from 31% to 34% in 2003, and then jumped again for Millennials in the past few years.*
This trend among Millennials also shows interesting differences between subgroups. For example, college-educated Millennials were more likely than those with lower levels of education to live with a spouse but no children, and they were the least likely to live with a child but no spouse (only 4% compared to 21% of those without a college education).
What It Means for the Church:
Anne Case and and Angus Deaton, authors of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, 2020), have been warning for years about declining life expectancies among lower-educated Americans. The increase in mortality among poorer Americans is connected to lower education levels, lack of economic opportunity (especially in former industrial cities and regions, but also throughout rural America), drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide. To this, we can add a higher likelihood of being a single or non-married parent relative to their more educated peers. All-cause mortality rates are higher among non-married adults, so marital status is an important aspect in the higher mortality rate among working class Americans.
Young families often become the backbone of many church communities over the longterm. With mortgages to pay off and ties to the community, they are likely to stick around and get involved. But what does it mean for the church if most of these young families, especially the ones with clear skillsets that they offer up to support their local congregation, represent a minority rather than the norm? When only 30% of Millennials live with both a spouse and a child (from the same Pew research above), surely there is a large swath of young people that our programming and marketing misses when we imagine that young, nuclear families are the norm.
Changes and Disruptions in Contemporary America
The world of 1950s and 1960s America, the world in which much of the church’s current leadership grew up, is a far cry from the contemporary American landscape we see today. From a booming industrial sector with good jobs and wages in the postwar period to the explosion of service-related jobs today, working class job prospects and wages have declined relative to inflation (even before inflation spiked in the past two years). And while these tectonic shifts have occurred in our domestic economy, upending personal and family stability for millions of Americans, the church’s outreach efforts often seem designed more for families than for the growing majority of singles and/or single parents. Indeed, the Church of England’s recent Love Matters report devotes a large portion of its work to discussing the importance of singleness and the special Christian calling to honor it in community life. No such exhortation would be necessary if church communities were already doing this well.
The demographic decline facing the church is the result of many social changes: an aging population, the rise of non-religious or agnostic options, and more. We would be remiss, however, if we did not consider how the drastic economic shifts** of the past several decades upended the social norms and institutions that held our communities together. These changes are having major, largely negative effects on the poor, working class, and even middle class across the country. As we respond to them, especially in our ministry to young singles who live alone as well as young, single parents, we must find ways to overcome both the social and economic barriers to entry into church communities. Though these barriers are hardly noticeable to those of us who have grown up around them, they can be especially threatening to those who do not already feel like they belong.
Try It:
Spend some time discussing the following questions with church and community leaders:
Is our outreach geared to young families, or young people more generally?
How accessible are our events or outreach to singles and single parents? Are there things we can do differently to better engage these groups?
What kind of mutual aid or labor organizations are locally active? How can our church community connect with these groups to collaborate in support of better economic opportunities and stability for poor or working class families?
*The different years for each generation correspond to relatively similar periods in the average age of each generation.
**The major economic shift here is the transition from a manufacturing and industrial economic base (with abundant blue-collar job opportunities) to a service and financial services economy. Some of these changes are explored by Joseph Stiglitz in his Globalization and Its Discontents: Revisited (W.W. Norton, 2017) and Thomas Piketty in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard, 2017).