Abby DAY. Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion: Shaping Belief and Belonging, 1945–2021. 256 pages.  ISBN: 9780192866684. Oxford University Press, 2022.   Reviewed by Pierre HEGY Adelphi University, Garden City, NY 11530

Abby Day was able to answer the question in the title of her book in a single sentence: “The Boomers were the generation who, for the first time in most churches’ practices, did not go to church as children, other than for a brief moment before or after Sunday school.”(13) After an initial prayer or hymn at Sunday worship, children were led to a separate room for religious education which involved much coloring and other forms of religious baby-sitting. They came back to the church shortly before the end of the worship service. They never experienced the church as a religious and social community. Most of them dropped out after confirmation; they did not give up religion; they really never had any.

This study is based on interviews from a sample of Baby Boomers who were baptized and confirmed in the church of England, left it, and never returned. The author inquired extensively into their childhood experiences and found a uniform pattern of regular Sunday school attendance with little religious substance. At the time of confirmation, much of their religious education had evaporated without much of a trace. In a previous study, Abby Day had interviewed women of the previous generation. They were committed to sending their children to Sunday school, but were also willing to set them free of religious obligations after confirmation. Moreover, religion was mainly absent from family life, being reduced to weekly one-hour church attendance.  The baby-boomers increased the trend toward secularization for the next generation. Having left church at adolescence with no religious tradition to transmit, the Baby Boomers did not baptize their children. This is the cycle we are in today: parents with little religion produce an ever-increasing proportion of religious “nones.” The latter comprise about half the population in the U.K.

This book is divided into 11 chapters and 3 parts: Sunday school attendance, drifting away, and finding new beliefs and values. The Sunday school teaching consisted mainly of practices like coloring images of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus rather than learning beliefs. It was experienced as something social, related to church spaces and times, like going to school. The practice of separating children from adults at the main service was a recent innovation in the church of England, the author explained. It was not something that their parents had probably experienced as children; they had attended church together with their parents and siblings. For both the parents and the children, Sunday school was unrelated to Sunday worship. The end of Sunday school meant the end of religion.  

Because Boomers did not have strong beliefs, they could not reject religion; they simply drifted away from it, like a natural outgrowth. Having no personal convictions, they did not have many options after confirmation; religion simply faded away from their scheduled activities. Moreover, during the 1960s the number of students attending college doubled in the UK. For many Boomers, the secular environment of college and work was another factor pushing their childhood religion out of their consciousness.

This inductive study of the Sunday School Movement in the UK and its deleterious effects on religious education let author to important theoretical conclusions. The general theory of secularization was of little help; the basic factors of “modernity, individualism, and consumerism [were] found wanting in this current analysis.” (14)  Instead of macro social factors, the author found that the micro-sociology of the transmission of the faith within the family (or the lack of it) was a much more powerful explanation. It was when religion ceased being practiced at home and religious practice was made optional for children in the 1950s that the “chain of memory” in the transmission of faith was broken. The transmission of faith becomes fainter with each generation, the Boomers not baptizing their children, and their children having no personal memory of religion, they have nothing to transmit to the following generation. In short, secularization is accelerating. Moreover, instead of secularization being a cultural “subtraction” (a society without religion), she found evidence of secularization as a cultural “addition:” religion is replaced by universal values to make the world  more just, more democratic, and more inclusive of minorities and women; it is a just world created without God which is very attractive to young people. 

This study is based on data from Anglican church members in the UK, Canada, and Australia, but it has great relevance to Catholic readers. When religion ceases to be promoted by family devotions, and religious education is run by specialists according to diocesan plans, independently and separately from worship and the adult parish community, it is likely that confirmation will be the end of religion, not just the end of religious education. This is a totally new perspective on the sociology of faith and worship. It is also one that suggests avenues for stemming the flood of decline.