Why Middle-Aged Americans Aren’t Going Back to Church

Church attendance for Gen Xers has dropped off more dramatically than other age groups.

Americans in their 40s and 50s often identify with a religion, but they’re also in the thick of raising kids, caring for aging parents and juggling demanding jobs that spill into the weekend. During the pandemic, many got out of the habit of going regularly to religious services and didn’t resume. Some had been drifting away before or became disillusioned by church scandals or positions on social issues in recent years.

Some people who study religion liken the drop-off in attendance and involvement to the workplace phenomenon called quiet quitting.

While average attendance, including online, has rebounded from the pandemic in many congregations, deeper participation is still lagging, says David Brubaker, a professor at Eastern Mennonite University and organizational consultant. Volunteering fell to about 20% of church membership in March 2022 from about 40% in early 2020, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

Nicole Nuehring, 44, of Utah, sees many Latter-day Saint friends stepping away, which she attributes to disillusionment over scandals that they read about on social media and time away from church services during the pandemic to question why they were going in the first place. “It was easier to quiet-quit,” says Nuehring, who doesn’t attend church and didn’t as a child.

Many of her peers are exhausted from hectic work and family lives, she says. While older generations also went through demanding stages of life, they remained more involved in their churches. “Church was an anchor, where it’s not anymore,” she says.

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