Reasons for Age Differences

• Voas and Crockett (2005) suggest three possible explanations for age differences in religiosity:

  • The ageing effect This is the view that people turn to religion as they get older. For example, using evidence from the Kendal Project, Heelas (2005) argues that people become more interested in spirituality as they age. As we approach death, we 'naturally' become more concerned about spiritual matters and the afterlife, repentance of past misdeeds and so on. As a result, we are more likely to go to church.
• • The period or cohort effect People born during a particular period may be more or less likely to be religious because of the particular events they lived through, such as war or rapid social changes.
  • Secularisation As religion declines in importance, each generation becomes less religious than the one before it.
• Voas and Crockett found little evidence for either of the first two explanations. Instead, they argue that secularisation is the main reason why younger people are less religious than older people. They found that in each succeeding generation, only half as many people are religious compared with the generation before it.
• This is because of what Arweck and Beckford (2013) describe as the 'virtual collapse of religious socialisation' after the 1960s. For example, traditional Sunday schools, which in the 1950s enrolled a third of all 14-year-olds, have all but disappeared. According to Voas (2003), even parents who share the same faith (for example, where both are Anglicans) have only a 50/50 chance of raising their child to be a churchgoer as an adult. When they are of different faiths (which are on the increase), the chances fall to one in four.
• We are therefore likely to see a steadily ageing population of churchgoers. In 2015, one in three were aged 65 or over.

  By 2030, this will be over four in ten and without significant numbers of young people joining the congregations, within two or three generations practising Christians will have become a very small and very old minority of the UK population.