Is Catholicism Surging Among Younger Folks?

There's reason to doubt the results from the most recent data

My wife and I bought our house about fifteen years ago. It was built in 1940 and had sat empty for a couple of years before we moved in. There were a lot of problems, obviously. But, in true Midwestern DIY style, I wanted to fix all of them myself. I set to work replacing water lines, peeling wallpaper, and refinishing the hardwood floors.

One thing I couldn’t figure out was the furnace. Despite watching a ton of YouTube videos and reading forum posts about my specific issue, I couldn't get it to work. After a couple of days of futility, I very reluctantly called a local HVAC company. The technician who came out was great; he let me watch him work (which I bet was super annoying). After about fifteen minutes of testing various things, he found the problem - a faulty part.

I asked him if a DIY’er like me could have diagnosed the issue. He shook his head emphatically and told me that the only way he knew how to diagnose it so quickly was that he had worked on equipment like mine for decades. He had a built in troubleshooting guide in his head that he had compiled the hard way.

I would like to think that I have the same hard won experience but it’s not in anything useful like furnace repair. It’s in survey data about religion.

Here’s the setup. The 2023 Cooperative Election Study was released about six weeks ago. I was eager to see how much religion had changed between 2022 and 2023. So, I put together a couple of graphs and wrote this post:

I included one graph here that just didn’t really seem right. It’s the one below - religious composition by generation. The general trends are there: older generations tend to be more Christian and less "none," but those numbers begin to shift for each successive generation. But here’s where the experience comes in. I had made that graph before for something I had written a while ago. It’s the second one in this post: Gen Z and Religion in 2022.

Here’s the share of each generation that was Catholic in that data from 2022:

• Silent: 23%

• Boomers: 19%

• Gen X: 17%

• Millennials: 16%

• Gen Z: 15%

Catholicism becomes less popular, going from 23% to 15%. Keep that in mind when you consider the result from the 2023 CES data.

If you compare the 2023 data to that collected in 2022 from the oldest three generations (Silent, Boomers, Gen X), there’s not a big difference, really. It’s a point or two off, which is just the nature of survey data. There’s always just a bit of wiggle on statistics like this.

But look at Millennials and Gen Z. In 2022, 16% of Millennials were Catholic - it’s 20% in the 2023 data. Among Gen Z, 15% were Catholic compared to 21% in 2023. That’s…fishy. Definitely beyond the typical variation that exists in this type of work.

That sent me down an entire rabbit hole. I would almost call it a forensic investigation at this point. A whole bunch of graphs that I thought would be interesting to share with the readers of this newsletter.