Day, Abby. 2022. Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion: Shaping Belief and Belonging, 1945-2021. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192866684 [Book]

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Mocked, vilified, blamed and significantly misunderstood – the ‘Baby Boomers’ are members of the generation of post-WWII babies who came of age in the 1960s, wanting to reject religion, ban bombs, burn bras, get high, dance to the music and give peace a chance. Their parents of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly their Anglican loyal flower-arranging, scone-baking, tea-making, church-attending mothers, raised their Boomer children to be church-attenders and respectable, not the half-hippy/ half brokers they became, spurning religion and raising their Millennial children to be the least religious generation ever.

The Baby Boomers were the last generation to have been routinely baptised and taken regularly to mainstream, Anglican churches. So, what went wrong - or, perhaps, right? This book is the first to offer a sociological account of the sudden transition from religious parents to non-religious children and grand-children, focusing exclusively on this generation of ex-Anglican Boomers.
Now in their 60s and 70s, the Boomers featured here make sense of their lives and the world they helped create. They discuss how they continue to dis-believe in God yet have an easy relationship with ghosts. When they turned from the Bible and Sunday School lessons to pursue their inner truths, replacing prayer with contemplation, meditation and silent reflection, they did not, as theologians are wont to argue, fall into an immoral self-centred abyss, but forged different practices and sites (whether in ‘this world’ or ‘elsewhere’) of meaning, morality, community and transcendence.

This study is important to reveal much about failed religious transmission and sudden religious decline, and about the Boomer mothers who were, perhaps, not as pure and pious as they let on. It is important to see how those mothers nourished their Boomer children’s inner rebels to subtly licence them to incite a cultural and spiritual revolution. This maternal ‘enabling ambivalence’ may have nudged the Boomers into becoming the tipping point in a century of religious change.

This book by leading sociologist Prof. Abby Day is the sequel to her 2017 critically acclaimed The Religious Lives of Older Laywomen: the Last Active Anglican Generation: OUP) which studied the then-oldest active Anglican generation of laywomen. This new book helps answer the question she asked of the older women at the time: why have your children not followed you? Their answer was often: ‘not sure - why don’t you ask them!’.

Day’s new book draws on recent research made possible through generous research leave and funding by Goldsmiths, University of London. She shows that Baby Boomers are a pivotal generation between the godly and godless, whose beliefs and practices have determined the health and wealth of churches and wider society for generations to come. Through international research including original interviews capturing the Boomer’s own stories and conversations, oral history accounts and a review of significant surveys the book explores what happened to a suddenly de-churched generation of Baby Boomers, raised in the 1950s, coming of age in the 1960s, and now in their 60s and 70s.
To address specifically the question of religion change and rapid decline, the book focuses tightly on those Baby Boomers who, as children of Anglican church-attending parents, were baptised and confirmed as Christians yet subsequently turned away permanently from church attendance and Christian beliefs. The Boomers studied here are ex-Anglicans from, primarily, the UK.
This is a story of loss, renewal, redemption and ‘truth’, providing new answers to old questions and developing theoretical frameworks to help explain one of the most significant movements in religious decline nationally and internationally.

Item Type:	Book
Keywords:	Baby Boomers, religion, Anglican, non-religion, community, transcendence, beliefs, transmission
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Sociology
Date:	15 September 2022
Item ID:	37381
Date Deposited:	24 Jul 2024 16:00
Last Modified:	24 Jul 2024 16:00
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37381

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