Dropping a long-established affiliation doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t believe. It may mean your commitment to your beliefs is so strong that you can’t abide weak, seemingly unprincipled leaders and institutions. Or it may mean that you simply don’t want to be taken for granted, or to limit the ways in which you may choose to exhibit or exemplify your beliefs.

I could be talking about the phenomenon of former Republican-leaning voters becoming unaffiliated, but the proposition also applies to religious belief, as the Los Angeles Times reported this morning:

Is faith losing its grip on the young?
That would be one way to read a new report by the respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found that more than one-quarter of Americans age 18 to 29 have no religious preference or affiliation, and fewer than one in five attend services regularly. That makes them easily the least religious generation among Americans alive today, perhaps the least religious ever.
Or does it?
The Pew study found that, although young adults — the so-called Millennial generation born after 1981 — are shunning traditional religious denominations and services in unprecedented numbers, their faith in God and the power of prayer appears nearly as strong as that of young people in earlier generations.