Young Humanists Engage!

By Janalee Morris, Executive Director, Humanist Canada

When I started writing this a few weeks ago, churches were celebrating a sudden surge in youth attendance. Last week, to their credit, they corrected the record: the original report hadn’t followed proper procedures, and the data was wrong.

In reality, the share of Americans with no religious affiliation has actually dropped three years in a row. While younger men are identifying religion as an important dimension, women of all ages and older men are continuing to drift off. As the Church Growth Engine put it so well: “Young men may be walking in the front door while the women who run your children’s ministry and the retirees who have prayed for your church for decades drift out the side.”

Even so, both churches and the secular movement are laser-focused on the same question: how do we get younger people engaged?

Recent research from Barna and Christ In Youth sheds some light on this, revealing that the most religiously active teenagers (“Faith-Activated”) actually experience intense internal tension, social pressure, and difficulty connecting their beliefs to daily life. They are asking hard questions. Rather than classifying this as a crisis of faith, the authors explain it as a sign of “deeper engagement” and “critical thinking”. Church leaders are now being urged to welcome those questions and embrace open dialogue instead of trying to quickly smooth over student doubts.

This is precisely where Humanists have a clear advantage.

While churches have to “sell” ideas that feel increasingly irrelevant to modern life, humanists are plugged directly into the world as we know it. We live in the world we can see, touch, test, and run experiments on to figure out what is right and wrong. That’s where religious organizations ultimately fall short—they have to rely on apologists, myths, justifications, and “you have to look at the context” arguments to make sense of archaic advice. We get to rely on the truth, or at least the best version of it we can build based on all available evidence. And while religious institutions often treat hard questions as problems to be managed, we embrace them as essential to critical thought.

That’s why Humanist Canada is actively paying attention to young people. We’ve launched a newly organized Youth Chapter, and we’re looking for folks to get involved. Throughout October and November, we are hosting drop-in sessions for anyone aged 18–34 to tell us directly how you want to be engaged in humanism and Humanist Canada.

Check out our Calendar for dates as they go live!