Millennials Say Christmas “Cultural” Holiday, Not Religious One

More American millennials now identify Christmas as a “cultural” rather than a “religious” holiday. Younger Americans are increasingly likely to embrace secular Christmas traditions while abandoning its faith-based ones, pointing to a troubling trend in America.

According to the new survey by the Pew Research Center, 43 percent of millennials said Christmas was a cultural holiday, while only 40 percent described it as religious. The majority of respondents from the Silent Generation, Baby Boom, and Generation X said Christmas was religious. However, younger generations progressively edged toward describing the holiday as cultural instead.

Millennials were also the least likely to attend a religious service on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, as compared to older generations. While ready to ditch the overtly religious parts of Christmas, Pew Religion Editor Michael Lipka said that “Millennials celebrate many of the cultural parts of Christmas at roughly equal rates to older Americans – and sometimes at even higher rates.”

The worrisome trend toward rejecting the Christian message behind Christmas reflects Millennials’ posture toward religion in general.

“Millennials are less religious than older Americans and less likely to identify with a religious group, and those traits are reflected in the way they celebrate Christmas,” Lipka wrote.

This Christmas season “atheists and their fellow freethinkers” renewed their “attempts to prevent and disrupt Nativity displays around the country,” IRD contributor Derryck Green reported recently. But Christmas in America may succumb to a more subtle but no less pernicious threat.

The “silent killer” of Christmas might end up being the spiritual apathy, mind-numbing consumerism, and irreligious lifestyle of young Americans rather than shrill attacks by atheists. Americans will likely still celebrate Christmas for years to come, at least in name. But it will live on as a feel-good, consumer-centric holiday, void of Messianic meaning.

If the trend revealed in the Pew’s recent survey persists, the explicit celebration of Christ’s incarnation, the virgin birth, and God’s merciful plan for redemption will slide toward extinction in America.

While disheartening, this is hardly surprising. Not even most Christian millennials have a solid grasp of Christ and the gospel. Can anyone truly celebrate Christmas without a firm understanding of the Messiah and what He represents?

IRD contributor Brian Ballas argued that millennials had a “warped” concept of Christ. He quoted New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who said America wasn’t suffering from “too much religion, or too little of it. It’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.”

With a theologically twisted vision of Christ, or an outright rejection of His message, we can’t expect Christmas to retain any real meaning in our country anymore. The American Church is losing Christmas because it is also losing the hearts and minds of its young people.