Three books chart significant portentous demographic trends underway in the United States. Bump and Munger both deal with the tectonic demographic shift embodied in the departure from the scene of the baby boom generation even as it retains unprecedented political, economic, and cultural power. Bullivant writes about a quite different demographic change, the rapid rise of so-called nonverts, individuals raised in some religion who now identify as having “no religion.” All three authors make a convincing case that the consequences of these shifts are likely to touch most aspects of American life.
Baby boomers, the most dominant generation in American history, were born between 1946 and 1964 and today make up 23 percent of the population. They have passed their peak in terms of raw numbers, but their power continues to grow. Today, they constitute 38 percent of voters and 43 percent of homeowners and own more than 50 percent of the country’s wealth.
Among them are four of the country’s 46 presidents (Joe Biden is too old to count as a boomer) and 58 percent of members of Congress. (The average age of lawmakers in both houses is currently the oldest in history.) Boomers control all the country’s major institutions (except technology companies), the two main political parties, and the mass media. Boomers are predominantly white, making age and race inseparable factors and a source of confusion in analyses of the changes in progress.
Both Bump and Munger foresee significant generational conflict in coming years with the smaller Generation X population, born between 1965 and 1980, and the much larger cohort of Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996. Bump argues that the discrepancies in wealth and political opinion among them are “simply unsustainable.” Munger emphasizes the tension between the world boomers grew up in and the penetration of revolutionary information technology that “changes all the rules.” Both books include many graphs, some quite complex, some staggering in their impact. Death is certain: beyond that the coming changes can only be sketched. Among the more definite problems ahead is the question of how boomers’ jobs will be filled as the number reaching retirement age peaks near the end of this decade.
Growth or decline in religious observation generally occurs over generations. Something else is occurring in the United States. The increase over the last 30 years of the number of those who have converted from some religion to none—now one in six Americans—is “wholly unprecedented.” Nearly all were brought up in a Christian denomination. “Nones” now account for 30 percent of American adults and 44 percent of those aged 18 to 29.
Why this rapid shift is happening is unknown, as are its likely consequences. It would be odd, Bullivant believes, if a segment of the U.S. “religious market” should suddenly expand so enormously and so rapidly “without it playing havoc” with the areas of American life shaped by religion including, to name a few, family, morality, identity, marriage, sex, race, ethnicity, and community. It should change, as well, the national self-image, from its earliest days, as a “Christian nation.”
