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S i d e b a r
Why Baby Boomers Left the Church . . .
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This Rock
Volume 18, Number 8
 October 2007 
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In an early episode of The Simpsons, Homer decides not to join the family for church on Sunday. He revels in the "freedom" of a Sunday without church by running around the house in his underwear, winning a radio contest, watching football on television, finding a penny and making his favorite waffles, which include "caramels, waffle batter and liquid smoke." It’s such a good day that he decides not to go to church again.
In some ways, it is not a bad metaphor to explain why many Baby Boomers abandoned the faith. Many Baby Boomers left when they were young without any real reason. They left because they saw the faith as part of their childhood and never developed an adult understanding of their Catholicism.
As they grew older, marital problems or lifestyle decisions would exacerbate the split between faith and life. But in many ways, what keeps them from returning is not doctrinal divisions or a real failure of belief. Rather, it is waffles and football—the desire to do something else with their time and the fear that the faith takes work.
I wrote in A Faith for Grown-Ups: A Midlife Conversation about What Really Matters (Loyola Press):
For many of us, we never really left the faith so much as we signed up for the mediocrity of the general culture, fell away from the practice of faith, then somewhere along the line fell away altogether. There was no great apostasy, no great moment of fission to take away faith. It was simply an apostasy of apathy, built on nothing more or less. (295)
To many Baby Boomers, it is simply too hard to be a Catholic. Apathy and a life of benign moral indifference are more attractive than the challenges of living the faith in the modern world. They haven’t so much rejected faith as they simply prefer to occupy their time in other ways.
Homer comes back to church after nearly killing himself in a house fire, and the old joke is that a Baby Boomer’s departure will last until the first chest pains. But the difficulty is that apathy and a lifestyle become entrenched. Bombarded daily with the reinforcing propaganda from the secular culture, too many Baby Boomers hold on to the penny they have found rather than the riches of the faith they have abandoned.
. . . and What Brings Them Back
Sometimes it is the first chest pain that brings them back.
The reasons Baby Boomers come back to the faith are varied. It can be a health scare, a personal tragedy, or waking up to discover that a life of quiet desperation is no way to live. But the bottom line in all the reversion stories is that people discover at some point and in some way that there is infinitely more to the faith once they approach it, see it, and touch it through an adult perspective rather than a childhood memory.
A fellow Baby Boomer introduced himself and told me the story of his return. He had been in the high school seminary and even had a bishop for an uncle when the Age of Aquarius smacked him between the eyes. Dropping out of the seminary, he went a couple of decades and more not practicing the faith, though he let his wife raise the family Catholic. His epiphany was simple in its own way. He was at his daughter’s wedding rehearsal. Looking around the church, seeing his daughter preparing for the sacrament, he suddenly realized: "I’m home."
What brings many Baby Boomers back is that when we finally begin to look at the faith with adult eyes, we realize that there was so much more truth and trust there than all the little truths we had toyed with for too long and never really trusted. We find nothing that could bring us to Christ better than the Church of our childhood when seen and experienced through adult lives.
We begin to understand that we don’t have to settle for the ordinary, for the good enough. We begin to understand that waffles, football, and television don’t provide a lot of answers at the shank of the evening. We began to understand that with God, through the grace of the sacraments, anything is possible and nothing, particularly life, is meaningless.
What we began to discover, finally, as we revisited our faith through the eyes of an adult, was that it has been there all along. The spirituality we seek, the prayer life we hope to have, that way of living our lives daily as if we are touching the infinite, has been there waiting for us. We found that there is a way to get back home. (A Faith for Grown-Ups, 300)
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