A new study is showing that more Americans have left organized religion for the pursuit of personal truth. Entitled “Breaking Free of the Iron Cage: The Individualization of American Religion,” researchers followed 1,348 individuals born in the late 1980s from adolescence to early adulthood and explored their religious habits. Participants completed four rounds of surveys between 2003 and 2013, while they were between 13 and 17 years old. They answered questions regarding how frequently they attended religious services or prayed alone, as well as if they identified with a particular religion or had a belief in God, whether they practiced meditation, and if they supported converting others to a religion. During that time period, researchers saw higher declines in religious participation while belief in God remained mainly the same.

The term “iron cage” comes from German sociologist Max Weber who predicted that the continual “bureaucratization and rationalization” in modern institutions would lead to an “iron cage,” leading people into developing, “new forms of religious and spiritual expression outside formal institutions.” “We bring the iron cage argument back to religion, making the case that rising individualization and autonomy reflected in the 1960s countercultural movement set the stage for a revolution against the bureaucratization and politicization of religion,” stated the researchers.

Some of the biggest factors drawing younger Americans away from organized religion included politics and a desire for sexual autonomy. However, the biggest factor appears to be individual freedom, with younger Americans having more options in lieu of organized religion than previous generations to practice their personal beliefs. “People are breaking free [from organized religion] not with bolt cutters but with deeply personal acts of spiritual rebellion, rejecting the rationalized, systematized, and institutionalized religious constructs of modernity in favor of more dynamic, diverse, and syncretic expressions,” noted the study.

Landon Schnabel, associate professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study, said the shift is more personal than politics. “People aren’t leaving religious institutions passively or only because of partisan politics, but because of more deeply held values – about the sacredness of the individual, their concern for others and feeling that their participation in an institution doesn’t align with being the type of person they want to be,” he said. “They’re more intentionally choosing to follow what they really believe in.”

The rise of personal truth comes during the same time that moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD) has risen. The 2021 American Worldview Inventory noted it as the most popular worldview in US culture. “Practitioners of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are not anti-religion or anti-Christianity. They just are not willing to surrender themselves to authentic Christianity’s demands—or to believe that a real faith would even make such demands of them,” stated George Barna. MTD minimizes or denies sin and removes the idea of Jesus to a more broad concept of “God.” “The fact that a greater percentage of people who call themselves Christian draw from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism than draw from the Bible says a lot about the state of the Christian Church in America, in all of its manifestations,” added Barna. “Simply and objectively stated, Christianity in this nation is rotting from the inside out.”