USA - Our take: In the past, the 18-24 set has been too busy to find time for faith as they finish school and acquire careers, although they have tended to reconnect with faith around the time they got married and had kids. More recently, that demographic, known now as 'millennials', people born between 1988 and 1994, has been shown to be growing less religious as they grow older, which may have implications in almost all areas of American society in the next decade.
'Millennials Abandoning Christianity' - Dude, that's the headline I'd put on the new survey of Millennials from the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown's Berkley Center. Like, 80.2 percent of them were raised as some kind of Christian and now just 64.2 percent consider themselves such. That 20 percent decline is largely accounted for by the increase from 11.1 percent to 24.7 percent of the cohort that the survey calls "unaffiliated"-- i.e. those who identify with no religion, or Nones. Add a bit over a percentage point increase for both the non-Christians and the "Don't Knows," and you've got the whole picture.
While every Christian grouping experienced some decline, the big losers are the Catholics and the Mainline Protestants, both of which declined by 28 percent. White Catholics dropped 34 percent; Latino Catholics, 21 percent. Indeed, at this point Catholic Millennials are evenly divided between whites and Latinos, at 9 percent each.