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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

The amount of 18 to 30 year olds who have joined my (American, blue state, large city) church in the last 5 years is huge, and we have the statistics to prove it. The conversion classes are also 2x, from 5 to 10 from 2000 through 2020 to 19 in this year's class. The private school attached to my church has doubled pre-K through grade 2 and we are now doubling each grade's size as the kids continue. My city spends over $30k per year per public school student and enrollment was collapsing until it was flooded with the children of immigrants last year and this. We charge $11k per student and the parents are overwhelmingly lower and middle class, because the education is superior in every measurable metric (we do give free and discounted tuition to those that need it).

Counter-cultural awakening of the next generation is happening, at least here.

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Your specific church may be growing.

Church membership as a whole is falling, and has been for decades.

I would wait and see, society-wide changes that disagree with the mainstream dogma appear in popular press years after it happens

Hard statistics aren't dogma. Church isn't counterculture either.

I guess it depends on the definition of counterculture. 20% of Americans attend church every week. 57% of Americans seldom or never attend religious service.

https://www.churchtrac.com/articles/the-state-of-church-atte...

I guess it depends on exactly what you define as counter culture. If it’d just identifying as having some kind of religious affiliation with no actual participation or beliefs, then it’s not counter culture but is getting close. If it’s actually participating and actively attending religious services, it is absolutely counter-culture.

I think that a reasonable definition of counterculture is moving against the dominant culture, rather than just doing something uncommon. And if this is it, it absolutely can't be defined as counterculture.

Look at a country as religious as the US - even if it's seemingly getting barely less religious than before, the dominant culture is absolutely run by religion. A political candidate, let alone a presidential candidate who's openly non-religious would almost always be seen as an abhorrent non-starter. Public servants swear on Bibles and school children recite a mantra to prove their belief in a "nation under God". Basically the entire ideological landscape is run by religion, from the issues that people talk about to the stances they take on them. You don't even have to be religious to be influenced by all this. It doesn't really matter if a believer is committed enough to go to a church, all of them are contributing at least a little bit.

And then, just as my own unrelated opinion... the thing we associate with counterculture was always a radical disregard for arbitrary standards, an ability to pinpoint and reject the things in the world that are unjustly enforced by society. In that way, doing anything religious can never be counterculture - how can you envision a rebel with a capacity to question everything wholeheartedly believing a system of preconceived dogma?

In my city the mayor cuts the ribbon at a new abortion clinic, so for our community being religious is an outlier.

This misses the bigger point of my argument. The whole reason why abortion is seen as this religious issue is the system of religious thought that's ingrained in American society. It was created as a wedge issue for religious voters, and this system grew so much that nowadays it's seen as this intrinsically religion-dividing issue, as if it's just natural for it to be this way. The reason why you (and possibly the mayor) see opening a clinic as this big act of secularism is because the underlying religion is deeply integrated into their community.

And the second half of my argument still stands. Someday, religion may become a minority ideology. But it will never be a rebellious counterculture.

No the overwhelming majority of the city loves aborting children. Being pro-life is not a majority opinion whatsoever. Maybe you live in the rural south, I live in a Democrat-lead blue city.

No one is aborting "children".

In the US, "going to church" is about the least counter cultural thing you can do.

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