The organization's latest study found adolescents to be "much less inclined toward spirituality" than were teens a dozen years ago. Six of nine religious activities were discovered to be at their lowest levels since Barna began tracking such teen behaviors.

The downturns were found in small group attendance, prayer, Sunday school participation, donations to churches, reading sacred texts other than the Bible and evangelism.

David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group and director of the research, warned that some of these changes may go unnoticed by church leaders because the most visible activities-church attendance and youth group involvement-have not changed much in recent years.

"While there is still much vibrancy to teen spirituality, it seems to be ‘thinning out,' " Kinnaman said. "Teenagers view religious involvement partly as a way to maintain their all-important relationships. Yet perhaps technology such as social networking is reconfiguring teens' needs for relationships and continual connectivity, diminishing the role of certain spiritual forms of engagement in their lives. Talking to God may be losing out to Facebook."

The "most striking change" in the research was how teenagers today seem much less inclined to have spiritual conversations about their faith in Christ with non-believers. Among born-again Christian teenagers, the proportion who said they had explained their beliefs to someone else with different faith views in the last year had declined from nearly two-thirds in 1997 (63%) to less than half in the December 2009 study (45%).

Source: Barna Group.

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