I’ve always (and by “always” I mean “since I bothered to actually think about it”) been rather annoyed by the “everybody knows that” assumption that people grow more conservative as they get older. You know the words by now – sing along if you feel like it (this is allegedly Churchill’s version):

Anyone who isn’t a liberal by age 20 has no heart. Anyone who isn’t a conservative by age 40 has no brain.

I can report that this isn’t particularly true, at least for me (it would have to take a seriously unexpected life change on my part in the next 2.3 years for Churchill’s version to become true, anyway); and I know plenty of people in my generational cohort for whom it isn’t. I know personally, that I was a heck of a lot more conservative socially, politically and religiously in my twenties than I am as I edge into middle age. I have plenty of theories as to why (there are lots of blog posts in the archives dealing with exactly those theories, or you know, you could just ask me if you’re curious), but they’re not particularly important in this case, as much as I love to talk about them.

What I want to point to today are the results of a big survey on religion and political self-identification recently released by Trinity College in Connecticut. This study tracked the attitudes about the subject topics among members of Generation X (defined in the survey as being born between 1965 and 1972, though through personal anecdata, I expect the results wouldn’t be that different if they bumped that period out a bit to include me born two years later). The results seem to fly in the face of the societal truism exemplified by Churchill’s statement.

The big takeaway for the media is that as a group, we Gen-Xers have become less religiously affiliated and less Republican as we’ve aged. As one of the authors of the survey told the Washington Post, “Everything we find here is counterintuitive”.

Counterintuitive, unless you don’t necessarily hold with the common wisdom, or are, for example, me.

I’m not necessarily looking for validation; I’m perfectly comfortable being the aging liberal, non-traditionally spiritual hipster geek that I am, though it’s nice to have some data to point to the next time someone (usually a haughty self-satisfied Boomer or a misguided Millenial who’s suddenly decided its time to be society’s definition of a “grown up) tells me that “I’m doing it wrong” by being that aging liberal non-traditionally spiritual hipster geek.

If I really am doing it wrong (and I’m quite sure I’m not), I’m hardly alone in my efforts.

So, that’s that, other than making the attempt to wash the taste of Churchill’s drivel out of my blog by referencing a tangentially-related quotation I encountered this week from C.S. Lewis (who, Narnia’s heavy-handedness aside, was a fun and clever rabble-rouser), reacting to one of traditionalist fun-killers’ favorite scriptural bludgeons, 1 Corinthians 13:11:

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.