Modern Believing

Abstract

Those I have termed ‘Generation A’ are female, Christian and born in the 1920s and 30s, everywhere regarded as the backbone of mainstream Christianity; a generation dying out and not being replaced in the churches. They are often presented as deeply religious, loyal and hardworking, but wholly different from a younger, more ‘spiritual’ generation. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork suggests otherwise, and this study suggests researchers may have been asking the wrong questions and searching for spirituality in the wrong places.