In his 2011 book You Lost Me, Barna president David Kinnaman identified three trends shaping our culture: access (which, thanks to WiFi everywhere, is exponentially more amplified today), alienation (from institutions and traditions that give structure and meaning to our lives) and authority (which, like institutions and traditions, is increasingly viewed with suspicion).

In the years since that book released, Kinnaman and the Barna team have adopted a phrase to describe our accelerated, complex culture that’s marked by unlimited access, profound alienation and a crisis of authority: digital Babylon.

Four exile groups reside in digital Babylon: prodigals, nomads, habitual churchgoers and resilient disciples, and recent data show that the church dropout rates among these groups has risen from 59 percent to 64 percent since 2011. As more and more young adults leave the church with no plan to return, it’s no surprise that only 10 percent of Christian twentysomethings can be called resilient disciples.

The pages of Scripture and the annals of human history suggest that there are times when faith is at the center of society and times when faith is pushed to the margins. This transition—from faith at the center to the margins—is happening in North America and other societies in the cultural West right now. Barna data show widespread, top-to-bottom changes from a Christianized to a post-Christian society.

Here’s a short video about the digital Babylon phenomenon.