It's the metaphorical lipstick on a pig, man. Revising the delivery is pointless when the message itself is corrupt.

I would venture to say the exodus (little pun there) is two fold. The article points out just one arm, that young people are moving to the left politically, while church leaders are moving to the right. That is enough to alienate an audience all by itself!

However I submit the second arm, that young people are also less indoctrinated, so they're free to ask more critical questions. They wonder, why does God talk to that guy and not me? Does God really need tv shows and $100 million megachurches? Is it sensible to cherry pick Bible verses, taking them way out of context to support whatever moral argument one has at the moment? For that matter, if we want to get to the heart of our religion, why do we focus entirely on a version of the Bible that's generations removed from the original material, having suffered any number of revisions and mistranslations?

I know because I followed that path myself. When I was a kid in the 70s, I remember the day I gathered up all my courage and asked my Sunday school teacher: which came first, the Garden of Eden or the dinosaurs? I don't even remember the teacher's words, I just remember him blubbering and waffling in an attempt to respond with something other than, "I don't know."

It's not an issue of intelligence. It's a way of thinking. As best I can tell, my elders had simply never wondered how to rectify their Biblical legend with natural history. Did God kill the dinosaurs to make way for Adam and Eve? Where did black people come from? Where did Noah keep all the food? They never wondered any such things, and if they did, they just sloughed it off as trivial in the face of God's might or whatever.

Maybe they just didn't ponder such questions in a serious way because they were comfortable in their habits. In contrast, young people today have no comfort at all. Pensions are gone. The idea of the 'company man' is gone. The notion that a university degree, or any other professional accreditation, will guarantee you a stable, well-paying job is gone. There's similarly no faith in the social security system, the health care system, the nation's political structure and so on. They have nothing to lose by eschewing yet another construct of a passing generation - organized religion.