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Axios
10-05-2025
- General
- Axios
Young men are leading a religious resurgence
Christianity is starting to make a comeback in the U.S. and other western countries, led by young people. Why it matters: A decades-long decline has stalled, shaping the future of Gen Z, the drivers of the religion revival. 'We've seen the plateau of non-religion in America,' says Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University. 'Gen Z is not that much less religious than their parents, and that's a big deal.' By the numbers: Data from Pew shows that, for decades, each age group has been less Christian than the one before it. Americans born in the 1970s are 63% Christian. 1980s babies are 53% Christian, and 1990s babies are 46% Christian. But there was no decline from the 1990s to the 2000s. Americans born in the 2000s are also 46% Christian. Stunning stat: Gen Z-ers — especially Gen Z men — are actually more likely to attend weekly religious services than millennials and even some younger Gen X-ers, Burge's analysis shows. Between the lines: Young men are leading American's religion resurgence. Within older generations, there's a consistent gender gap among Christians, with women more likely to be religious than men. Within Gen Z, the gap has closed, as young men join the church and young women leave it. If the current trajectory sticks, the gender gap will flip. Zoom in: Many young people have turned to religion to find community and connection after the isolating years of the pandemic, which hit Gen Z harder than most. In some ways, this trend mirrors men's shift to the political right. "Religion is coded right, and coded more traditionalist" for young people, Derek Rishmawy, who leads a ministry at UC Irvine, told The New York Times. Plus, for some young men, Christianity is seen as "one institution that isn't initially and formally skeptical of them as a class," Rishmawy told the Times. Zoom out: The resurgence is global. 'In France, the Catholic Church has baptized more than 17,000 people, the highest yearly number of entrants in over 20 years,' New York Times columnist David Brooks writes. The share of British people between 18 to 24 who attend church at least monthly jumped from 4% in 2018 to 16% today, including 21% gain among young men, according to research from the Bible Society. What to watch: The deepening gender divide within America's religion revival could have broader consequences for young people, Burge says.
USA Today
20-04-2025
- General
- USA Today
Not just at Easter: Gen Z is returning to Christianity. Data proves it.
Not just at Easter: Gen Z is returning to Christianity. Data proves it. | Opinion It's not time to call this a revival, but something is stirring in the culture. Christians would do well to pay attention, live out their faith and step into the opportunity to share with others. Show Caption Hide Caption Easter traditions: How it's celebrated around the world Did you know that Easter isn't always just celebrated with chocolate? Easter is marked very differently around the globe. unbranded - Lifestyle Religious data rarely makes headlines, but a new wave of findings is creating a stir. For three decades, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has steadily declined, a trend confirmed by countless studies. For many believers, it has felt like an inevitable slide into cultural irrelevance. In a season of overwhelmed news cycles, these religious shifts haven't received the coverage they should, but they are significant, and they keep coming. The dominant religious storyline in recent decades has been the rise of the "nones" − those who mark "none" for religious affiliation. Secularism pulls down religious commitment like gravity pulling down a satellite. Over time, the orbit decays until there is a crash. Christianity in the United States has followed a similar trajectory, declining about 1% per year. It looked almost inevitable that a crash was looming. But now, something is shifting. And we can see it in the data among Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012. Gen Z men more likely to attend church Perhaps most surprisingly, Gen Z men are now more likely to attend church than Gen Z women. The New York Times reported that among young Christians, men are staying in church (at the same time, many women are leaving). Overall, younger generations are more spiritually curious. Barna research group reports that most Gen Z teens are interested in learning more about Jesus, with younger cohorts leading the way in the growth of new commitments. At the same time, the dramatic rise of the nones appears to be leveling off. Sociologist Ryan Burge recently observed that the share of non-religious Americans has stopped rising in any meaningful way − a surprising pause after 30 years of growth. Americans' engagement with the Bible also appears to be increasing. The 2025 State of the Bible report from the American Bible Society found an increase in Bible use and engagement. According to The Wall Street Journal, Bible sales have spiked, driven largely by first-time buyers. Finally, Christian entertainment has seen a remarkable surge. From "The Chosen" to "The King of Kings," faith-based storytelling is gaining a wider audience. Opinion: America is a potluck, not a battlefield where we defeat our fellow citizens It's too soon to announce a change to the direction of secularism, but as someone who has been an observer of Christian trends for decades, including a stint leading a Christian research organization, I've never seen anything like this. As I've been sharing data as part of The State of the Church project, I did not expect it to change this quickly. The cultural meteor of 2020 ‒ including the COVID-19 pandemic, social upheaval and political turmoil ‒ has shifted the conversation, and it's too soon to determine where it is going. However, Christians love a good comeback story − more on that later. Churches in the UK are growing rapidly Next month, I will again teach 'Christianity and Contemporary Culture' at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, but I'm having to update my lecture notes. A surprising − perhaps shocking − report from the Bible Society in Great Britain describes a "Quiet Revival" in the United Kingdom. The research was carried out by a well-known research firm, YouGov, in partnership with the Bible Society, which surveyed more than 13,000 adults in England and Wales. The report says, encouragingly: "We found that the Church is in a period of rapid growth, driven by young adults and in particular young men. Along with this, the Church demonstrates greater ethnic diversity than ever before. Both within and outside the Church, young adults are more spiritually engaged than any other living generation, with Bible reading and belief in God on the rise." Those of us who study trends in church adherence typically look to countries like the United Kingdom and Australia as harbingers of the trends that will unfold in the United States in the coming years. This is just one study, and we need more data, but in times of tumult and turbulence, people often turn to faith. Opinion: What would Jesus say to Americans at Easter? Let's learn to love each other. Mark Twain once quipped, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." The same could be true of Christian faith in the West. Yes, challenges remain, but the narrative of inevitable decline might no longer hold. This does not mean that there is not work to be done or issues to address. Even in the data I cited, we cannot ignore that within the good news concerning increased church attendance within Gen Z is a concerning trend regarding young women. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Yes, Gen Z men are coming to church in higher numbers. But among those who disaffiliate from the faith, Gen Z women are represented in significantly higher numbers (54%) than previous generations (47% among millennials and 45% among Generation X, according to a 2023 study by the Survey Center on American Life). So, it's not time to call this a revival. But something is stirring in the data − in the culture. Christians would do well to pay attention, live out their faith and step into the opportunity to share with others. Secularism, for many, has been found empty and wanting. The chaos and instability of the past few years has people returning to the age-old questions about where we came from, why the world is so messed up and where can we find hope. As Christians, we can rejoice in a newfound openness because we have this strange belief about death and life − that resurrection is real in Christ, and possible for the church. Ed Stetzer is the dean at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and a distinguished visiting scholar at Wycliffe Hall at Oxford University.
New York Times
20-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
America Wants a God
Americans believe. Most people are wary of the government, the future and even each other, but they still believe in astonishing possibilities. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they have a spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something 'beyond the natural world,' as we reported earlier this year. The country seems to be acknowledging this widespread spiritual hunger. America's secularization is on pause, people have stopped leaving churches, and religion is taking a more prominent role in public life — in the White House, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even at Harvard. It's a major, generational shift. But what does this actually look like in people's lives? I have spent the past year reporting 'Believing,' a new project for The Times. This project is personal to me. I was raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas. I've left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I understand how wrestling with belief can define a life. I hoped to capture what that journey looked like for others, too — both inside and outside of religion. I interviewed hundreds of people, visited dozens of houses of worship and asked Times readers for their stories. More than 4,000 responded. In my reporting, I found that there are many reasons for this shift in American life. Researchers say the pandemic and the country's limited social safety nets have inclined people to stick with (or even turn to) religion for support. But there is another reason, too: Many Americans are dissatisfied with the alternatives to religion. They feel an existential malaise, and they're looking for help. People want stronger communities, more meaningful rituals and spaces to express their spirituality. They're also longing to have richer, more nuanced conversations about belief. Unsatisfying alternatives Over the past few decades, around 40 million Americans left churches, and the number of people who say they have no religion grew to about 30 percent of the country. Many people turned to their jobs, gym classes (yoga, CrossFit, SoulCycle) and mysticism (astrology apps and meditation) for answers on how to live well. Some stopped speaking about their past faith — it was unfashionable, in big cities and on college campuses, to do so. Studies provide a sense of how that's going: 'There is overwhelming empirical support for the value of being at a house of worship on a regular basis on all kinds of metrics — mental health, physical health, having more friends, being less lonely,' said Ryan Burge, a former pastor and a leading researcher on religious trends. People who practice a religion tend to be happier than those who don't, a study by the Pew Research Center found. They are also healthier: They are significantly less likely to be depressed or to die prematurely from suicide, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular illness or other causes, multiple studies from Harvard found. This isn't true for everyone, of course. Many people have built happy, healthy lives outside of faith, and about a third of Americans who have left religion appear to be doing just fine, according to a new study from Burge. But in aggregate, religion seems to help people by giving them what sociologists call the 'three B's' — belief in something, belonging in a community and behaviors to guide their lives. Religion fills a psychological need, Michele Margolis, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. 'We want to feel connection,' she said. 'We want to feel like life makes sense.' Finding these things alone or creating them from scratch is 'really hard,' she added. A new conversation Now, something is shifting. Most Americans identify as religious (around 70 percent of adults), and many are very committed to their faith (44 percent of Americans say they pray at least once a day). For the first time in decades, America's religiosity is remaining stable. This may change, of course, in the coming years, especially as young people age. But for now, many 'nones' — people who have no religious affiliation — that I spoke to seem to have a dawning recognition that, in leaving faith, they threw 'the baby out with the baptismal water,' as my Opinion colleague Michelle Cottle said. Some are even converting to a religion. Depressed and doomscrolling during the pandemic, Matt McDonough, a 39-year-old in Minnesota, said he found a 'profound' community in a men's Bible study. 'I got baptized as an adult. My mental and physical health improved dramatically.' Most say they aren't going back to religion. But many people told me they want new spaces to discuss and explore their spirituality. 'My inner life is rich with spiritual reflection, and I sometimes yearn for a more open dialogue about it,' said Doris Andújar, 42, from Ponce, P.R. Looking for belief Conservatives seem to be better at naming this longing. They speak to 'civilizational' renewal and a restoration of moral values. They promise deliverance through politics. They use the infrastructure of evangelical Christianity to communicate their vision. It's working for them. But is this the only way? Successful alternatives haven't emerged at scale, and many liberals have ignored American spirituality — this longing — at their party's peril. This data reveals that finding a way forward may require acknowledging that Americans want to wrestle with hard questions about how to live. They're looking to heady concepts — confession, atonement, forgiveness and sacrifice — for answers. In short, they're looking to believe in something. Read more in my article, 'Americans Haven't Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion.' For more Deportations Tariffs More on the Trump Administration Middle East War in Ukraine Other Big Stories Was the backlash against the all-women Blue Origin flight fair? Yes. The event, framed as female empowerment, felt tone deaf as rich celebrities celebrated themselves in a climate where women's rights are attacked. 'White billionaire men using women to showcase their technological prowess … is completely cringe,' HuffPost's Kimberley Richards writes. No. The public is jealous of these women's success and ignores the representation the flight offers to a younger generation. 'The women are part of a generation that are breaking the norm, that are changing the traditional pathway to space,' argues Vanessa O'Brien for Britain's Times Radio. The egg industry gasses or grinds up newborn male chicks, but technology could end the gruesome practice, Sy Montgomery writes. Here's a column by Ross Douthat on how to survive the digital revolution. One if by land…: 250 years ago, Paul Revere sped across Massachusetts warning of the British approach. The Times retraced his route. The American diet: After years in which 'plant-based' was the mantra, meat is back. Most clicked yesterday: A brother and sister sought a homestead that could house three generations. See which home they chose. Vows: He saw her on a billboard. Then fate brought them together. Lives Lived: Mike Wood, prompted by his son's struggles with reading, founded LeapFrog Enterprises, which in 1999 introduced the LeapPad, a child's computer tablet that was a kind of talking book. Wood's toys taught a generation. He died at 72. This week's Interview subject is Nate Bargatze, whose low-key, G-rated stand-up has made him a mainstream star while still earning the respect of comedy snobs. Self-deprecation is one of his trademarks — his new book is titled 'Big Dumb Eyes: Stories from a Simpler Mind' — but he also harbors some huge ambitions, on the business level and the spiritual one. You joke in your book about not being much of a reader, and to help your readers, you threw in some blank pages. For people to keep their head above water. Now that you've written one, are you feeling any differently about books? I did think last night, as I was watching TV, 'This is when you should be reading.' I was thinking about trying to get into a fun book. Start with something superfun and get into a habit. What would that book be? I looked up the most popular books. It was Christina Agathie? Is that her name? Agatha Christie? I was backward. I think I'm dyslexic so that should count as I said it correctly in my head. That wasn't a bit? Christina Agathie? No, I thought that's what it was. I'm sorry. I ride the line: You don't know what's a bit, what's not a bit. No one can really tell what's going on, and then, depending on who I'm talking to, I can decide if it was dumb or not. Read the full interview here. Click the cover image above to read this week's magazine. Listen to songs you didn't know were big hits right now. Haggle on vacation. Here's how. Streamline laundry day with these tips. In this week's Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Genevieve Ko suggests affordable recipes that taste like a billion bucks, including citrus-soy chicken ramen, salmon with radicchio and anchovy sauce, and narjissiya with asparagus, halloumi and sumac. Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangrams were ineffable and infallible. Can you put eight historical events — including the rise of McCarthyism, the invention of the zipper, and the hiding of the first videogame Easter egg — in chronological order? Take this week's Flashback quiz. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@
New York Times
12-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
The Share of Religious Americans Will Continue to Decline
My generation, millennials, has been blamed for ruining so much: cloth napkins, traditional marriage, American cheese. But in the long run, we might be credited with destroying American religion. We are not a particularly faithful generation, and there's evidence our offspring may be even less so. Last month, a new edition of Pew Research's Religious Landscape Study came out. It's a huge survey — the organization polled more than 35,000 Americans — and the last one was released in 2014. Coverage of the survey focused on the fact that the fall in popularity of American Christianity has recently plateaued, after years of continuous decline. (Non-Christian faiths, which are a very small proportion of the American population, have gone up a bit since the survey started in 2007, but their relative size makes it tough to draw conclusions about them). According to Pew, since 2007, the share of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has dropped to 63 percent from 78 percent. But between 2020 and 2024, that figure hovered between 60 and 64 percent pretty consistently. The share of Americans who describe themselves as 'nones' — a category that includes people who have no religion in particular, or who are atheist or agnostic — has leveled off at just below 30 percent, up from 16 percent in 2007. But when you look at the numbers by generation, this plateau is temporary. As the Silent Generation, Boomers and Gen X become a smaller and smaller share of the population, there will simply not be enough religious young Americans to replace them. 'The reality is that 20 percent of boomers are nonreligious and it's at least 42 percent of Gen Z,' about the same as millennials, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist and the author of 'The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.' Burge said of the Pew data: 'For every six Christians who left the faith — one joined. It's the exact opposite for the nones — six joiners for every leaver.' He added, 'You can't get away from those trend lines.' It is very unlikely that children raised without religion will later become religious, as 'none' is becoming just as sticky a religious identity as any other. According to Pew, only 40 percent of American parents of minor children are giving their kids any kind of religious education. Only 26 percent go to religious services once a week. We will eventually become a country that is 40-to-45 percent 'nones,' Burge said, though it will likely take a few more decades to get there. The move away from organized religion among younger people isn't just with their feet — it goes much deeper than church attendance. A new book, 'Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America,' by Christian Smith argues that millennials created a 'new zeitgeist' where religion is much less important to their overall worldview than it was to previous generations. Smith, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, told me, 'I think culturally religion is in bigger trouble than a little plateau might suggest.' For his book, Smith did over 200 interviews with 18- to 54-year-olds, and he also ran a 2023 survey he calls the 'Millennial Zeitgeist Survey.' One question he asked in that survey was about religion's relevance to daily life. 'The bottom line is that two-thirds of the millennial generation view religion as either obsolete or not a matter they have an opinion about, which is arguably an indirect expression of obsolescence,' Smith wrote. Smith described organized religion to me as having become a 'polluted' idea in the American mainstream, because of the publicity around sex abuse scandals and financial malfeasance in many different faiths in the '80s and '90s as millennials came of age. 'The scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good,' Smith wrote. 'They demonstrated that religion did not make people moral, did not help its own leaders cope with life's challenges and temptations, did not promote social peace and harmony and did not model virtuous behavior for others.' Those scandals helped destroy religion's credibility — and led to millennials no longer believing that religion could be a 'glue' that held America together, Smith's research showed. And this appears in every facet of life for Americans in their 30s and 40s. Their friend groups are less likely to center religion, and they are more likely to believe that you can be a moral person without believing in God. 'The idea of obsolescence captures this sense that the old— the thing that's gone obsolete— can still be around and people can still use it. I mean, there's still people that type on electric typewriters,' Smith told me. Part of why we're seeing a particularly virulent strain of Christian nationalists' fight for power in American society right now is because, deep down, they know that they're losing the long game. But the irony that Smith points out is that the more religious Christians tightly embrace electoral politics, the more they will continue to repel many of those they seek to attract. Though there has been a lot of press about young men flocking to strict Christian denominations, their overall numbers are not significant to the big picture of American life that Pew paints. As of now, only 38 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds say that they believe in God or a 'universal spirit' with 'absolute certainty,' and only 27 percent 'pray daily' lower numbers than for any other age group. As Smith puts it, 'the movement to save Christian America for God ended up pushing many Americans away from Christianity, God and the church.' I don't think that dynamic is changing soon. End Notes Thank you for being a subscriber Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.
Boston Globe
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Christianity's decline in US appears to have halted, major study shows
'We're entering a new era of the American religious landscape,' said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who was not involved in the Pew survey. The 'nones' — those in the American population who tell researchers they have no religious affiliation — have been growing for decades. 'Now that growth has either slowed or stopped completely,' Burge said, 'and that's [a] big deal.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The findings come from the Religious Landscape Survey, a survey of more than 35,000 randomly selected adults from across the country conducted in 2023 and 2024. The last survey was published in 2014, making the new edition's release a major update in the understanding of American spiritual beliefs and practice. Advertisement The survey finds that 62 percent of adults in the United States describe themselves as Christians, including 40 percent who identify as Protestant and 19 percent who are Catholic. Overall, that represents a decline in the share of Christians since the survey was first published in 2007. As recently as the early 1990s, 9 in 10 adults in the country identified as Christian. Almost 30 percent of adults participating in the new survey are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 percent identify with a religion other than Christianity. 'If you look to the long term, it's a story of decline in American religion,' said Gregory Smith, a senior associate director of research at Pew. 'But it's a completely different story if you look at the short term, which is a story of stability over the last four or five years.' Advertisement The story of the steadying is complex, but one factor is the youngest cohort of adults in the survey. The survey's first two editions have shown each age group becoming steadily less Christian than the previous. For example, 80 percent of those born in the 1940s or earlier now identify as Christian, compared with 75 percent of those born in the 1950s and 73 percent of those born in the 1960s. People in the youngest age group in the new survey, born between 2000 and 2006, appear to defy that trend. They are still less likely than average to identify as Christian, and far less likely than the oldest Americans. But, intriguingly to researchers, they appear no less religious than survey participants in the second-youngest cohort, born in the 1990s. The youngest survey participants stood out in other ways, too. The gap in religiosity between men and women is far smaller than it is in older generations. Typically, women are more religious than men on a variety of measures. It's a pattern so consistent across time, geography, and culture that some scholars characterize it as a fact of human life. The pattern shows up in Pew's oldest cohorts, where, for example, women are 20 points more likely than men to say they pray every day. Among 18- to 24-year-olds in Pew's survey, however, the gender gap is small or nonexistent in measures of whether they pray daily, identify with a particular religion, and believe in God. 'It's not quite a reversal, but the fact that it's narrowing is significant,' said David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who was not involved with the survey. Advertisement Campbell speculated that the cause of the convergence might be at least partly political. As the perception of Christianity in particular has become increasingly entangled with conservative political movements, identifying as a Christian has become a matter of conservative identity. 'If you're a young white male these days and you think of yourself as conservative, then being religious is a part of that,' he said. The survey was conducted before President Trump's reelection and the subsequent 'vibe shift' detected by many religious conservatives, a rightward turn that includes celebrity conversions and a Silicon Valley backlash against progressivism. Still, people who are politically conservative and liberal are on dramatically different trajectories religiously, the Pew survey affirms. The share of self-described liberals who identify as Christian has dropped by 25 points since 2007. Just over a third of liberals now identify as Christian, and more than half say they have no religion. Among conservatives, the decline in Christian identification has been much more subtle, to 82 percent from 89 percent. Researchers caution that the data does not indicate an actual reversal in the decline of Christianity, or even that the plateau will last. Young adults are still significantly less religious than older adults, meaning they will pull down the average religiosity over time. It is unlikely that the current group of young adults will become more religious as they age. But some experts suggest that most people who were going to leave a religion have done so by now, raising the possibility that the data might offer a hint at the natural ceiling of nonreligiosity in the United States. Advertisement 'The 'nones' have run through the easy parts of the market, and now they're hitting the bedrock of committed evangelicals' and theological traditionalists in other faiths, said Burge, who was also pastor of an American Baptist church for 17 years. Going forward, 'if you're going to make advances, you have to make advances with conservatives.' Regardless of how many Americans identify with specific religions — or no religion at all — in the future, the survey depicts a fundamentally spiritual population. More than 80 percent of survey participants believe humans 'have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body,' and believe in God or a universal spirit. This article originally appeared in
