God Is Back And Gen Z Is Leading The Revival

In the spirit of Glamour UK’s declarative headline, “God is SO back,” younger generations appear to be effecting a religious resurgence. Young Millennials and Gen Z are abandoning atheism in favor of spirituality, religious practice, and belief in God at increasing rates. The big question is this: following the influential era of New Atheism and dwindling participation in religion throughout the early 2000s and 2010s, what accounts for the sudden revival in religiosity?

The answer is a bit complicated, but intuitive. It has to do with religious cultural capital, mimetic desire, a crisis of meaning, a longing for community and belonging, but most importantly, an orienting philosophical framework from which we can make sense of the world around us; the beauty, love, suffering, and injustice, and provide them with the significance they’re warranted.

The Generation Raised Without Religion

When I was coming of age, the thought leaders I looked up to were people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, whose distinctly reactionary and aggressive modes of argument against religion and in defense of rationalist atheist perspectives were dubbed the New Atheist movement. It took the epistemology of materialism and weaponized the “debate me bro” attitude you might see in modern political debates, becoming incredibly influential from about 2006 to 2013.

The ethos of this new strain of atheist thought wasn’t just “I don’t personally believe in God, but live and let live.” It was aggressively intolerant of pseudointellectualism and religious posturing for what they regarded as pressing ethical concerns, infringements on individual liberty, and reason. It didn’t help that the Christian thought leaders of the time spouted uniquely unsophisticated religious dogma. The debates and panels held between new atheists and religious figures were often a kind of early bloodsport spectacle, viewed for entertainment. Rather than changing hearts and minds, they served to solidify the perspectives viewers already held.

But as good as it was at dismantling the irrationality of some profoundly low-IQ religious people, it was a little too good at successfully dismantling religion’s cultural relevance while offering no comparable alternatives to fill the void. And so, the atheists won. Religion became relegated to a cringeworthy artifact of antiquity, something that haunts the narrative through vague traditions and old buildings, but is no longer taken seriously. Yet they also lost. Because what the religious “simpletons” warned would happen, did. Everything became a religion, except religion: politics, morality plays, wellness culture, therapy speak, even new age spiritualism detached from any of the virtues or orienting structures of religion.

Everything became a religion, except religion.

Having witnessed the full-scale attack on Western civilization through mass immigration, descent into woke identity politics, suicidal empathy (in rejecting pride and celebration of our own culture to elevate the cultural roots of others), and with religion being declared dead, people have become fully untethered from any coherent guiding principles of morality, behavior, and character. If Nietzsche declared “God is dead” as a warning in the 1880s, then modernity suggests we’ve killed all vestiges of its memory. People don’t seem to remember what anchored us before all of this, or if “being” was always this way: directionless, nihilistic, selfish.

In Freya India’s “Our New Religion Isn’t Enough,” she argues modern society lacks access to the old structures of religion but attempts to mimic a suboptimal version of it through social justice, climate activism, political tribalism, therapy culture, and new age spirituality. Old religious ideas like confession, repentance, days of rest, seeking salvation, and resisting temptation from the devil have all been transmuted into modern secular capitalist frameworks. There’s an app for that.

Freya’s worry is that, as helpful as therapy and self-improvement can be, this tendency to obsess over our mental health and orient ourselves with wellness and self-actualization as our highest aim, even if it comes at the expense of others, wrenches aspects of religion from the inconvenient parts we need most. The implication in all of these trends is that we’ve made gods of ourselves, and these new religions lack moral guidance. Deeper than just seeking belonging and connection, she suspects young people crave commandments and are desperate to be delivered from something. They’re missing a sense of deep connection to something bigger and more enduring. For the first time, however, the trend is changing.

The New Cultural Capital of Being Openly Religious

Glamour UK notes that young people are becoming more, not less, religious, with rates of young people believing in a supernatural deity doubling in 2021, curiously close to the inciting incident that shut down the world, locked us in our homes, and thrust us into economic, emotional, and perhaps spiritual instability. Another UK study found that Gen Z is far less likely to identify as an atheist than their parents or even grandparents.

In an American context, things aren’t so optimistic. Young people are still statistically less likely to be religiously affiliated than earlier generations, by far, according to Pew Research. However, the long years’ decline of Christianity since 2007 has started to level off, challenging the idea that each succeeding generation becomes more secular and atheist than the previous one. There’s reason to believe the spiritual shift could be even more significant than it looks.

One insufficiency of this data is that religious affiliation and attendance may be an imperfect proxy for quantifying belief and practice. For a generation steeped in online culture and parasocial attachments, their relationship with God is plausibly more personal than institutional. That is, they might not attend every church service. In fact, they might attend virtual ones. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t actively living in accordance with their faith through other means, such as praying, reading scripture, and talking directly to God.

A number of celebrities have gone public about their faith in recent years, including Rosalía, Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Gwen Stefani, Kat Von D, Kanye West, and Shia LaBeouf. The popularity of faith-oriented music and TV shows likewise signals a renewed thirst for spiritual storytelling. Former rationalist and atheist figures, such as Elon Musk, Russell Brand, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Joe Rogan, have either outright converted to Christianity or talked about being more receptive to it. Many were inspired to return to church, to begin praying again, and to take their faith seriously in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, because they were moved by the conviction he had in his faith right up until his death.

The culture’s most dominating stories appear to be veering away from materialism, think No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood during peak new atheism, in favor of faith and transcendence with Dune, Conclave, Heretic, Bring Her Back, The Night House, Hacksaw Ridge, and Silence. This signals renewed interest in God and the transcendent, but it also has the effect of making spirituality mimetically desirable. If there was cultural capital in transgressing against religious symbols as an expression of edginess, like with Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” things seem to have changed. There’s nothing edgy about the 50,000th music video relying on Satanic imagery to subvert wholesome Christian ideals.

The New York Times recently ran an article this month, “Is Hollywood Getting God?”, identifying a clear cultural shift toward more overtly spiritual celebrities and stories in the media. “Americans seem to be getting more conversant with religiosity. Movies about the Bible are having a moment in Hollywood. Rappers and singers are earnestly, not ironically, engaging with faith,” writes religion columnist Lauren Jackson. She says it’s an indication of what people are interested in right now, what they’re worried or thinking about, and marks a notable shift occurring around 2018 with the A24 film First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke.

A convergence of social and political forces has contributed to the reclamation of earnest belief. Culture reporter and host of The New York Times’ Popcast, Joe Coscarelli, says the shift is earnestness. While in past decades the counterculture was subverting religious imagery with contradictory or offensive messages, “the current moment is engaging with it in a much more head-on, straightforward, earnest, and irony-free way.”

Paradoxically, the counterculture is not to transcend or reject tradition, but to return to it. This echoes broader cultural and political trends rightward: record numbers of young people voting conservative, the resurgence in traditional lifestyles, and men disproportionately becoming both more conservative and more religious than women, thanks to the gender polarization gap. But while men are converting to religion at much higher rates and are more likely to attend religious services than their female counterparts, the spiritual shift is bipartisan, multiethnic, international, and multifaith.

While men are converting to religion at much higher rates and are more likely to attend religious services than their female counterparts, the spiritual shift is bipartisan, multiethnic, international, and multifaith.

Glamour UK spoke to a 21-year-old liberal student who converted to Christianity at 17, who attributed her thirst for faith to her generation’s disillusionment with consumerism. “Gen Z is used to being reduced to what they buy, the brands they wear, and the ways they present their lives on social media,” she said. “That’s been their entire socialization, and it’s exhausting.” Christianity, by contrast, defines people by how they can love and serve other people.

The share of “nones,” a demographic nickname for Americans with no religious affiliation, was a mere 5% in 1972. However, it started spiking in the 1990s, and the trend held for decades, with a 40% jump between 2008 and 2013, the peak of new atheism. However, between 2013 and 2018, it slowed, and by 2020, it had stagnated. That’s all being attributed to Gen Z, the only generation not losing their religious affiliation, despite previous trends indicating that each successive generation becomes 10% less Christian than its predecessors.

Per Vox, “it might seem odd to think of religion as countercultural, but at least for many of the youngest Americans, growing religious disaffiliation has been the popular narrative and posturing of their elders.” So, what happens when the status quo of your parents and the broader culture is atheism and agnosticism? Religious adherence, rather than being an inherited tradition passed down from your parents, becomes a form of resistance to mainstream secular culture. Young believers have gravitated toward religious traditions that define themselves in opposition to elite secular norms.

Vox reports that in the UK, where Anglicanism has long functioned as the mainstream religious tradition, recent increases in religious identification are disproportionately skewing Catholic. In the US, where mainline Protestant denominations were historically associated with elite culture, growth has instead come from Catholicism on the right and from evangelical and more tolerant nondenominational churches rather than from atheism or agnosticism.

Liberal women, likewise, appear to be growing more spiritual. Pew Research shows spiritual beliefs are widespread. Eighty-six percent of Americans believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body, and 83% believe in God or a universal spirit. Seventy-nine percent believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can’t see it, and 70% believe in an afterlife.

The New Counterculture: Community, Purpose, and Guardrails

When you combine the younger generation’s unique loneliness problem, already underway thanks to the rise of social media and the increasing atomization of social life, with the extreme isolation of COVID-19 fully obliterating any meaningful ties to community and to Zoomers’ social peers, it’s no wonder young people sought out the stabilizing force of faith and religious community. Gen Z has been described as the “loneliest generation.” Jonathan Haidt prefers to describe Zoomers as “the anxious generation,” and while these trends predated the pandemic, the foundation of young people’s sense of purpose, community, belonging, and hope that the world was going to get better, not worse, was already built on a house of cards.

The pandemic didn’t just make people lonelier and more depressed by isolating them and removing them from their communities. The way the pandemic was handled by the media, public health officials, and the government was disastrous for institutional trust. If the era of new atheism was to reject religious dogma as flimsy superstitions in favor of empirical science, COVID brought that entire epistemology into question. Institutional trust collapsed, and that encompassed our faith in journalists, the government, and, most damagingly, science and the reasonability of our peers. Rationalist materialists questioned the orthodoxy of religion, but the orthodoxy that modern youth are questioning is institutional authority presuming to have all of the answers, despite indications that they don’t.

This critique has emerged on both sides of the metaphysical question. Sam Harris says our most trusted institutions have done irreversible damage to their credibility, but asks us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The answer isn’t to reject science and standards, but to fight to uphold them. However, the other camp’s resolve has been forged in fire. Universities have been found guilty of shameless institutional discrimination against white people. DEI has replaced truth and merit in favor of representation and equality of outcome. Science is retrofitting its processes to vindicate its presuppositions, not just regarding COVID-19 vaccines, masks, or social distancing, but also gender ideology and blank slate theory.

People look at the world around them and ask themselves, has the world gotten better, more sophisticated, more ethical, more virtuous since we abandoned religion?

Meanwhile, people look at the world around them and ask themselves, has the world gotten better, more sophisticated, more ethical, more virtuous since we abandoned religion? Because it looks a whole lot like everything just became religion except for religion. Politics, humanitarianism, even our interpersonal relationships have taken on religious fervor. Our politics are now tribal orientations of good and evil, so we make heretics of the blasphemers who don’t accept the good word of woke progressive liberalism.

Humanitarianism has become a morality play to show off our moral virtuousness while shaming those who come up short, all while oversimplifying incredibly complex issues and viewing them through a black-and-white good-versus-evil lens. I used to think the Christian teaching “we are all born sinners, and we have to repent for our sins” was evil. Now I think I see what it’s getting at. When you believe you’re inherently good and have everything all figured out, people become totalitarians in the name of “equality and fairness” real quick. For what it’s worth, there’s an epistemic modesty inherent to Christianity, the idea that you are merely man and don’t have access to the ultimate truth. You can only try your best to live in accordance with God’s image and teachings.

We police the digital footprints of our closest friends and family, hold our peers accountable for past social blunders and offensive comments, like we’re the ultimate judge at the end of time. Like we are God himself. And yet, we offer no forgiveness, no opportunity for repentance, no guidelines for how to live a meaningful life or cultivate good moral character. We have antisocial sadism, tribal warfare, virtue signaling, cancel mobs, and a belief that people aren’t fundamentally redeemable or worth saving, but irredeemable and worth punishing.

So, when an unsuspecting Canadian professor by the name of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson pops up on the scene to oppose a proposed bill mandating the use of preferred gendered pronouns and starts telling young men, uniquely disillusioned, scapegoated, and by all meaningful measures left behind, to stand up straight, clean their room, tell the truth, and take responsibility for themselves, they listened. And something happened. Their lives transformed for the better. Upon the release of his book 12 Rules for Life and a series of biblical lectures on Christianity, Peterson expanded that guiding framework by rooting it in the Christian ethos.

He told them life is full of suffering. As opposed to leftist nihilistic ideologies that tell us the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so you might as well roll over and let the human race slip into quiet extinction, he said, “your suffering is meaningful, and when it’s taken on voluntarily, it gives your life purpose of the highest magnitude.” He told them life is about creating order amidst the chaos, that you can’t condescend to change the world before you’ve set your own life in order, or cleaned your room.

This messaging, more than perhaps any other to emerge from the mid-2010s, is the most resonant idea to have taken hold in the culture. Young men were hungry, ravenous even, for guidance, structure, some sort of rulebook, someone to tell them no one is coming to save you, so you have to save yourself. He encouraged them to find the highest good they can conceive of and to bear that responsibility, and the suffering that comes along with it, voluntarily.

Unlike the evangelicals of old who asked us to marvel at the design of an eyeball and extrapolate “this must have been the work of God,” he made a more poignant point. Jesus is the archetypal embodiment of voluntary suffering, an evocative image that conveys there’s no higher good and no more powerful antidote to evil than to take responsibility. The cross, symbolizing an antidote to resentment, stands as a symbol diametrically opposed to grievance politics. Through his biblical lectures, he painted Christianity not as woo-woo mysticism you either hedge your faith on or don’t, but as something morally necessary for both the individual and civilization.

Do We Need to Choose?

Ben Shapiro gave a quote on Bill Maher’s show recently when confronting him over religious moral questions. He rhetorically asked Maher why they agree about 87% on morality, despite being an atheist and Shapiro a religious Jew. “We probably grew up a few miles from each other in a Western society that has several thousand years of biblical history behind it, and so you can think that you hit that triple and formed your own morality, but the reality is you were born morally on third base,” he said.

I’ve always been incredibly critical of this perspective, the idea that you need religion to have a coherent value system and moral code. I reject it as an all-encompassing claim that individuals can’t transcend. But it is generally true that secularism is great at critique and bad at replacement. Britt Hartley of No Nonsense Spirituality explains this polarizing pragmatic claim made by Jordan Peterson, who says stupid people should be religious. The claim isn’t that being religious makes you stupid. It’s a claim about luxury beliefs.

Hartley explains, “He’s arguing that if you’re not going to reinvent the moral wheel yourself, if you’re not going to construct an ethical system from scratch, it’s actually probably safer for you to plug into a tradition that already gives you meaning and community and rituals and guardrails and things that are good for humans.” She continues, “If you’re not going to read Kant or Aristotle and design a worldview that holds up under pressure, then you should probably plug in somewhere.”

Since most people aren’t going to do that, Peterson argues they’re more likely to flourish by inheriting a religious tradition that’s already done the heavy lifting by thinking about and developing these frameworks over thousands of years, in the process absorbing centuries of trial, error, and refinement. Most people don’t have the cognitive tools or privilege of time, resources, or freedom from other pressing concerns to reverse-engineer incredibly sophisticated philosophical frameworks from first principles. We’re subject to human error, whose ideas haven’t been stress-tested over thousands of years. And if religion is something that evolved alongside humans and can’t be meaningfully discarded, as it’s arguably the default operating system for the human psyche, then maybe there’s something to be said for not tossing the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe throwing it out wholesale is reckless.

Even famous New Atheist thought leader Richard Dawkins now calls himself a “cultural Christian,” granting that while he’s not a true believer in the supernatural claims, he feels at home in the Christian ethos and would feel a great sadness if suddenly our cathedrals and our culture disappeared. “I think it would matter, certainly, if we substituted any alternative religion. That would be truly dreadful.”

The Value of Spirituality

Religion is a social cohesion tool, as Hartley emphasizes. “Rituals reduce anxiety, community reduces loneliness, moral codes reduce chaos,” and these are unambiguously good things for the human psyche. Sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that without religious myths that allow for social cohesion, the world would fall apart into moral drifting, and we’d see a breakdown of social norms much like the kind plaguing Gen Z today. Likewise, Nietzsche, with his pessimistic warning “God is dead,” suspected people would fall into nihilism or other dangerous ideological replacements, such as nationalism or fundamentalism, rather than building new secular value systems overnight.

Hartley argues we did exactly what these thinkers warned we would do. We turned to political religions and nihilism, and because of pluralism, we now have all of these competing narratives of meaning because belief is no longer the default. A lack of one cohesive shared story gives us more freedom, but paradoxically, overwhelm and fragility. We become locked into analysis paralysis. There’s no main reason to choose one over another, and yet humans don’t outgrow their yearning for meaning even as belief in traditional religion has declined.

A lack of one cohesive shared story gives us more freedom, but paradoxically, overwhelm and fragility.

Hartley argues religion isn’t just a set of outdated stories, but a cognitive technology that we developed and fine-tuned over thousands of years to meet very specific human needs: meaning, belonging, awe, structure, transcendence, moral clarity, community, and even singing together provides us with profound psychological relief and unity. It provides community, rituals, grief practices, and moral education. It is irreplaceable scaffolding.

She argues that secularism alone can’t be the answer because we are fundamentally storytelling creatures. We are moved by stories and music and shared gatherings, not by spreadsheets or products. She believes we need a post-secular vision that combines the intellectual honesty of science with the emotional wisdom of tradition and a spirituality that honors reason but also knows how to speak in poetry, one that isn’t allergic to ritual or afraid of the word sacred.

Final Thoughts

We’re seeing a new breed of religious debate wholly different from the evangelists versus the New Atheists dynamic. We’re increasingly seeing atheists and religious people debate each other not from the standpoint that the other’s worldview is fundamentally silly and immature, but from the recognition that there are genuinely compelling reasons both to believe in God and to doubt His existence. It’s a new spirit of debate that makes the tension all the more palpable. These questions are far deeper and more resistant to easy dismissal than the New Atheists ever gave them credit for.