“As someone who just moved there from out of state, Midwest, I don’t know anything about New York,” the 23-year-old recalls thinking. “I don’t really have that many friends. I don’t have community. And I definitely don’t know where to go to mass. I would just look it up on ChatGPT. Like I would want to go at night, I’d say, ‘What’s a 5 p.m. mass near me?’”
“The place was packed,” he says. “You had to show up 10 minutes early. You could barely get a seat. Everybody was under the age of 30.”
Pastors and priests from across the country have said that they’ve observed more young people attending their services: Bishop John Dolan of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, for instance, says his diocese saw hundreds of people baptized over Easter weekend, most of them Gen Z. Young Christian influencers have also gone viral online. Media outlets have published articles about church being the new Gen Z “hot spot.”
But researchers and political scientists have cast doubt on whether those anecdotes are reflective of a widespread trend. In a report released in December, the Pew Research Center said that its polls, as well as other reputable surveys, “show no clear evidence” of a “nationwide religious resurgence” among young people. (The center’s report breaks some of its findings down by “Christianity,” “no religion,” and “other religion.” Many other religion-related surveys don’t break their findings down by different religious traditions; political scientists say that the majority of Americans are Christian, so it can be difficult to draw nationwide trends on other faiths based on the data.)
If you look at survey findings, says Ryan Burge, a former pastor who is now a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, there’s no indication of a religious revival among young people. The data does show that religiosity, which refers to the depth of a person’s religious beliefs, has been holding steady since about 2020 after years of decline—but, Burge says, “that’s not a resurgence.”
Burge says the dissonance between the narrative of a religious revival and what the nationwide data is showing could be because “outlier stories are the ones that stick in our minds.”
“One reason we might be seeing the dissonance is that the news media often likes to run stories that run counter to the typical conventional wisdom,” says Melissa Deckman, the chief executive officer of the PRRI. “So I think there might be some legitimate cases where we see an uptick in individual churches where more young people are coming to join or attending services regularly … but I would caution against looking at anecdotes as being the same things as general trends.”
Read More: Religion’s Longstanding Gender Gap Is Narrowing Among Gen Z. But Which Gender Is Narrowing It—and Why?
“And yet another [possibility] is there really isn’t a religious revival at all,” he continues. “There have always been examples of particular congregations that are able to draw in young people; it’s just nobody had stitched them together into a common narrative until now.”
Last year, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix began working on an initiative that involved holding listening sessions with young people about their thoughts and feelings on various topics, including faith and family life. What the diocese found, Dolan says, is that young people are wanting—and finding, through the church—“a sense of belonging, a sense of healing from family instability and personal trauma and mental health struggles, [and] a sense of formation.” Young people also said they are searching for “a sense of safety,” Dolan says, adding that the church is “kind of a refuge of reverence and stability; it’s a place where they can step out of this hectic world.”
“When we look at Gen Z, which has grown up amid constant chaos and really a loneliness epidemic, it makes sense why this cohort would be moving into religion as an organized form of not only community and a sense of belonging, but it also gives them purpose and a way to find meaning in a world that has felt very chaotic,” Janfaza says.
And he attributes that to young people craving community, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“And in times like that,” he says, people may feel like, “‘I can’t play this game of life alone, and I need somebody else that I can put my trust in, and someone else that I can believe in, and someone else that I know at the end of the day loves me and is going to lead me down a path for a greater good.’”
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