(LifeSiteNews) — “Generation Z,” the cohort born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, is witnessing an unexpected revival of faith, particularly in Christianity, according to the latest findings.
Over the course of only a few years, YouGov identified a sharp rise in belief in God among young people in the U.K. Strikingly, belief in God among British youth aged 18-24 nearly tripled between 2021 and 2025, rising from 18 percent to 46 percent.
For many of us in this generation, the news isn’t too surprising. Having grown up amid the collapse of postwar ideals, we see the failures of a secular society that rejected God and is cannibalizing itself.
I am part of this trend. I converted to Catholicism in 2021, after a period of attending Mass during my time at university in Oslo. Like many of my peers, I began my journey to faith as a result of a deep dissatisfaction with the cultural and societal landscape I was inheriting. I had little if any religious patronage or observance in my youth. I’m one of many. Not a few of my friends are also converts. We talk – frequently. And I know of their backgrounds, their stories, their loves, their grievances. So while I can’t speak for all involved in this trend, I can certainly speak for some.
What we’re seeing among “Gen Z” (as they are called) often begins with a reaction to the failures of the beliefs, teachings and projects of the contemporary world and their manifest results in their own lives. Secularism, the fruitless disillusionment and confusion brought about by postmodernism, and the disintegration of the values that once held Western societies together make a sour cocktail. This means you’re not likely to find among Gen Z the typical idealistic optimism associated with youth since World War II.
Our generation is the first to inherit the full consequences of a world built on postwar, postmodern and 1960s countercultural thinking. We were raised in a society that rejected religion, assuming that abandoning faith would lead to a utopia where “all you need is love” (and John Lennon). But instead, what we’ve seen is widespread family breakdown, fatherless children, social chaos, slavery to sexual appetite and an inability to grapple with fundamental truths such as defining what a woman or Englishman is.
There’s a remarkably stark contrast between the glorious world of the Renaissance and Baroque – where great works of art, music and architecture flourished – and the culture we see today, which seems more concerned with shallow materialism and ephemeral pleasures. Where our ancestors built cathedrals and celebrated the finest art, we’re left with empty entertainment and the crass commercialism of pop culture. Sin is celebrated, and as knife crime proliferates among teenagers in British schools, many young people no longer feel they can count on our fellow man to uphold basic standards of decency. Gen Z is beginning to sense the contrast between the successes of the past and failures of the present as it grows evermore stark.
In this context, it’s no surprise that many of us feel a growing sense of unease about the future. We’re entering adulthood in a world where negative birth rates and demographic shifts point to a future of instability and fragmentation. We are not having enough children to avoid a catastrophic collapse in the near future. Moreover, the idea that entire nations, like Ireland, could see their native populations become minorities (balkanizing and making the historical nation evermore unstable) in just a few decades isn’t distant or abstract to us, for we are the ones who will live through it. As our societies fracture, we’re looking for something that offers more than the materialistic worldview we’ve inherited.
The reason for this is simple: ideas matter. Ideas shape reality. We live in a world where ideas – often ones that were conceived generations ago – are still bearing fruit, for better or for worse. The ideas of Marx, for example, fueled the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. The Enlightenment’s vision politically secularized Europe. And more recently, postmodernism, the 1960s cultural revolution and the rise of liberalism have produced a society marked by confusion, nihilism and a deep sense of moral uncertainty. Liberal democracy, once touted as the pinnacle of political development and its final destination, has shown its flaws – its inability to address the deep crises which threaten to submerge a 2000-year-old civilization.
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As a result, Gen Z is disillusioned. We’re acutely aware that the cultural models of previous generations have failed and many of us are rejecting the ideologies that led us here.
Findings support this analysis. One recent study found more than half of Gen Z wish to live under a dictatorship rather than a democracy. This generation radically questions the novel postwar orthodoxies it was fed. The old sacred cows are not theirs.
But why, then, are so many of us turning toward God? What draws us to religion in such large numbers? This is where the pull factors come into play.
There are several reasons why so many young people are returning to faith. The first, I think, is the increasing accessibility of religious resources. Today, the internet has revolutionized access to knowledge. Anyone with an internet connection can listen to podcasts, watch video lectures and read texts by some of the greatest minds in Christian thought. For example, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians are now just a click away. This easy access to high-quality intellectual content has allowed many of us to engage with the richness of the Christian tradition in a way that was once unimaginable to the medieval monk.
Moreover, the very quality and truth and intellectual depth of Christian theology itself is proving to be more compelling than many of us anticipated. For many of us, this intellectual engagement with Christianity has been transformative in all the right ways.
In addition to this ideational appeal, there’s also a tangibly practical aspect to the return to faith. Studies have shown that religious observance is correlated with higher levels of happiness and stability. This is a living apologetic argument in itself. If there was a God who offered vital grace, lingering behind the veil of the cosmos, this is exactly what we’d expect to see. For a generation raised in a world where family life has been fractured by divorce and sexual liberation, the old sanity of God and the religious family beckons.
But there’s another, more existential reason for the rise in religious interest among Gen Z: materialism just doesn’t work. The secular worldview, which reduces everything to physical processes and denies the existence of anything beyond the material realm, has proven to be insufficient. It fails to explain fundamentals such as consciousness, mathematics, forms and ideas, existence itself. The more we engage with these questions, the more we realize that materialism offers no answers.
Many in Gen Z are discovering the objectivity and truth of Catholicism, traditional Christianity and classical monotheism is a stronger philosophical system that holds individual lives, families and society together – leading them on the path to beatification, love, sacrifice and flourishing in an increasingly disordered world.
So why do so many of us find solace in Christianity? Christ provides a pathway to a life that is deeper, richer and more meaningful than anything that secular ideologies have to offer. Liturgy, contemplation, sacrifice, love and mystery activate the consciousness in far more profound ways than the comparatively mundane sedative effects of the movie theater, sex, drugs and the holiday swimming pool. The quality of the old has been found greater than the artificiality of the new.
In Edinburgh, for example, I once met an eloquent Chinese student who was finishing his PhD in physics. He converted because St. Thomas Aquinas’ hylomorphic philosophy made better sense of reality than anything he had been taught up to that point. I think this to be a fitting anecdote.
Some have expressed incredulity and mused about the potential inaccuracy of the YouGov poll. How much of this is accounted for by immigration? How deep does this mere ill-defined “belief in God” go? These are all entirely legitimate questions. But my own experience, combined with upticks in adult baptisms and conversions to Catholicism in Britain, France, and the U.S., suggests the change is real, whatever the scale may be.
For Gen Z, the revival of faith is largely about embracing a future that embraces truth long discarded by a suicidal contemporary world. Increasing numbers of Gen Z are turning back to the timeless truths that have sustained civilization for centuries. As the world darkens, the lone source of authentic light stands out ever more clearly.
