Contrary to sensationalized headlines, sociological data indicates that the US is not experiencing a religious revival, particularly among Gen Z. Instead, there is a plateau in religious affiliation and practice following a long-term decline, with younger generations showing significantly lower levels of religious engagement than older ones.
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If you only read the headlines, you'd
think that the US is in the middle of a
religious revival led by Gen Z. USA
Today, Gen Z is returning to
Christianity. Axios, young men are
leading a religious resurgence. And
here's a very confident claim from the
evangelical ministry, the Gospel
Coalition. It's here. Gen Z revival hits
campuses. But if you read sociological
data inside the headlines, the picture
looks very different. A real revival
would leave a clear statistical
footprint and it's just not there. To
see this, let's zoom out and look at one
of the most respected studies, the Pew
Research Cent's 2023 2024 religious
landscape study. This is a massive study
of nearly 37,000 Americans designed to
track their religious identity, beliefs,
and practices over time. And here's the
topline finding. Back in 2007, about 78%
of American adults identified as
Christian. By 2024, that number sat at
roughly 63%. So the Christian population
of the US is dramatically smaller than
it used to be. But notice here that this
long downward slide is not continuing at
the same pace. Over the last 5 years or
so, the graph has stabilized, hovering
in roughly the 60 to 64% range. And we
can see this also in measures of prayer
and church attendance. The share of
adults who say they pray daily, for
example, has fallen dramatically since
2007, but since 2021, it has stabilized
in the mid-40s. Monthly attendance to a
religious service tells the same story,
leveling off in the low30s since around
2020. And we also see a slowing in the
rise of religiously unaffiliated people,
the so-called nuns, that is Nes,
the folks who check the nun box on the
survey question, what religion are you?
They make up around 29% of US adults in
the latest surveys, and they've been
bouncing around that same range over the
last few years. In other words, we're
not seeing a third great awakening.
We're seeing more of a religious
plateau, an unmistakable long-term
decline in Christian identification and
a short-term stabilization. But here's
the piece that matters most to the whole
narrative of a Gen Z revival. Even
though the overall decline has slowed,
younger adults remain much less likely
to be Christian than older adults. In
that same survey, only around 46% of 18
to 24 year olds identify as Christian.
Only 27% of them pray daily and 25%
attend a religious service monthly. This
is a huge generational gap when we
compare to older adults. The sociologist
Ryan Burge, an author of The Vanishing
Church, backed this up when he dug into
multiple data sets. Using data from the
General Social Survey, Burge notes that
the percentage of people who say they
believe in God, without a doubt, drops
with each generation. Boomers are
highest at 57% and that drops down to
40% with Gen Z. And he notes the biggest
drop is the most recent shift from
millennials to Gen Z. A drop of eight
points of people who confidently believe
in God. And when Burge looked at
attendance, Gen Z comes out as the least
church attending generation in American
history with only 17% attending weekly.
Though the number that really jumps out
is the 38% of Gen Z who never attends.
Way higher than any generation before
them. As for religious identification,
we see something similar with the Pew
study. After decades of steady growth,
the share of American adults who say
they have no religious affiliation has
mostly flattened out. So taken together,
is there a Gen Z revival? Well, Gen Z
has the lowest levels of confident
belief in God and the highest rates of
never going to church of any generation
measured. Yes, the explosive growth of
religious disaffiliation has slowed, but
nothing here looks like a dramatic
return to organized religion. Attendance
hasn't bounced back and belief hasn't
surged. So, if the major data sets all
show the same thing, low belief, low
attendance, and historically high levels
of non-religion among Gen Z, why do we
keep seeing headlines about a Gen Z
revival? Well, a big part of the answer
is that some of these claims are built
on flawed data or on media outlets
misreading what the data actually says.
For example, consider a recent study
from the UK making similar claims. A
report from an organization called the
Bible Society argued that church
attendance in England and Wales had
exploded since 2018. According to their
numbers, attendance among men aged 18 to
24 supposedly jumped from 4% to 21% in
just a few years. But the sociologist
David Voas, one of the leading experts
on religious change, took a closer look
at the data and said, "Not so fast." The
most trusted national survey, the
British Social Attitude Study, shows the
exact opposite trend. Churchgoing
declined between 2018 and 2023, and
individual denominations reported the
same. While the Bible Society claimed
that Catholic Church attendance had
doubled, data from the Catholic Church
itself actually showed a sizable drop
during the same period. So, where did
the whole revival story come from? VOAS
argues it was the study's methodology.
The Bible Society used an online opt-in
panel run by Yuggov. People volunteer to
join these panels, which means the
sample is not truly random, and that
matters a lot, especially with young
adults. They're a notoriously hard group
to survey accurately, and the ones who
do participate in these online panels
tend to look very different from their
peers. They're the young adults who are
more settled, easier to reach, and more
likely to already be involved in church
life than the average young adult. This
can create the illusion of a massive
surge, but you're actually just seeing a
skewed sample. Dr. Vos's bottom line is
the old cliche that extraordinary claims
require extraordinary data, and the
evidence here is just not strong enough.
When you compare these revival headlines
to the durable long-term surveys, the
probability based ones that actually
track national trends, nothing suggests
a dramatic return to organized religion
in the UK. In other cases, the Gen Z
revival narrative comes from
misunderstanding the underlying data.
Take for example this Fox News article
from October 2025, Gen Z men returning
to church in surprising numbers in faith
resurgence. It summarizes the findings
of a study conducted by the Bara Group,
saying church attendance has increased
among Gen Z and millennial men, showing
signs of a return to church that
surpasses older generations. But that's
not what the underlying study shows. Not
even close. Dr. Burge pointed out the
key detail that apparently everyone at
Fox missed. The Bara study doesn't
measure Gen Z as a whole. It only was
looking at Gen Z who are already
churchgoers. Not all of young adults,
not the general population, just the
ones who already attend church. So the
study's actual finding is much more
narrow. Among the subset of Gen Z who
already go to church, they attend
slightly more often than the subset of
millennials who already go to church.
And the difference is not dramatic.
Churchgoing Gen Z attend about 1.9 times
per month, and churchgoing millennials
attend about 1.8 8 times per month. But
that tiny effect gets translated into
the headline, Gen Z men returning to
church in growing numbers. And I'm not
saying that a millennial or Gen Z
revival is impossible, but reversing the
current trend would demand a shift on a
scale that we've simply never seen in
all of American history. And it's truly
staggering when you put it into numbers.
Dr. Burge points out that to bring
millennials back to the level of
religious affiliation as their parents,
you would need around 10 million
millennials to reaffiliate. and Gen Z,
which starts from an even lower
baseline, you would require around 18
million to reaffiliate. He writes,
"There's no sign of that happening in
any data set. The reality is that there
hasn't been a single event in the past
50 years that sparked a sustained
measurable rise in religious attendance
in the United States." So the real
question is, does this plateau, which we
do see in the data, does this signal the
start of a religious rebound or is it
simply a pause in a longerterm decline?
I think it's simply a pause based on
what we know about non-religion and
generational change. When people imagine
a revival, they picture, you know,
dramatic moments, mass conversions,
people suddenly flooding back into
churches, a sudden spiritual awakening.
But religion in the real world usually
shifts through generations. parents
passing on their religion to their kids.
And a growing body of sociological
research shows that non-religion tends
to be remarkably stable across
generations. A recent study of school
kids in England, fittingly titled the
stickiness of non-religion, helps to
illustrate this. The sociologist found
that when parents are already
non-religious, their kids typically
adopt the same stance through simple
absence of religion in daily life. At
home, religion is not talked about.
There are no rituals, no social or
behavioral expectations rooted in a
particular religious culture. In that
environment, not being religious becomes
the default. And one of the striking
takeaways from this broader line of
research is just how strongly this
non-religious default carries on
forward. One landmark finding from the
early 2000s is that if you're raised by
two Christian parents in Britain, you
have maybe a 50/50 chance of remaining
Christian as an adult. But if you're
raised with no religion, the odds that
you'll stay non-religious are
overwhelmingly high, well over 90% in
some studies. Of course, we're talking
about the UK and not the US. And the US
has shown to be remarkably resistant
when it comes to secularization compared
to Europe. But these studies are why,
for me, the idea of a Gen Z revival is
so hard to square with the data. If
younger generations of Americans are
already starting at lower levels of
belief and practice, and if non-religion
itself is this sticky across
generations, then a dramatic return to
organized religion becomes even harder
to imagine as Gen Z starts to have kids.
So when you hear claims about a Gen Z
revival, everything we're seeing across
belief, behavior, belonging, and
childhood transmission points to not a
resurgence, but a plateau and possibly
beneath that plateau, the stickiness of
non-religion that tends to flow in one
direction generation after generation.
So despite the headlines, the data leads
us somewhere much less dramatic. And a
lot of that comes down to how we
understand the information we're
swimming in. And one of the best
creators exploring that broader media
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