It's No Great Awakening
Why a "Gen Z Christian Revival" Isn't Here, and Why It May Never Come
Christianity in post-war America was undergoing a radical transformation. Old churches were collapsing, new ones were being formed, and the manner in which Americans went about professing and practicing their religion was changing. These were the times of what is sometimes called the Fourth Great Awakening, the era of Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Indeed, there was something of a revival going on in the culture. Church attendance was up, membership was widespread, and interest in new denominations contributed to a constant cultural fixation on matters of religion. The turn into the 1970s was arguably the peak of Christian cultural relevance in modern America, with 91% of the population identifying—confidently—as devout Christians. But by 2022, this number would be 64%. In just 50 years, America has transformed from an unquestionably Christian culture to a much more anxious one. How often we prayed, went to church, called upon God, swore oaths on the Good Book, and cited it as supreme on matters of law or morality—all of these things were in steep decline up until the present day.
And yet today, there is much talk of a revival—a quiet revival! Whispers of something of a Fifth Great Awakening, where Americans will once again snap out of their slumber and return to the historical mean. This quiet “Gen Z Christian Revival” has been shouted everywhere in the papers this year, see here, here, or here. In the alternative media sphere of the right this is especially true, with shows and podcasts from Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, PragerU, and even a film promoting various anecdotes, data points, and rationalizations of a revival in Christianity fueled by younger generations. But is it actually happening, and if it is, under what terms?
Conjectures and anecdotes are all well and good, but what does empirical data show? Surprisingly, we have exceptionally good and up-to-date works of this nature, including two landmark studies that track religiosity in the US: Pew Research's Religious Landscape Survey, and Harvard’s Cooperative Election Study. These are high-quality surveys issued out to thousands of people at frequent intervals, giving us a good insight into the changing landscape of American religiosity over time. Both show the same thing: there is no evidence of an Awakening in the short term following the dramatic cultural setting of the COVID pandemic, and long-term demographic trends point to a society that will increasingly secularize, not the other way around.
Pew Research’s Religious Landscape Survey (RLS) provides reports on religiosity in American society at the 2007, 2014, and 2024 markers. In addition, it performs its National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) annually, giving insight into trends within short-term intervals. According to these, the past two decades American society has seen a dramatic shift towards irreligiosity, to whatever extent is meant by this category. Moving away from the nearly universal Christian culture of the Silent Generation, by the Millennials and Gen Z of 2024, we are upon a Christian minority in pure identification. We see this trend not only across all demographics and generations, but between each successive generation: with one exception, Gen Z, who is identical to Millennials. When shifting to the NPORS to see annual intervals, we can clearly see a plateau, but little evidence of a much talked about dramatic revival.
What about metrics of piety, such as prayer, church attendance, and the importance of religion? Here, we see an identical outcome: a dramatic decrease in the 2000s and 2010s, followed by a plateau in the 2020s—without a “revival” in sight. Daily prayer is stuck around 45% (down from 58% in 2007), and acknowledgement of religion as “very important” is lingering at about 38% (down from 56% in 2007). While it wasn’t surveyed previously, the 2024 iteration found an interesting return that while 92% of Americans make moral decisions from reason and 75% from scientific information, only 53% do so from religious beliefs.
The annual Cooperative Election Study is finding much of the same. While we do see evidence of a leveling-off in irreligiosity in the last couple of years, it exists within a catastrophic decline of religious identification and piety. Gen Z has remained at roughly 45% “nothing in particular” since 2020, but this is nearly double of Boomers at 24%. Further, no Christian denomination has seen more favor among Gen Z in contrast to Millennials: Protestantism decreased from 27% to 22% from Millennials to Z, while Catholicism has held at 16% (down from 22% among Silents). Full credit to Ryan Burge for compiling the CES data into these helpful graphics:
Clearly, good and up-to-date survey data does not point to any sort of Christian “revival” in American culture. It remains stuck in the same miserable place it found itself in roughly a decade ago, and Gen Z exhibits religious attitudes that are almost identical to the archetypal irreligiosity of their Millennial older siblings. If anyone, it is Gen X who seems to be seeing the most movement, likely explained by their aging. One plausible explanation is that we are not seeing a revival, but a completion of the previous era of apostasy. Those who had only marginal or weak associations with Christianity have left, while the remaining portion of believers are far more resolute.
Now, it may be replied that this 1% drop in irreligiosity is a sign of things to come. The revival has only just begun, and successive reports will show exactly this. Though this is conjectural and hardly an argument, maybe so. But for larger problems for the cultural relationship between religion and the West, we have good reason to seriously doubt such a prediction.
The problem that shrouds Christianity today is not necessarily disbelief. People were not burning their Bibles in the streets en masse, and indeed, the portion of “nones” made up by avowed atheists remains incredibly small. Proponents of such a revival believe they are fighting a cultural element with a date of birth no later than the 1960s, an aspect of the larger cultural dominance of leftism in the West. But they are completely mistaken. What has happened is far more dangerous to religion, much harder to tackle than bringing the Ten Commandments back into the Capitol and such, and has been simmering for some centuries.
What instead happened was a complete and utter loss of Christianity's legitimacy, as both an institution and a revealed dogma which overrules personal experience. It is not that people stopped being religious (or even Christian), but that they no longer require Christianity to tell them what religion is, and all this entails. As the late Robert Bellah had pointed out, the leading cultural edge in the West no longer entails obligations to the doctrinal orthodoxy of Christian institutions, but an effort to make sense of one’s own existence at the level of the individual. Wherever doctrinal creeds are espoused, an implicitly-understood personal reinterpretation is enacted. Whereas previous peoples relied on the spoken word of priests to guide their lives, today we lean primarily on our intuition and experience of the world. Even for evangelicals, the emphasis of a personal relationship with Jesus is central to their religiosity. Historically, the job of the Church has been to prevent these personal reinterpretations from proliferating too widely, and never has it been more utterly incapable of doing so. As has often been quipped, the Protestant Reformation did not get rid of the Pope, but made it so that every man could have his own.
For this reason, most “nones” have retained a number of residual Christian beliefs, even after apostasizing. According to the 2024 RLS again, a minority (41%) of nones are purely materialist, with most (57%) believing in some type of supernatural world. 69% of them believe in human souls, and 34% of them believe in heaven—including, curiously, 5% of atheists. Yet of course, there is likely an unimaginable diversity of belief contained within these yes-or-no survey responses. Looking into the trends within Christian denominations as well, we can see good evidence of this observation. For example, the majority of American Christians are absurdly heretical: according to Ligonier Ministries’ 2023 State of Theology report, 51% believe God changes (modalism), 71% believe we are born innocent and without sin (Pelagianism), and 73% of evangelicals believe Jesus was the greatest being created by God (Arianism). If this is the Christianity being revived, what would previous generations make of such a form, much less men such as Augustine or Athanasius?
Why then, despite all of this, do we still have this insistence that a “revival” is currently under way?
For starters, we have to first note that certain circles on the religious right (especially trad Catholics) have long gamed this act of “speaking into mainstream existence” a number of their beliefs, be it out of wish-casting or a concerted effort. Typically this involves wildly exaggerating a news line from the week into a massive cultural piece, perhaps hoping to generate some form of “viral” traction and renewed interest in the religion. We saw this fairly recently with the sudden promotion of the Shroud of Turin as definitively, provably-real through a number of podcast and video rants, all of which were spurred by the recirculation of the WAXS study that had already been available for over 3 years. There is certainly some of this going on here, with a well-established Christian media seeking to appeal to young men that church is “cool” and “countercultural”. The traditionalist/Christian right (whatever you wish to call it) does indeed wield a respectable amount of influence in new media, and are going to use that influence to steer younger consumers towards their worldview. Though Christians are of course allowed to evangelize, this cultural lobbying campaign we are witnessing is important to recognize as such, no matter how sincere any specific orator may be.
But more generally, I believe we are seeing more of the aforementioned personalization of religion, with the implicit identification between religious and ideology beliefs. Of course, a sincerely-held religion is central to one’s worldview and has immediate consequences on the latter's formulation. In our case however, we are seeing an understanding that Christianity necessarily equates to a right-wing disposition, at least among right-wing Christians. Therefore, when the right enjoys a level of cultural ascendancy (which it undeniably has in the Trump era), those individuals believe that Christianity has likewise enjoyed a level of cultural ascendancy, as the two in their mind are inseparable. This would come as a shock to the other half of the Gen Z right-wing who does not hold this association, and it was not that long ago when Christian institutions representing everything between Lutherans, Baptists, and the Catholic Church facilitated the precise animating issue of the Trump coalition: mass migration.
As our culture stands today, the efforts of the New Atheist movement has completely failed to make serious inroads against the actual spiritual beliefs of Americans, contributing only to a further delegitimizing of religious institutions as a part of a process that has been occurring for centuries. It seems that the promoters of a revival correctly state that some level of religiosity is intrinsic to the human condition. But what they have not understood is that the general condition of malaise Christianity finds itself in is not significantly explained by the intellectual chevauchées of TEDTalk atheists, or even institutional and magisterial forces of the late 20th Century which all but demand secularization. It is most significantly the West’s conception of religion itself that is at question, and it is not guaranteed that it will even settle upon a public form of one. Devout personal belief in what one conceives as “God” is one thing, but orienting all of society upon that conception above nearly all others is another—and the prospect of achieving such an ordering seems increasingly impossible.
Perhaps a revival will come Christianity's way in some time. It has of course pulled itself out of deeper demographic woes before. But it is not here yet, and reports of a “Gen Z Christian Revival” have been greatly exaggerated—perhaps in some cases intentionally to will this into existence. At best, we see a short-term rest after a long hike into irreligiosity. Gen Z remains the most irreligious demographic in existence, and as older more religious demographics die off, we will see an increase in the general irreligiosity of this country over time. More importantly, larger cultural trends and realizations in the West make the prospects of a potential later revival to anything approaching its former glory all the more unlikely.
Despite sound predictions, we cannot see into the future. If a Fifth Great Awakening does indeed occur, it may not come in the form that contemporaries intend it to. Gen Z remains more heretical, less likely to attend church, and less likely to have denominational affiliations than any other. It is, still, the most irreligious generation in modern history. Most importantly, any prospect of using it for cultural utility must first overcome a momentum that Christianity itself had set into motion some centuries ago. Until then, we can safely declare that this “Gen Z Christian Revival” remains a culturally and politically insignificant fantasy.
It also can't be stressed enough that the plateau in Christianity's decline came at the exact moment that the borders were opened (mainly from countries with relatively higher religiosity). If Trump's remigration plan finds a decent amount of success, I wouldn't be surprised if we once again start seeing Christianity dropping at the rates seen throughout the 00's & 10's.
Young men converting to Christianity want a tight-knit community of people who look like them that they can lead. After conversion, they find a hollowed out husk of old White boomers with liberal racial attitudes and mullato mystery meat Democrat voters, even in the most "conservative" churches. The prognosis for growth is not good.