Forget the doom and gloom — the future is open for Gen Z and religion

There’s more to the story about religion in America than what polls and surveys indicate — especially among young people.

Consider two recent statements made by one of America’s most prolific religious demographers, Daniel Cox. On the one hand, in a report examining Gen Z’s religious attendance and affiliation trends, he wrote: “In terms of identity, Generation Z is the least religious generation yet.”

On the other hand, in a co-written report about faith after the pandemic, this: “Increasingly, religious affiliation may tell us less about the full range of religious and spiritual experiences Americans have and the extent of their theological commitments.”

Our research findings confirm this tension: Gen Z expresses religiosity and spirituality, but in ways that defy traditional polling measures.

In this new reality, faith leaders can accept existing data as evidence of declining demand for religion among young people and just keep trying to get them back in the church building.

But we firmly believe that the decline narrative is not the full story. We think the better option for faith leaders is to transform their approach to young people in a way that recognizes how they actually are engaging with faith and spiritual practices.

At Springtide Research Institute, we are discovering that in reality, a majority of America’s “least religious generation” identifies as religious (68%) or spiritual (77%) — a fact that changed little even as their already low religious attendance dropped off further during the pandemic.

So what’s going on with young people?

For decades, sociologists and demographers have looked to two primary indicators of religiosity in individuals or society: affirmed beliefs (e.g., “Do you believe in God with no doubts?”) and frequency of attendance at religious services.

A recent article based on these indicators, for example, doubles down on the thesis that the U.S. is undergoing a process of secularization.

But it’s important to look more closely. This same article notes: “Of course, compared to most other wealthy countries, the U.S. is quite religious. Fifty-five percent of Americans, for example, say they pray daily, compared to an average of 22% of Europeans.”

This includes 47% of Gen Zers who pray at least weekly, according to Springtide’s 2022 annual State of Religion & Young People report.

With Gen Z, traditional indicators of affiliation and attendance no longer explain what’s happening. Cox and his co-authors call this the “decoupling of identity and experience.”

There are far too many voices pronouncing God “dead” (or at least dying) for Gen Z without the full range of evidence needed to back up such a claim.

Those indicators cannot tell you, for example, that numerous young people engage with crystals and herbs, anime, activism and politics, tarot, and nature as spiritual exercises.

Before dismissing these practices as New Age frivolities, consider that young Latter-day Saints and Muslims — groups that traditionally hold more conservative/orthodox religious beliefs — were among the most likely to engage with tarot or other forms of divination on a regular basis (38% and 35%, respectively).

Gen Zers engage in these practices even as they tag along with mainstream religious traditions. We also know that young people who engage in practices like these reap some of the benefits that accompany traditional religious behaviors and expressions.

For example, while 17% of all young people say they are flourishing in their faith, this number increases for young people who engage spiritually with crystals and herbs weekly or daily.

Similarly, while 24% of all young people say they’re flourishing in their mental and emotional health, this number increases for young people who engage with crystals or herbs weekly.

We’re not arguing that Christian churches should replace liturgy with crystals. But a deeper understanding of young adults’ faith and practices can help churches connect with them.

Some faith communities have picked up on Gen Z’s unconventional spiritual quest, dumping traditional programs in favor of eclectic, peer-driven activities that promote what Gen Z says it lacks most: a sense of belonging.

One example is Table Bread, a ministry of The Table United Methodist Church in Sacramento, California. The church discovered that the baking and breaking of bread created community for young people that helped alleviate their isolation and loneliness. As they form authentic relationships around baking bread, the participants have rich and honest conversations centered on Wesleyan concepts and questions.

The project eventually evolved into a youth-led social enterprise that is forming an intergenerational community through farming and bread making. Yet a young person’s participation in these initiatives might not register under traditional survey measures of religious identity and attendance.

And take a look at what happened in February 2023 at Asbury University, where a garden-variety chapel service ignited a two-week, continuous revival, drawing nearly 50,000 students and visitors from around the country. It also sparked similar events on other campuses.

Daniel Darling, a bestselling Christian author and pastor, wrote in response to the Asbury revival:

“I’m bullish on Gen Z. God is doing something. I’ve seen it on our own campus. I’ve seen it on campuses where I’ve preached. We need wisdom and discernment, but I don’t want to be the cranky old guy who obsesses over trend lines, nitpicks away and misses a movement of the Spirit.”

To be sure, the revival has its skeptics. However, whether one is a doubter or a believer in the Asbury revival, the event at least suggests that maybe the experts don’t have the full story on where young Americans are headed with religion. In fact, one could argue that we simply cannot know for sure right now.

Returning to the findings of researcher Daniel Cox: “What most distinguishes Generation Z from previous generations is not that Gen Zers are more likely to leave their childhood religion, but rather that many of them lacked a religious upbringing.”

Cox notes that 15% of Gen Zers report being raised in nonreligious households, more than twice the rate of Gen Xers (6%) and five times the rate of baby boomers (3%).

Many of them say they don’t know how to connect to communities of faith. Almost 40% of young people in Springtide’s 2021 annual State of Religion & Young People report agreed with the statement, “I would not even think to go to a faith community because it is not something I’ve ever gone to before.”

More than half said, “I’m not sure how to get connected to a new faith community.”

The decline of institutional trust, the increase in demographic diversity and the rise of social media, among other factors, mean that young people are operating in a different social environment than the one that gave rise to the successful program-driven models of youth engagement over the past 50 years.

What can faith leaders do in place of programs? They can invest in building trust through authentic relationships with young people rather than relying on institutional authority to do the lifting. They can promote belonging to the same degree as believing. They can address the issues that young people care about, like racial and ethnic identity and mental health. They can bake and break bread.

At Springtide, we know that there are more examples of innovative approaches to engaging young people, because young people tell us about them all the time.

With a new grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., we are excited to spend the next three years identifying the who and the what behind those approaches and why they are so successful with young people, with the goal of developing frameworks that can be adapted and applied in faith communities everywhere.

We are excited to tell a new story — perhaps even the true story — about the spiritual potential of young Americans. Among the epitaphs written about young people and the church, we hope to announce new births — and to normalize a posture of hope and anticipation for the exciting places young people will take religion in the years to come.

Twenty-five years ago, the book “Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People,” compiled and edited by Dorothy C. Bass, initiated a conversation about Christian practices that continues today.

“Practicing Our Faith” inspired a score of other books that explored specific practices, addressed different age groups, and encouraged theological reflection on practices in seminaries.

Bass, a practical theologian and historian of Christianity, has spoken widely on practices, vocation and spirituality. Her most recent book is “Stepmother: Redeeming a Disdained Vocation,” published by Broadleaf Books in April 2022.

She and Craig Dykstra — a major contributor to “Practicing Our Faith” — also led conversations and events about faith practices.

The other day a friend from graduate school called my office. She is now a pastor in nearby West Virginia, but I hadn’t seen her in years. She had a question she wanted to discuss and wondered if we could meet for lunch if she made the ninety-minute drive to the seminary where I teach. She told me over the phone that she knows people who have spiritual directors — guides in the life of prayer and life with God — with whom they meet once a month or so to help them find their way through the darkness and confusion that life often is. I assume they had told her the benefits of having such a soul friend: the zone of nonjudgment they create; the way they have no agenda for your life; the value of knowing a holy chat is scheduled monthly; the sheer gift of having a place where you can laugh or cry, ponder or rage without fear; the little light their presence can cast into the dimness of your soul. She’d started to wonder whether spiritual direction would be good for her, too.

“I’d like to talk to you about whether I might be a good candidate for spiritual direction,” she said. I agreed to chat over lunch. I looked forward to seeing an old friend. And the hands-down best Thai restaurant in Pittsburgh is just a mile away from the seminary. I love to take people there and recommend the pumpkin curry at a spice level not to exceed “four.” But it was winter, and she’d have a two-hour hilly drive and would need to check the forecast before embarking. So maybe I should have saved her the trouble of coming. Just knowing she was thinking about spiritual direction enough to wonder whether she was a good candidate, just by hearing how she had spoken with friends who were benefiting from this practice, and just by realizing she would be willing to brave the hills in the snow to have a conversation over an excellent curry dish, I had all the information I needed. “Yes,” I should have told her. “You are a good candidate for spiritual direction.”

Some folks might have the same question about contemplative praying and living: Am I a good candidate for that? If there are any doubts, it’s because we carry around in our minds stereotypical pictures of spiritual people, contemplative types who seem nothing like us: robed monks with sandaled feet and impossible haircuts who shuffle to prayer seven times a day, sometimes at hours when there’s some question whether even God is awake. Desert hermits who live in caves and have friends deliver to them a loaf of crusty bread once a week to sustain them through their extreme ascetic practices, perhaps splurging on a plate of simple vegetables on feast days. Famous gurus who trumpet through their books, their podcasts, and their Twitter accounts that they are genuine mystics, lost in a profound oneness with the All. No way am I a candidate for that kind of life, we think.

Or sometimes we read about contemplation, and it sounds so difficult, like a particular type of prayer that involves a lot of sitting and holding your hands just right and letting your vision go soft as you stare into a void — a kind of prayer you could only learn how to do if you signed up for a weeklong retreat, preferably at a facility on an idyllic island off the coast of Washington State. (There are a lot of contemplatives in the Pacific Northwest, right?) Odd people engaging in esoteric prayer on remote islands. Thanks, but no thanks. But what if the word contemplative doesn’t just name a narrowly defined kind of prayer — which it sometimes does — but also a possible approach to all prayer? What if the same word doesn’t denote a specific way of life — extreme, alone, with lots of somber sitting and eating simple vegetables — but can describe any life that seeks to be more open, available, and responsive to the One who is as present in an office cubicle as in a hermit’s cell? Sure, there are people living contemplatively in monasteries and convents (and people not living contemplatively there, too). There are also contemplatives working at library reference desks and delivering Amazon Prime packages, scrambling to complete tax returns in April and changing linens in hotel rooms. There are contemplatives talking about God from pulpits and contemplatives listening in the pews. And there are contemplatives in the colorful rooms beneath the sanctuary teaching the kids too young to endure preaching. Some of those kids are also contemplatives. In other words, most contemplatives are everyday contemplatives. When I look up the word everyday in the dictionary, I see it means “common” and “ordinary.” Like faded blue jeans in the dresser drawer. Like you and me. Maybe our pictures should be in the dictionary next to the word.

Parents and principals can live contemplatively. Doctors and lawyers can be attentive to the Divine. Custodians and dentists can be open to God. Hospital orderlies and nursing home residents all have the capability of opening and responding to the refrains of divine love being sung from the depth of every soul. Contemplatives are protesting with the Black Lives Matter movement. They are marching with the Poor People’s Campaign. Contemplatives might start by sitting in a La-Z-Boy, but they don’t stop there. Perhaps some of these folks, if they’ve been allowing themselves to learn this refrain of Love over a long period of time, walk just a little slower, make eye contact a little more often, listen more patiently as you answer their question, “How are you?” They seem to show up in their lives and in your life as their authentic, truest selves. But they don’t do so in a way that calls attention to themselves. More likely, it is in a way that gives greater attention to you. And they almost never announce that they have become contemplatives.

Thomas Merton writes that contemplative praying and living is a “response to a call: a call from [God] Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are words of [God].”

To live contemplatively means simply to approach life with openness, availability, and growing responsiveness to the God who speaks in everything, to the God who speaks from the depths of our very selves, to the God who spoke us into existence. If you were to Google the seminary where I teach, find my office phone number on the faculty page, and ring me to ask whether you’re a good candidate to be an everyday contemplative, I’d say three things.

First, I’d say, “Please call me ‘Roger.’”

Second, I’d ask, “How far away do you live, and what’s your opinion of pumpkin curry?”

Finally, I’d answer your question: “Yes, of course you are.”

From “Everyday Contemplative: The Way of Prayerful Living,” by L. Roger Owens. Copyright © 2022. Excerpted by permission of Upper Room Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

On Easter Sunday 2020, churches across the globe were closed in response to the pandemic.

During the course of the past two years, few could have anticipated the number of shifts that have happened in our individual congregations and communities.

As two researchers who have conducted extensive interviews in the post-Christian contexts of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Seattle, Washington, we have seen churches turn to the particular in the wake of COVID closures and restrictions.

Much of the research on churches’ response to the pandemic has explored the rise of digital church. Our research across these contexts reveals another story — a turn to the local, in which spiritual practices have been recalibrated. Even in instances when a worshipping community has employed technology to support its common practice, this work has been disciplined by its commitment to a neighborly faith. What is instructive is how these practices of neighborly faith have occurred against the backdrop of a local and ordinary Christian existence.

We completed 17 in-depth interviews with ministry leaders from two post-Christian contexts in the aftermath of COVID-19. Each was creatively drawing on local practices to renew the local mission.

Although separated by culture and geography, churches like Awake Church in Seattle, Washington, and Timaru Presbyterian in Aotearoa/New Zealand bear witness to how it is possible to thrive within limits by turning to the local. Throughout our interviews, we saw several practices that have sustained a neighborly faith in the time of COVID.

Walking and placemaking. When limits restricted gathering in local congregations, people took to the streets. A neighborly faith was pursued through the practice of walking in the contexts we researched. Historic Christian practices were redirected toward local geography in ways that took faith outside the church walls.

For Brent and Catherine Richardson of Timaru Presbyterian, their peripatetic practice became a site of discovery as they recognized an opportunity to serve their community in innovative ways. Noting the importance of walking, they spoke of how “you’re praying for the local area and you’re contemplating what’s happening.”

Other church leaders took familiar Christian practices, such as the Stations of the Cross, outside the church walls. With familiar places in local neighborhoods as sites for prayer, this public pilgrimage invited people to receive these familiar spaces as sites of divine encounter.

The innovations in localized spiritual practices that individuals across these contexts pursued were rooted in place. Church leaders encouraged people to be mindful of what the Spirit might be up to in the particularity of the streets where God had called them.

For pastors Andy Carlson and Hayden Wartes at Awake Church, placemaking was an organizing principle for their common life. Awake Church defines its mission in relation to the particular geography that surrounds the worshipping community.

Although the particularities of place differed, the pastors and the broader community learned how to receive the limits of their particular spaces as an invitation to practice a neighborly faith.

Slowing down and blessing others. While the limits of this period of time demanded a different pace for many leaders, an intentional effort to slow down became a practice that catalyzed innovation.

This was one of the insights Carlson and Wartes discovered at Awake Church: even when the world was turned upside down, they found slowing to be one form of faithful response.

Freed from a catalog of previous commitments (commutes, sporting events, social gatherings), Awake Church and other communities received the gift of a measured pace as an opportunity to practice a neighborly faith amid unaccustomed limits.

Leaders across contexts and communities of faith aimed to bless others despite the limitations they shared. Amid uncertainty, leaders and communities expressed the desire to work for the well-being of those they served, particularly in the time of heightened vulnerability.

Blessing took a variety of forms: offering prayer, extending hospitality, giving congregants space to discern how to respond to new limits on their lives, even if it meant worshipping elsewhere or not at all. Churches innovated by seeking ways to equip and resource local congregants to bless their neighborhoods.

Connecting and localizing care. Despite the unavoidable limits of social distancing, a shared commitment to connecting with people inspired leaders’ innovation across continents.

As Brent and Catherine Richardson of Timaru Presbyterian walked their community in the wake of COVID-19, they noticed teddy bears appearing in windows.

They wondered, “How do we as a church engage with the community when we can’t be open? Well, we have these windows and we have these teddies. What could the teddies do?”

In an answer to this question, teddy bears began to bear witness at Timaru Presbyterian. During Easter, at one window, bears gathered in a Last Supper tableau. At a second window, the cross had a ribbon. At a third window, bears ran toward an empty tomb.

“Really, the whole thing was about connection,” said Catherine Richardson as she described the inspiration for their playful witness with teddy bears.

These leaders experienced the disruption as a renewal of the need to be connected.

While the Richardsons offered playful witness to their neighbors, Carlson and Wartes experimented with what they called audio church. Following a period of rest and reflection after the first break in services due to COVID-19, Awake Church grounded its worshipping community, which was now dispersed, around audio church.

Resisting the allure of highly produced online church experiences, they crafted and distributed each recording with the intent that individuals would gather in their particular localities: their homes, their cars, in isolation.

Audio church provided a flexible liturgical template that people could engage with amid their unique pressures and schedules.

Another church opened its facility to the homeless population when other community service agencies closed. The faith communities we researched discovered the need to localize care.

These creative acts became yeast for innovations in neighborly spiritual practice, leavening the neighborly spiritual life and witness of local faith communities.

While the limits of this pandemic time were extraordinary, leaders and the broader community received these limits as an invitation to pursue and cultivate faith in the “ten thousand places” that mark a life of faith.

Innovation is both its own practice and an extension of these neighborly practices. Among the leaders we researched, the ability to engage in this form of enforced innovation was learned over time, beginning long before the constraints of the pandemic.

The people gathered around Awake Church were already practiced in adaptability.

“That was just kind of always part of our thing,” Carlson said. “We already had just kind of developed a sense of like, ‘It’s OK to not go to church on a Sunday.’ And that held us; that created a lot of space, I think, for us to kind of figure out what to do.”

Much like a muscle developed over time, communities’ ability to adapt in the face of uncertainty builds upon previous practice. That practice enables risk taking in seeking to meet the needs of their particular contexts.

In these stories, from the Pacific Northwest to Aotearoa New Zealand, a neighborly faith has given rise to innovative practice and missional resilience. Gathered worship might be disrupted, yet the word and work of God continues to go forward through this neighborly faith.