“Christianity is on the rise in Gen Z.” “Why more Americans are seeking religion.” “Gen Z returning to faith in new ways, research shows.” This is just a small sampling of recent headlines heralding a religious revival, with Gen Z in the vanguard.
Clergy report their pews are filled with young people. Meanwhile, online influencers document their search for the “best” Catholic church in New York City.
The capitalist press amplifies anecdotes of young people finding religion in their search for community and purpose. What’s clear is they are sick of culture-war polarization, social alienation, and financial pain. They want a way out.
Afraid the youth will turn to class struggle, some sections of the ruling class are trying to promote Christian “unity.”
Trump swore to protect Christianity from the “radical left”—even if his AI-generated impersonation of Jesus didn’t quite land with his base. Among his detractors is the Pope, who is attempting to channel class anger into the Catholic Church by speaking against racism, the imperialist war in Iran, and wealth inequality. For his part, JD Vance preached the importance of “Christian values” on his latest book tour, trumpeting faith as the cure for the country’s divisions.
“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”
Is Gen Z really going back to church? Or is it a red herring by the ruling class, intended to obscure smoldering class rage building up in society?
Many articles in the bourgeois press point to a recent study from Barna, a Christian research group, as evidence that “young adults [are leading] a resurgence in church attendance.” According to the report, Gen Z churchgoers attend services more frequently than older generations, averaging 1.9 times a month against the national average of 1.6.
But the Barna study is misleading. They only surveyed current churchgoers, not the population as a whole. It shows that Gen Z Christians attend church slightly more frequently than their older churchgoing peers, but it’s far from evidence of a general religious renaissance.
Pew found that only 45% of Gen Z identify as Christian, 10% less than millennials, and much lower than older generations. A recent Wall Street Journal survey revealed that less than one-third of Gen Z said religion was “very important” to them, down from about half in 2019. Merely 22% said a culture rooted in Christianity is important to US national identity, lower than their elders.
“There are anecdotes, but we just are not finding anything in our data,” Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told Axios. In 2024, they found that 34% of Gen Z self-described as religiously “unaffiliated,” alongside millennials at 35%, Gen Xers at 25%, and baby boomers at 19%.
Although the ruling class media magnifies new religious converts among Gen Z, and young men are leaving the church at a slower rate than their female counterparts, a new Great Awakening is nowhere in sight.
A revolutionary raison d’être
For many in that small but amplified layer of Gen Z churchgoers, it’s the soulless conditions of a heartless world leading them to religion.
The New York Times podcast The Daily interviewed a Gen Z churchgoer who said: “The work that I’m doing, it just feels [like] a lot of corporate bullshit. I think my parents’ generation had a much stronger belief that work is good, and by working, we’re making the world a better place. But my generation, a lot of us do not feel that way.”
According to the Harvard Youth Poll, a mere 29% of young Americans expect they’ll be better off financially than their parents. Just 13% think the country’s headed in the right direction. A recent Gallup poll found 45% of young people find only “a little” meaning or purpose in their lives or “none at all.”
While some are returning to the Bible, others are looking to communism. A Cato Institute poll found 38% of Gen Z holds a favorable view of communism, and 43% an unfavorable view of capitalism.
The lonely grind we endure each day is not a permanent feature of human existence—it’s a product of capitalism.
Communists find meaning in the struggle for a society no longer dominated by a ruling class that thrives on our misery. The revolutionary party is not a refuge from the world but a means of radically transforming it.
As Leon Trotsky once wrote, “For a revolutionary to give himself entirely to the party signifies finding himself. Yes, our party takes each one of us wholly. But in return it gives to every one of us the highest happiness: the consciousness that one participates in the building of a better future, that one carries on his shoulders a particle of the fate of mankind, and that one’s life will not have been lived in vain.”