In City Journal, which is the outstanding publication comes out quarterly if you're a magazine subscriber, and it's by the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy. And joining me now is the author of the column that caught my eye or the story that caught my eye, Associate editor John Hirshower from City Journal.
John, First of all, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
So your story was about gen Z sort of maybe I'm trying to think of the best way to say it. I don't want to engage in too much hyperbole, like they're saving the churches, but gen Z is turning back to the church. Tell me a little bit about why you did this story, first of all, and then.
What you found.
Sure, so, like you say, I mean, it's possible to overstate what's going on here, and I want to be careful not to do that. But basically, there's a few releases of a survey or has released part of a survey every year since two thousand and seven called the Religious Landscape Study. Now they don't perform the whole survey every year, but there are questions that they asked annually.
They release it.
As part of this broader survey and one of the questions is simply you know whether the respondent identifies as
Christian or not. And from that random sample of thirty five thousand Americans, they basically try to get an idea of what proportion of the population identifies as Christian or any number of other religions that they include in the survey prompt And if you chart that out over time, you see that since two thousand and seven, when Puce started the poll, there's been a consistent decline in the share of Americans generally, not just gen Z, but the
share of Americans generally who identifies Christians. So I think in two thousand and seven, when they first started the survey, you had seventy eight percent of Americans identifying as Christian, and I think, with one exception, every year from then through about twenty twenty three, it just consistently declined year over year and bottomed out at sixty two percent in twenty twenty three. I think there was one blip, but
otherwise it was just consistent decline year over year. But then in twenty four there was actually a slight uptick to sixty three percent, which was really kind of the first reversal major reversal that we've seen of the trend of consistent downward trajectory basically in the sheriff of Americans who identifies Christian. And when you break that out in term, you know, when you start to ask yourself, what's what's
going on, what's driving the shift? Why has the consistent decline appeared at least to stall.
I don't know that there's a reversal going on, but at least to stall.
And it seems like when you break out and you partition the respondents by age bracket, you notice a consistent decline over time or actually over birth cohort in the
share of each birth cohort that they're id identification as Christians. So, in other words, people born in the nineteen forties and before, eighty percent of them identifies Christian, and that proceeds down and down over time through the birth decades until people born in the two thousands, who are no less likely than people born in the nineteen nineties who identify as Christian.
Now, what is this actually cash out?
As we're still talking about, you know, only forty six percent of people in Generation Z identify as Christian, but the fact that they did not decline as precipitously as generations before them had. Is part of the reason that we've seen this stability in the overall share of the American population that identifies as Christian.
You also talk about the fact that there are many young people who are looking for a very orthodox type of Christianity, a very very traditional type of Christianity. I know that a friend of mine who is an episcopal priest has said the Latin Mass is making a return mostly because of young people.
What do you think that's about?
Yeah, and this is you know, this is anecdotal. There's not a ton of great, you know, big survey evidence on this. But just from my own experience and when you talk to people my age, I do think, well, first of all, young people are always rebellious, right, and maybe in the sixties rebellion looked a lot different, the cultural moras were a lot different.
Now, you know, the prevailing message that.
Young people get throughout all of these various institutions is basically, I'm okay, you're okay, We're all okay. No one way of living is better than any other way of living. The choices you make basically don't matter. The reason we exist is to you know, engage in as many acts of like you know, sensual pleasure as possible, and then we die and then it's over.
And the way to.
Rebel against that, if if you're looking your rebel, is not to just kind of lean into the revolution even more, but it's actually to kind of embrace an older form of liturgy and worship that says, actually, this is not about me. I'm not here to come to church to kind of be affirmed as myself, but rather to like
lose myself and to look at something beyond myself. And I think, you know, I don't think it's impossible for modern liturgies to capture that, to be sure, but I think with the older forms of worship, what you get is a form of worship that is.
Focused on God, on the Creator.
Oftentimes, in the traditional Latin Mass, the priest will have his back face to the congregations at the congregation and the priest are faced in the same direction, and it's just a totally different experience. And so I think it's easy to overstate what's happening here. They're certainly enclaves of young people who are attracted to these types of liturgies,
but is it something that's a huge widespread phenomenon. No, but it's notable, like you say, because it's strange, I think to some people to think, why are you know, twenty two year old women wearing veils at a church? Why are young men, you know, kind of attracted to these forms of worship that churches had abandoned in an attempt to appeal to young people. Right, So, I think it's.
Just a notable sociological observation.
Even if you know, this isn't the sort of thing that you walk down the street and you're bound to meet a man who you know goes to some Orthodox.
Liturgy or something.
It's to the point that you made earlier in that answer about young people rebelling, I actually think there's a little more to it than just rebellion. But I do think rebellion or salvation is a form of rebellion. Is somewhat ironic, and I kind of love it. I'm not gonna lie, but I think it's a rejection of the postmodernism that you were kind of clicking through. Nothing matters, nothing is important, You're completely helpless to go through the world.
All of those messages suck when.
You're searching, right, they're vapid, they are shallow, and all of a sudden, if you have been innuanated with the message that nothing matters and everything is the same and nothing is better than anything else, even though you can clearly see that there are things that are better than other things. I do think there's a lot of appeal to having that set of rules that are clear and concise that you can easily understand that you can try
and attain by living a good life. I think there's maybe a little more to it, because we see these high levels of anxiety and depression in young people and they see what's been fed to them before. Whether the religion is climate change or genderism or LGBTQ rights or whatever the new religion is, it's wildly unsatisfying.
At least I hope that that's part of it.
Well, I think, you know, as a Christian, I think I would say the reason that being a Christian reduces your anxiety and depression is because Christianity is true. But even if you aren't a Christian, you don't accept that, and you want to look at the social utility of religion and why it appeals to people in an age like ours. I think like you're saying, you know, in a digital world, forgetting even the postmodernism, which is obviously
a big part of it. But we live in a digital world where things are so for people's attention spans are short. The institutions we belong to are you know, they come and go, people's images, their careers, everything is
very is very fleeting. The church provides something that's enduring, and ideally, I think the forms of religion that insist that the truth doesn't change, that there's a certain there's certain perennial things about our lives that we can know to be true with certainty, are those that are most likely to attract people who are tired of feel anxious about all of the uncertainties that I think are unique in some ways unique to the modern world.
I agree.
John Hirshower is the associate editor of City Journal, which is a fantastic publication. You can find it at City hyphen Journal dot org. That cityhyphen Journal dot org. I put a link on this blog today, mandy'sblog dot com to this story.
John.
I appreciate you covering this, and it's something that I've been looking at for the last like six months or so, just because little more data is coming out, and I'm here to encourage it. I think it's wonderful that young people are looking for something bigger, something more permanent, to your point, and something that they can be a part of that really means something. So thanks for covering it and hopefully we'll talk again soon.
Sounds good, Thanks for having all right, thank you.
That's John Hirshower.