What is going on with Gen Z?
Quite a lot it seems!
“Church decline in England and Wales has not only stopped, but the Church is growing, as Gen Z leads an exciting turnaround in church attendance.”¹
Across schools today, teachers are noticing a striking shift in the spiritual landscape of young people. After years of decline, there are signs of a “quiet revival” that challenge the narrative of inevitable secularisation. For Christian educators, this presents both opportunity and responsibility: to help students make sense of their longings for justice, meaning, and identity, and to point them to the deeper story that sustains them. In this article, Cristo Rodriguez of OCCA explores how Gen Z’s spiritual hunger reveals both the emptiness of self-made meaning and the enduring power of the Gospel.
How did we get here?
Justin Brierly has been charting a ‘surprising rebirth’ in belief in God² since the decline of the so-called New Atheists.
New Atheism Got Old
The New Atheist mindset offered somehow less than nothing — not just a materialist, reductionist ‘non-story’ but rather a road to demise. Gen Z wants truth, meaning, moral rights, justice, and value, yet they have not been bequeathed a narrative with roots to ground them. They have been sold a story which cuts off the West from its Christian foundations. They don’t realise they swim in Christian waters.
The inward turn
Popular now is the sentiment that the individual is responsible for meaning: “You do you,” “find your why,” “find your truth,” or simply “be the best version of yourself.”
In reality, young people turning inward, trying to find meaning in themselves alone, has brought mental anxiety and identity crises. Although held forth as a path to freedom and self-expression, it has proven a recipe for depression and divisive individualism.
A downward turn
Openness to spirituality has also opened the door to a kind of therapeutic spiritualism. Sadly, this often boils down to dependence, darkness, and deception. Spells to bind ‘presences’ or crystals hailed to bring peace can draw young people further into occult practice, leaving them anxious when these tools are unavailable.
The upward turn
The good news for Gen Z is that Christianity has the riches and depth to speak to all human longings, needs, hurts, and desires — and to anchor them in a story bigger than their own. A story that not only addresses reason, morality, meaning, truth, ethics, hope, justice, and suffering, but grounds them. A story that not only acknowledges the spiritual forces of darkness but, in Jesus, has the power to bind and banish them.
The burden of the inward turn is relieved by the one who bids us to come to Him and learn of Him, for *His burden is easy and His yoke is light* (Matthew 11:30).
Making sense of justice
Christianity doesn’t just preach against injustice. Christ came and tasted the depths of pain in the human condition. Gen Z must be introduced to a God who enters a world full of sin and injustice, who suffers unjustly himself, and yet can be trusted to define love rightly.
Unique good news of the Gospel
Uniquely in Christianity, Jesus suffers not for Himself nor as an ideological martyr, but the just for the unjust (1 Peter 3:18). The only worldview where undeserved grace is offered to redeem humanity, which could never redeem itself — offered purely by the gift of grace, not ritual or performance. Gen Z need to hear the beauty of Christ’s free gift.
This gift has transformed hearts at their core and set depth charges at the foundations of culture. As Tom Holland points out, the crucifixion is the reason we in the West, even the ‘post-Christian’ West, regard it as more noble to suffer than to inflict suffering³.
In the midst of ‘cancel culture,’ Gen Z must be reminded that the line of right and wrong is drawn through each of our hearts and that we all need redemption. The Gospel reminds us that sin, though dangerous and destructive, can be forgiven. We can hope; we can have redemption.
Opportunities in schools
Much chaplaincy or Christian work in UK schools is understood by secular institutions as pastoral care, ethos development, and related to core values. In this sense, chaplains have an immense, untapped opportunity to recover and reconnect school values to their historical, philosophical, and biblical roots.
Putting Christ back at the core
This is our task: telling the counter-catechesis, the counter-narrative of the Lord Jesus Christ — Lord of science, Lord over the spirits, and Lord and Saviour of our own souls. For chaplains and Christian teachers, this is perhaps the greatest calling, and for such a time as this.