Caitlin Olsen
Saturday, 24 May 2025
Good news – Gen Z is bringing Christianity back! Well, maybe.
According to Christian publisher SPCK, Bible sales have increased by 87% in the past five years. A recent UK survey showed Gen Z were more likely not to identify as ‘atheist’ than their parents and grandparents. But is it jumping the gun to assert that Gen Z are becoming Christians at higher rates?
That’s the story multiple media sources have been spruiking for the past few months. It traces back to the American Bible Society’s 2024 ‘State of the Bible’ report, which recorded a four-point increase (from 50% to 54%) of Gen Z adults who ‘agreed the Bible transformed their lives’, compared to a one-point increase (from 57% to 58%) among American adults generally. I’m no statistician, but those four points seem too insubstantial to hang a generation’s spiritual hat on, especially considering that the same survey highlights Gen Z as the least ‘Scripture Engaged’ group of American adults. Something doesn’t add up.
I will concede that, in some instances, the story holds. Here in Australia we are currently celebrating a fresh influx of young souls saved into the Church from an unspoken and oft-overlooked set of identities.
Of course, I’m talking about young men.
I am being sincere. The Church is perhaps the only place in the Western world where young men could be considered a cultural minority. But for the first time in thirty years, Christian-identifying men outnumber Christian-identifying women among Australian adults under the age of 28. While these statistics come from a 2022 survey, this trend, apparently identified in the USA, too, has only become newsworthy within the last few months, concurrently with articles identifying Gen Z more generally as returning to religious faith. Meanwhile, some of the same articles indicate that young women are leaving the church in droves. But we’ll stick to the story that Gen Z are becoming religious, and it’s happening because of young men… and this is a great thing.
More young men coming into our churches is worth celebrating. Yet millennial evangelicals like me remember when young (read: marriable) women outnumbered men in the church, and it wasn’t celebrated. Female ‘dominance’, and femininity in general, was viewed as problematic. I’ve had friends tell me that they remember hearing that the church was at risk of becoming too ‘feminine’. I remember single Christian women joking that they were ‘waiting for good Christian men to divorce their first wives’, because basic mathematics told them that Christian men (good or otherwise) were slim pickings.
Now that the tables have turned, we don’t appear nearly as concerned about whether there’ll be enough women for these new men to marry. We’re just happy to have more men represented. Representation matters. It allows us to disabuse another of isolation and despair by saying to another, ‘you are bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’….
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