As faith increasingly declines in American culture, Gen Z is left with fewer resources or people to ask about identity, belonging, and purpose. So it is no surprise that we are turning to the internet.
I’m a Gen Zer, and I’m familiar with this inclination: I’d rather check my Target app to locate an item rather than bother an employee. Turning to the internet for answers may read as antisocial on the surface, but it is a reflection of both America’s highly autonomous culture and Gen Z’s copious internet usage.
And of course, this translates to church. With dwindling numbers of Gen Zers attending church, it’s unsurprising that young adults are flocking to virtual spaces rather than physical ones for answers to their big questions.
I believe Gen Z’s religious “nones” are more curious about faith than the data leads us to believe. It’s easy to measure religious affiliation, but it’s harder to measure spiritual curiosity and openness. Online, we can see what questions younger generations are asking and who is stepping up to answer them.
One good example is Girlscamp, a podcast for post-Mormons to process their faith transition out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The host, Hayley Rawle, interviews post-Mormons, shares anonymous stories from her listeners, and shares her insights about different aspects of the Mormon faith.
On Girlscamp, Rawle encourages listeners to construct a new worldview outside of high-demand religion. She offers listeners a secular philosophy of relative truth as a solution for the rigid boundaries of highly demanding religions. I discovered Rawle’s podcast roughly a year ago. While her content is focused on Mormonism, she also openly critiques the Christian church and Western Christianity. Her podcast is just one example of how Gen Z engages with spirituality without the obligations of embodied community.
In my experience, many Christians my age are taught that religion is largely absent from Gen Z lives. There seems to be a mindset that people used to be religious but are no longer. But this is not the case.
On paper, Gen Z is becoming increasingly nonreligious because many identify as “nothing in particular” in religious affiliation surveys. With half of Gen Z identifying as nonreligious, it seems like a fair assumption that Gen Zers would not be interested in spirituality. However, our spiritual seeking just takes on a different name than previous generations.
Ryan Burge, associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, points out that the rates of “atheist/agnostic” identifiers have increased several percentages between each generation until the transition from millennials to Gen Z, when the category “nothing in particular” has continued to grow over time.
Talbot School of Theology philosophy professor Timothy Pickavance sees the growth in the “nothing in particular” category as an indicator of Gen Z’s open posture toward spirituality rather than a cynical atheistic one.
“This data points to Gen Z’s sensitivity to spiritual things and their longing for a deep spiritual life,” he said in an interview.
Gen Z’s participation in religion can be encapsulated by the term faith unbundled, coined by Springtide Research Institute, which describes the way people construct faith by combining elements such as beliefs, identity, practices, and community from a variety of religious and nonreligious sources, rather than receiving these things from a single system.
Don’t Let Yourself Be ‘Cured of Churchgoing’
Podcasters and influencers—such as Rawle, who functions in some ways as a digital pastoral figure or spiritual director for her followers—are now one of those nonreligious sources. Guests and listeners are taught a secular “gospel,” where the good news is that they can tinker with their religious beliefs, keeping the doctrines they agree with and shirking restrictions or teachings they do not.
Nonreligious people can tune in weekly to the podcast, just as religious folks may tune in to Sunday service messages and learn something new about how to operationalize their spirituality. On an episode of Girlscamp, one guest spoke about keeping Sunday night dinners and having family members go around and share one thing they are grateful for in place of prayer. Instead of sharing a story from Scripture, this guest teaches his or her children a secular lesson about love or acceptance.
Christians and others who are religiously affiliated may find this ambiguous religious engagement inauthentic. But this openness of twentysomethings toward the immaterial world is fertile ground for meaningful conversations and engagement.
While Gen Z is abandoning traditional religious institutions, it is not abandoning spirituality. In the 1990s, a shift began from using the term religious to using the term spiritual to describe an individual’s moral and spiritual framework. Now, it has changed to “meaning making.”
God and community used to be at the center of religious life, but for Gen Z, those are no longer prerequisites for intentional, spiritual living. As Pickavance noted, “There’s still a longing and a clear intention toward spirituality that is not being brought into some specific tradition.”
Eliza Smith DeBevoise, a chaplain at Converse University, often counsels students asking big life questions. She thinks Gen Z is incredibly spiritual. “Whether Gen Z is religious or not, they are doing hard, hard work in spiritual formation,” she told me, “that, to be honest with you, I have not seen in older generations before who were more devoutly religious.”
DeBevoise affirms that students struggle with identifying with one religion, even if they have strong personal beliefs. She said even these devout students worry they will come off as closed-minded.
Like every generation that has come before, Gen Z has eternity set in their hearts. But this longing for something beyond oneself cannot be satiated on an individual spiritual journey. We need the church.
As Henri Nouwen writes in his book Spiritual Formation, “Spiritual formation is not an exercise of private devotion but one of corporate spirituality. We do have personal experiences of God, but together we are formed as the people of God.” The religious impulse humans feel is best fulfilled in the context of a faith community, and it is an impulse that the church can be poised to answer.
Digital guides like Rawle can guide individuals on their spiritual journeys without ever knowing them. This makes the stakes low for people who are interested in navigating religious deconstruction. While meaningful exploration of our spirituality can occur online, we were not made to answer these questions on our own and in a vacuum.
Young Christians, too, can be tempted to engage solely online with their faith. But podcasts, influencers, or Christian books should be catalysts for in-person community, not replacements.
While church communities are imperfect, the embodied community that comes with gathering week after week, month after month, and year after year is an essential aspect of spiritual life. When spirituality is practiced independently, it is incomplete.
Teenagers are spending on average about 9 hours a day on screens. While being a part of primarily online communities may be the norm for Gen Z, that should not be where the church should focus our energy. There are plenty of good online Christian resources to counter the secular or deconstructing ones, but what young people need more than just information is community—and that starts with embodied relationships.
I can speak to how authentic friendship can be a catalyst for faith because that was my story growing up. Because of the adults who invested in me, I had a safe place to navigate my questions about God. I knew no matter what that I would be loved and accepted.
Now, as Young Life leaders for high school girls, my fellow leaders and I are learning to pursue relationships inside and outside the church. We are tasked with creating alternative spaces outside of church where young women can encounter Jesus, such as joining them at school for lunchtime, taking them out to coffee, and attending their sports games. From there, we host Bible studies and have the opportunity to spiritually engage them and invite them into a faith community.
Beyond just criticizing the hours young people spend online, we need to offer them a compelling alternative: a loving, embodied, imperfect community.
As Mary Demuth wrote for CT in 2011:
We live in a mobile culture, which sometimes isolates us. We who create personas on the web, who perfect our hiding, may find attaching ourselves to a local church frightening. And yet God calls us there, warts and all. He calls us to covenant together with other Jesus disciples, to messy our lives with people we might not hang out with normally. In that beautiful conflagration of community, we learn the art of loving each other and showing the world outside our circle just who Jesus is.
For those who have avoided community for various reasons, yes, there is risk in being a part of an in-person faith community. You can’t be anonymous; you can’t log off when you feel triggered. But you also have the opportunity to be known and loved—something that an online community can never offer.
Jenna Mindel is a NextGen Accelerator Fellow with Christianity Today. She recently graduated from Biola University with a degree in journalism.
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