In Britain last year the Bible Society produced a big, widely covered report called ‘The Quiet Revival’. It was based on a YouGov survey of more than 13,000 people, which is huge by normal survey standards. The finding that attracted a lot of media attention was that regular church- attendance (meaning monthly or more) by the 18-24-year-olds had risen from just 4pc in 2018, to 16pc last year.
The finding has been questioned, but even an increase from 4pc to 8pc would be a big deal because it would be a reversal of the previous trend, which is that each generation attends church less than the last.
The Quiet Revival report fits with the big increase in adult baptisms that has been seen in secular strongholds like France and Belgium. The Catholic archdiocese of Westminster in London has also recorded a big increase in the number of candidates coming forward for baptism. The absolute numbers are small, but the trend is significant. Trends have to start somewhere.
Here in Ireland, the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin has seen its biggest intake of adult baptismal candidates in years. Most of them appear to be immigrants, but they are mainly young, and you would not expect many of the ethnic Irish to be among the candidates anyway because almost all of us were baptised as babies.
Now we have a report from the Irish hierarchy called ‘The Turning Tide?’ which examines recent religious trends on the island of Ireland. The report by Professor Stephen Bullivant and Emily Nelson examines recent European Social Survey (ESS) data about religion in Ireland, and also two Amarach Research polls commissioned by The Iona Institute.
A big finding is that while religion in Ireland (both north and south) has declined sharply over the year, the country remains one of the most religious in Europe.
You might think this will change once all the over-65s who still go to church regularly are dead, and you’d be right. Yes, church attendance figures will continue to decline as all those older people shuffle off their mortal coils not to be replaced one for one or anything like it, but here is the significant thing: there are signs of an increase in openness to religion among younger people, and specifically among the 18-24-year-olds, or ‘Gen Z’.
The prediction has always been that religion will fade generation by generation until only a handful of people classify themselves as religious and society becomes almost completely secular.
But the two Amarach polls commissioned by The Iona Institute show that Gen Z are starting to buck the trend on both parts of the island. (You can find the results here and here).
The polls asked lots of questions to determine attitudes to the Catholic Church and religion more generally. For example, one of the questions asked respondents whether they had a positive or a negative attitude towards Christianity, or somewhere in between.
As you’d expect, the younger the respondents were, the less likely they were to feel positive towards Christianity, until you get to Gen Z, that is, and then you get an uptick.
In the South, the age group with the worst impression of Christianity are the 25-34-year-olds. Only 29pc have a good opinion. But 43pc of Gen Z have a positive opinion.
Across question after question there is a similar pattern, and again on both sides of the border. The polls weren’t even looking for this finding. It was simply there.
Now, let’s not get carried away. Greater openness to religion is not the same as greater participation. We’ll have to see what happens, but again, you must start somewhere.
So, what’s going on? One explanation seems to be a social media effect. There is a lot of religious content online and some of it is popular. For example, in the US there is the Hallow App, where you can find Hollywood stars like Mark Warburg and Chris Pratt discuss their Catholic faith. The two Amarach polls found quite a lot of young people are watching religious or spiritual content.
This doesn’t come out in the polls, but Jordan Peterson seems to have acted as a sort of ‘gateway drug’ into religion for a fair number of young people, especially young men. Also, look at the fervent religion of the late Charlie Kirk and his young followers.
In Ireland, the Dominicans with their unapologetic faith have a strong following among young, practising Catholics.
I have a sort of overarching theory about what is going on, namely a generational shift. The ‘baby boomers’, which is to say those born between 1945 and roughly 1963 grew up in a strict, sometimes authoritarian society. Parents were strict, teachers were strict, the Church was strict, and sometimes much worse than that. This invited rebellion.
But if you were born in 2000, you have no experience of any of this. Instead, you will have grown up in an extremely individualistic society where the social bonds of family, community and religion are not too tight, they are too loose, and maybe even non-existent. So, the concerns of the baby-boomers, which still dominate debate here to a depressing extent, make no sense. They are totally out-of-date.
The 25-34-year-old age group came of age in the period of ‘peak Woke’. They remember #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and the marriage and abortion referendums. Hence their continuing hostility to religion.
But some of the age group coming behind them are probably sick of ‘woke’ ideology, especially very young men who are tired of lectures about ‘toxic masculinity’. At least they are unlikely to get that at Mass.
Therefore, some of this seeming uptick in openness to religion may well be a response to the society Gen Z are growing up in, one where there isn’t enough community, where family ties are often very weak, where there is a crisis of meaning and purpose, soaring anxiety, lots of alienation.
In this sort of environment, religion offers an antidote. It provides a sense of meaning, a sense of belonging, a way of life. It can be a safe harbour. This is why we might see more people in the future turn to religion than we think, especially as the baby boomer generation disappear from view with their out-of-date concerns about an authoritarian society which is an increasingly distant and irrelevant memory.