Gen Z: A Generation Reconstructing
“More than a third (34%) of Gen Z identifies as religiously unaffiliated.”
At Clapham, we develop and provide expertise in the U.S. faith landscape and how religious groups, movements, and individuals shape public conviction and behavior. Since joining the team at Clapham, I have become the in-house expert on Gen Z (a.k.a. Zoomers, the generation born between 1997-2012) and their complex relationship with religion and spirituality and the role they play (or do not play) in forming their lives. I know this well because I myself am Gen Z.
We represent a new landscape for public pundits, and there is a race to decipher who we are, what we love, and how we will contribute to society. Yet, Gen Z is more than a generational mystery to solve and more than a coming-of-age population of consumers. Candidly, I see beautiful capacity and opportunity in my generation. We are passionate and eager contributors and can be pursuers and promoters of what is good, beautiful, and true. However, I hear, see, read, and receive more critique concerning my generation than I see or receive encouragement or excitement for my generation. I monitor so much Gen Z news that it feels like a slog of statistics and headlines speaking for Gen Z before it can speak for itself.
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My generation has a myriad of characteristics that shape our lives: we are digital natives, the first fully digital generation in history; we are the most ethnically diverse generation in the U.S,; and we have a deep skepticism and distrust of formal institutions (within government, the media, education, the economy, and religion). We have been critical witnesses of institutional low points, including The Great Recession of 2008, multiple unjust police shootings, massive sex abuse scandals in Protestant and Catholic church leadership, rampant school shootings, overwhelmed medical facilities during the height of COVID in 2020, and the growth of increasingly divisive media and political cycles. These experiences have not only shaped our distrust of institutions, but it has shaped our formation overall, including our spiritual formation. This leads us to another key attribute of my generation: religious disaffiliation.
More than a third (34%) of Gen Z identify as “religiously unaffiliated,” a five percent difference from Millennials (29%) and almost double the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Boomers (18%). Gen Z is a generation that holds individuals and institutions to a high standard of transparency—scandal, deceit, and hypocrisy does not settle well with them and has soiled religion’s reputation. Theologian Russell Moore succinctly describes this connection between Gen Z’s religious disaffiliation to their low trust in the church itself in David Brooks’ New York Times piece “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism from Itself.” Moore says, “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches but because they believe that the church itself does not believe what the church teaches."
Survey Center on American Life
However, a higher concentration of religious disaffiliation for Gen Z should not come as a surprise as “American religious identity has experienced nearly three decades of consistent decline.” Therefore, Gen Z’s high religious disaffiliation represents the height of a more significant sociocultural decline. Yet, this decline is not an “end” in and of itself. Gen Z is still developing, and the finality of their religious identity is unclear as they are not necessarily losing faith as they disassociate institutionally.
For us at Clapham, this matters because we are particularly interested in how a group’s faith interacts with their perspective and advocacy on issues such as economic mobility and opportunity, women’s rights, media, entertainment, caring for the marginalized, etc. For Gen Z, their lack of desire to be institutionally connected, low religious affiliation, and low trust in religious institutions define how they see the world and the passions they embody. This institutional disaffiliation alongside other stressors (including domestic social and political unrest and international crises) has created and imparted a heavy weight of responsibility and ownership onto Gen Z to succeed where institutions have not. However, it has also fostered a great zeal in us to execute justice where it has been withheld or mismanaged, to create new solutions for faltering institutions, and to protect and embody a standard of revolutionary inclusivity, diversity, and transparency.
I was talking recently with a Millennial friend (believe it or not, Gen Z and Millennials can be friends) about Gen Z’s attraction to “deconstruction,” a broader movement within the Evangelical church that attempts to strip away the cultural trappings that have come to define it. This term does not merely mean a falling away from the faith (though it can result in religious disaffiliation); it also means a questioning, unraveling, and testing of long-held beliefs. “The language of “deconstructing one’s faith” shares the idea that true knowledge delves beneath simple affirmations,” wrote Kirsten Sanders, “asking what social commitments, political assumptions, and gender politics might reinforce what appear to be otherwise straightforward assertions.”
Broken Church - Upslash, Andrey Metelev
I shared with my friend that I didn’t exclusively see a deconstructive trend in my generation, but I see a generation seeking new tools to reform, refine, and give the energy to rebuild religious institutions rightly. I think there are excellent and beautiful reasons for this—a new thirst for something pure, a deep passion for justice, and a desire to correct wrongdoing. I think this “reconstructive” nature (a drive to rectify, to make and see things right again) and these attributes form Gen Z’s issue priorities. Though we roam away from the reach of traditional religious institutions and the ways to reach us may become more complex, the redemptive drive in us will find new expressions as we become the generation that contributes to revolutionary change in the American social, political, and economic landscape.
For this reason, I see great promise for my generation, believing that we, Gen Z, may be the most transformative and spiritually consequential generation in modern history.