As Generation Z steps into adulthood to cast ballots, clock into jobs and crowd bars, the one space that doesn’t seem to catch their attention is attending religious services.
“We’re just a busy generation,” said electrical and computer engineering junior Taylor Lee. “I feel like that busyness has let my faith kind of whittle out. As my day gets busier and busier, as my courses get harder, as I get closer to graduation and a full-time job, I don’t find time to go to church nowadays.”
Less than half of Christian Gen Zers say they attend church weekly, and more than 34% of Gen Z are religiously unaffiliated, a significantly larger portion compared to millennials and Generation X, according to Survey Center on American Life.
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Chad Fields said the decline in church attendance has been a broader trend in America, not just with Gen Z. Since the 1990s, Fields said there has been a societal shift in how people are consuming and interacting with religion. He said the definition and traditional concepts of spirituality and religion have expanded with the rise of technology and media.
“People aren’t just watching three channels on TV anymore,” Fields said. “There’s a whole host of different options and the same has happened with religion. They’re connected by a brand, or they’re connected by a book or a speaker or a political perspective … It looks a lot different now.”
This trend isn’t unique to just Christian denominations. The American Muslim community has only 24% of mosque participants aged 18-34, yet, this age group makes up roughly half of their population, according to a survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.
Second-year computer science major and Muslim, Mohamed El’tijani Mohamed, said it falls on the adults in the community to take that initiative to spread the word.
“I believe it stems from a place where there’s nobody to really preach the word,” Mohamed said. “The adults and the older people, they don’t really try to target the youth in a way that would inspire them to continue going and continue preaching the word out to their friends and the community, which would bring more people to the religion.”
A more recent societal shift that impacted church attendance was the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers from the pre-pandemic era have still not recovered, according to ChurchTrac. For some churchgoers, it led them to become uninvolved.
However, for Mary Riley, a fifth-year youth and community studies major at UT and a member of Episcopal student center, the pandemic emphasized her need for human connection and community.
“I wanted a church, not necessarily because I wanted capital ‘C’ church,” Riley said. “I wanted friendship. I wanted a community. I arrived at college in 2020– we know what was happening in 2020. I came to the realization that I didn’t have any friends and if I wanted to live a sustainable, happy life, then I would need to find a way to find some friends.”
COVID-19 introduced the possibility of staying connected to a church without having to physically go, which is why some continue to attend mass at home, Fields said.
Megan Peglar, senior minister at University Christian Church, highlighted how in-person mass provides the full experience of being part of a community that cares about its members.
“There is something to be said for being face-to-face with people and being able to see them, and they see you, and you are able to shake hands and hug or whatever feels comfortable,” Peglar said. “It’s over fellowship meals after church and Sunday school and those sorts of occasions that people are able to really get caught up in each other’s lives.”
Not only has the landscape of religion dramatically changed for Gen Z, but the expectations they hold for churches have too. For instance, 73.6% of non-churchgoing members of Gen Z are looking for churches that address mental health and 77.7% are looking for churches that help the poor, according to a survey by Millennial Outreach.
Peglar said she understands the importance of social justice issues to Gen Z and said she makes sure to echo the church’s progressive stances.
“Especially being in Texas, church and Christianity in particular sometimes (have) the stereotype of supporting the status quo, and not necessarily being on the side of social justice and the oppressed, and that is true of some churches, but it’s not true of all,” Peglar said. “I would say, especially in Austin, there are so many really loving, radically welcoming, open and affirming churches. My church is open and affirming of LGBTQ+ people, and we put that on our sign as one way to dispel some of those stereotypes.”
In addition to social justice concerns, Riley said her generation also struggles with a fear-based approach to religion.
“Perhaps we’ve been operating out of fear instead of love,” Riley said. “So we raise children with the fear of going to hell, and desire of going to heaven. When you live like that, then you’re living to avoid something instead of in pursuit of love and in pursuit of a relationship with God and a relationship with others. That kind of life is just not sustainable.”
For Mohamed, it wasn’t until starting college and being on his own that he was able to form a relationship with God, he said.
“When I was young, I didn’t like (religion) because they were trying to get me to do it so hard, I just kind of resented it,” Mohamed said. “But religion is something that I think you really have to find yourself. You can’t have somebody trying to push it into your brain, because you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
It’s a common trend for religious service attendance to decline when a generation is in their younger years, but the crowd tends to pick back up once they are more settled, Fields said. The need for community and congregations becomes more important once people start to build their family.
“When I’m older, when I’ve had a job, whenever I’m settled down, I feel like (it’ll) be nice to find a time to go to church,” Lee said. “I feel like once the generation matures a little bit, it’s going to be in a positive incline towards attendance in church or mass or temple.”
However, Gen Z is a part of a bigger social change and has challenged the idea of a typical heterosexual, nuclear family, Fields said.
“It’s not just because people are leaving a recognizably religious place,” Fields said. “(It) doesn’t mean that religion is not going to show up in another form somewhere else, in a different form of enchantment. We just may not recognize it at the moment as religion, but that’s how social change works.”
