Why is Gen Z getting more religious? We asked them.

A couple weeks ago, I did something I try to do at least once a month: I went to the church I’m a member of in person instead of online.

Growing up, church was a regular part of my life, and not just on Sundays. My father is a pastor, so it was common to spend a weekday evening doing my homework in my dad’s office, music from choir rehearsal pouring in as I finished whatever worksheet was due the next day. It’s an institution that shaped me: It’s where I made a lot of friends, it gave me my first taste of public speaking, and since pastors in my denomination are moved from church to church, it also determined what city I lived in and where I went to school.

When I was a kid, attendance was obviously less in my control. If I didn’t go to church on Sunday, that meant no hanging with friends the following week. “If you can’t make time for the Lord, how can you make time for something else?” was my mother’s refrain.

The choice is mine now. I enjoy hearing the songs that were the soundtrack for so much of my childhood. I like saying hello to the people I see week after week. I like the Black liberation theology interpretation of the Bible that I hear every Sunday.

And my experience, it turns out, is not unique. As we discussed in the most recent episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s call-in podcast, Gen Z has been finding religion these last few years. It’s a phenomenon that reverses some recent trends — and one for which experts are trying to find an explanation.

It’s a development that Ryan Burge has been keeping his eye on. He was a Baptist pastor for 20 years, and now he’s an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University.

Burge stepped away from ministry because the attendance in his church was declining: Members were aging, and there weren’t a lot of young people to keep it alive.

“It’s almost like every year, you expect [the share of Christians in the country] to be one point lower than the prior year, or two points lower than the prior year,” Burge told me. “Every generation is less Christian than the prior generation, going all the way back to the early 1900s. And what’s fascinating is that the drop is very consistent.”

Now, though, Burge says that not only is that decline tapering off, but “on some metrics, this data says that young people are actually more likely to be weekly religious attenders than millennials are. This is huge — we’ve never seen that before. We always assumed religion’s going to continue to decline, and it doesn’t look like that decline is continuing.”

When we asked Explain It to Me listeners about their own experiences with spirituality, we got a wide array of responses.

“I did not grow up going to church. My family never went to church when I was younger, but I always had questions and felt like something bigger was out there,” one listener told us. “So as soon as I could drive myself, I went to church and started looking for those answers.”

Another — a self-described “cradle Catholic” who has made her way back to religion — called in to say that, “I understand why a lot of young people are actually going back to religion. It’s because there’s no other place to turn to in order to see what’s wrong with life.”

So what’s behind this uptick? The hypotheses are legion.

“To be a young person is to rebel against your parents,” Burge says. “In my generation it was like, ‘Oh, I grew up very hardcore Catholic or evangelical and so I became an atheist.’ That was the most rebellious thing you can do. But imagine if you are a second-generation atheist or third-generation atheist. You know what the most rebellious thing you can do? It’s to be Orthodox Christian or be Catholic.”

Gender could also be at play. Through the years, more women have been regular church attendees than men, but we’re not seeing that with Gen Z. According to Burge, Catholicism is seeing a huge rise in young men. “I wonder if politics might be driving this religious divide among young people. Women had Time’s Up and Me Too. … I think a lot of men feel like they’re being overlooked. And if you go to a Catholic church, it’s one of the few places in society where men have a privileged position in that hierarchy.”

That’s a sentiment that was echoed recently during a young adult group at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in San Francisco. In the group, men outnumber women. Father Patrick Verney, who runs the group, acknowledges the shift.

“This is very different from how it’s always been in the past. In the past it’s always been more women than men,” he said. “This particular trend that you’re talking about is unique in the history of humanity in a certain respect, certainly in the history of Christianity.”

There’s more in our full episode, so please give it a listen and subscribe.