They Said Christianity Was Dying—Then Gen Z Showed Up- REVISED
Revised September 2026
When I first wrote this piece in June 2025, I opened with a statistic out of the UK: church attendance among young men ages 18 to 24 had gone from 4% in 2018 to something north of 20% by 2024. It was a stunning number. It traveled everywhere; to Parliament, to conference stages, to headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, and into a lot of sermons, including things I said out loud.
The number was wrong. The Bible Society withdrew the report behind it in March 2026 after YouGov acknowledged its 2024 survey sample was compromised. Quality-control systems meant to screen out fraudulent and inattentive respondents had not been switched on. YouGov took full responsibility and apologized. The Bible Society pulled the report in its entirety.
I repeated that figure. So did a great many pastors.
The disappointing part
There is no broad revival among young Americans. The best evidence we have says the long slide has stalled, not reversed.
Pew's Religious Landscape Study, the largest survey of its kind in the country, nearly 37,000 respondents, found the Christian share of American adults holding around 62%, roughly flat since 2021 after two decades of decline. That is genuinely good news if you had been bracing for the bottom to keep falling out. It is not a turnaround.
And the generational picture underneath it is sobering. Adults 18 to 24 are less likely than adults 74 and older to identify as Christian (46% against 80%), to pray daily (27% against 58%), and to attend services monthly (25% against 49%). Forty-three percent of the youngest adults claim no religious affiliation at all. Pew's own analysts are careful to say the plateau may be temporary: for it to hold, young adults would have to grow more religious as they age, or the generation behind them would have to arrive more religious than their parents. Neither has happened yet.
The American Time Use Survey found no increase in church attendance among young adults between 2021 and 2024. In January of this year, Ryan Burge, a data analyst, a former pastor, and the person most likely to be right about this, argued in the New York Times that young men are simply not returning to church.
That is the honest floor. Anyone selling you a national awakening is selling you something.
The exception
In April 2026, Gallup published findings from its Poll Social Series, a monthly survey it has run since 2001 using live phone interviews. Different method, different firm, no connection to the retracted UK work.
Among men ages 18 to 29, the share saying religion is "very important" in their lives jumped from 28% in 2022–2023 to 42% in 2024–2025. Young women held roughly steady near 30%. Monthly-or-more attendance among young men rose seven points to 40%, the highest Gallup has recorded since 2012–2013, after languishing near 33% from 2016 onward.
For context, this reverses a pattern that held for a generation. In 2002–2003, 57% of young women called religion very important against 41% of young men. That gap closed through the 2010s. It has now inverted.
This is the one finding in the whole conversation that comes from independent, probability-based sampling and points clearly upward. Something is happening with young men.
The fine print
I am not going to make the same mistake twice, so here is what gives me pause about my own good news.
The subsamples are small. Gallup's figures rest on a few hundred men under 30, with a margin of error running between roughly 7 and 10 points.
The gains are politically concentrated. Attendance among young Republican men sits at 52%; among young Democratic men, 26%. Gallup notes that 48% of young men now identify as Republican or lean that way. Some meaningful portion of what looks like religious revival may be political sorting wearing religious clothes; young men adopting an identity package in which church attendance is one item among several.
And young women's attendance rose too, three points, to 39%. On actual attendance, the sexes are effectively tied. The dramatic gap is in how important men say religion is, not yet in how often either group shows up.
One more caution, since it bears on numbers you have probably seen shared. Barna's widely circulated finding that Gen Z now out-attends older generations measures frequency among people who already go to church. It says churchgoing young adults attend about 1.9 times a month against 1.8 for Millennials. That is one extra service a year. It does not say more young people are coming. Burge has been shouting about this for months and he is right.
Why it might be happening anyway
Set the polling aside and consider the ground.
Young people are less social by nearly every measure, less likely to date, to work a part-time job, to simply hang out with friends. The decline started before smartphones were ubiquitous, so the easy explanation does not fully work, though the lockdown years clearly did not help. Burge's read of the Monitoring the Future data found that teens who attend church experience the same decline in social interaction, but noticeably less steeply. Community still counts for something.
Add moral clarity. Few people over 40 have heard of the campus speakers every teenage boy in my house can name, but those voices have been making the case for a structured moral framework to audiences raised on relativism. Whatever you think of the messengers, the appetite they are feeding is real: young men are looking for a coherent account of how to live.
Add new media. As legacy outlets lost their grip, YouTube, podcasts, and TikTok opened room for religious voices — serious apologists and secular commentators alike — introducing enormous audiences to Christian vocabulary and Christian questions.
None of that proves an awakening. It does describe a generation of young men who have been chewed up by an attention economy that promised connection and delivered isolation, and who are, some of them, walking toward a church door.
Fad or awakening
After September 11 churches filled. Within weeks most of those people were gone. The question is whether this is another spike, and the answer depends considerably on what the men who show up actually find when they get there.
Transformation over information. The early church grew before anyone owned a Bible. What it had was the Spirit of God and visibly changed lives. Prayer and fasting belong alongside rigorous study. The point is not knowing. It is becoming.
Countercultural community. If young adults are starved for real-world connection, the church has the one thing the feed cannot counterfeit: bodies in a room, over years, who know your name and will notice when you stop coming. Small groups, retreats, service, mentorship. Not programming. Infrastructure.
Purpose and calling. The instinct of the last thirty years was to lower the bar and make faith accessible. This moment may call for the opposite. Offer intellectual rigor, real accountability, and a demand large enough to organize a life around. Those are not available on TikTok. They might be available here.
Something is stirring among young men in America. It is smaller than we were told, more political than we would like, and less certain than a headlines would have us believe.
A note on this revision
This article was originally published June 3, 2025. It has been substantially revised.
The original version led with data from the Bible Society's Quiet Revival report, which claimed a dramatic rise in UK church attendance among young adults. In March 2026 the Bible Society withdrew that report after its polling partner, YouGov, disclosed that the underlying 2024 survey sample was unreliable due to fraudulent respondents and disabled quality controls. I have removed that material entirely.
I have also removed or heavily qualified figures drawn from Barna's State of the Church tracking, which have been widely misread; including, in the original, by me. Those findings measure attendance frequency among people already attending church, not growth in the number attending.
The load-bearing evidence in this version comes from Gallup's Poll Social Series (April 2026) and Pew's Religious Landscape Study, both independent of the retracted work, with their limitations stated in the body of the piece.
I am leaving this note permanently attached rather than quietly editing the page. I cited a bad number in public and I would rather correct it in public.
— J.T. Schoch, September 202