Name: Free Expression on the Weekend: Is Christianity Making a Comeback?
Uploaded: 2026-04-17T16:02:00Z
Duration: 5 min 27 s
Description: Free Ex’s Mary Julia Koch spoke with political scientist Ryan Burge, one of the foremost researchers of religion in America, to figure out what’s really happening at churches across the country.

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Free Ex’s Mary Julia Koch spoke with political scientist Ryan Burge, one of the foremost researchers of religion in America, to figure out what’s really happening at churches across the country.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260417/b5b21ca0-5027-4482-845f-f93d42556914/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Free Expression on the Weekend: Is Christianity Making a Comeback?

Among college-age students, if you're white and liberal, 70% chance you're non-religious. If you're conservative, it's about a 15% chance you're non-religious. It is that predictive.

Headline after headline is claiming that there's a religious revival among Gen Z. Catholic influencers are going viral for posting videos of Sunday masses that are packed with young people, and the narrative is that Christianity is cool again. So I'd like to know, what does the data on Gen Z show is actually happening?

Yeah, so the data says that Gen Z is the least religious generation we've ever seen in the history of modern polling. On questions of belief in God, Gen Z scores seven or eight points less likely to believe in God, certainly than Millennials do, and 15 points less than Boomers. Gen Z is significantly more likely to never attend religious services, and they're somewhat more likely to claim no religious affiliation. They're probably two or three percentage points more likely to be nuns compared to Millennials. So almost 45% of Gen Z says they're atheist, agnostic, or claim no religion in particular, which is 20 points higher than Baby Boomers and five points higher than Millennials. The most recent data among Gen Z for gender says that the gender gap is closed. Young women are as religious or as irreligious as young men are, but the reason for the closure of that gap is not because that men have returned to church, it's actually because young women are continuing to leave church faster than young men are. So, you know, the idea that men are returning to church in droves, that's just really not backed up by the data compared to women who are heading for the exits, you know, by the millions. It's actually making young men look more religious when they're probably not really changing that much.

What you're suggesting there is that the media narrative, or at least the people that are going viral, aren't representative of Gen Z or Gen Z conservatives at large?

Let's be honest here, a story about, you know, I'm a young Gen Z person who grew up an atheist and started going to Catholic mass, you know, twice a week is really interesting. The narrative of American religion for the last 30 years is decline, decline, decline across almost every metric. So any sort of evidence at all that that narrative is turning, you know, in any way becomes really interesting. Now the narrative begins to change around those things, even though the underlying data behind American religion hasn't really changed that much. The zeitgeist, the way we discuss it, the vibes around religion has changed because these couple influencers, these couple pieces of media, these videos we see in these pictures, little anecdotes here and there tend to wanna change our minds, even though the data hasn't really moved that much.

Yeah. I'm curious about the political religious divide.

The most important feature of American religion in politics is the God gap and that's just the idea that the Republican party is the party of religious people and the Democratic party increasingly becoming the party of non-religious people. For instance, about 70% of Donald Trump's voters were white Christians in 2024, almost 80% were Christians of any racial background. In 2024, Harris voters, 45% of them were atheist, agnostic, or claim no religion in particular. Young people are more and more convinced that to be a liberal person politically means to be a non-religious person and to be a conservative person is to be a religious person, most specifically a Christian person, Protestant or Catholic. And the Republican parties leaned into Christian values and Christian language and talking about things like abortion and same sex marriage and transgender. And meanwhile, the Democratic party has really leaned into being the party of inclusivity, talking a lot about groups like Muslim Americans or transgender Americans. Even those groups only make up 1% of the population. They're trying to create this sort of like disparate big tent.

Yeah, I've seen you report the statistic that 70% of young liberals aren't religious. Is that like an all time high?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, among college-age students, if you're white and liberal, 70% chance you're non-religious. If you're conservative, it's about a 15% chance you're non-religious. If people ask me, you know, "Guess what my religion is, "but you can't ask me any religion questions," the first question I would ask is, "What is your political ideology?" I mean, it is that predictive, a liberal is five to six times more likely to be non-religious compared to a conservative, and those gaps are only getting wider among the youngest adults.

So the story of religion in America is really a cyclical one. There's been moments of religious revival and moments of religious decline. Have you been surprised at all by this plateauing of secularization in the last few years?

You know, when I started doing this kind of work, the nuns were just rising every time we got the survey right? And the question we always have, "When's that gonna stop?" And the answer seemed like never. And to see that number stop and stay there consistently for a five year period of time, the reality behind that is that this is just a pause in secularization because there's huge gaps in the overall religiosity of Boomers compared to Gen Z. And Boomers are 60 to 80 years old right now, which means that in 20 years, most of them won't be part of the American population and they'll be replaced by Gen Z who are much less religious than them. The share of Americans who are non-religious will almost inevitably rise in the next 20 years because of the death of the Baby Boomers. Unless Millennials come back to faith in numbers that we've never seen before in the history of modern Poland. We're talking 10, 15, 20 million Millennials and Gen Z coming back to church in the next 10 or 15 years. I'm not saying that's not possible, I'm just saying we've never seen it before and it's highly unlikely based on current trends. So the pause is a surprise to me, but the long-term macro level trend is definitely away from religion in the United States.