New Survey Reveals Spiritual Awakening Among Young People In The West

A spiritual awakening is stirring among young people in the West, according to a steady stream of survey data.

In February, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that the decade-long decline in Americans identifying as Christian has leveled off. But new studies show that the downward trend is now in full reverse, with the engine driving the change occurring among Generation Z and millennials.

On Monday, Barna Group released data showing that "66 percent of all U.S. adults say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus that is still important in their life today," marking "a 12-percentage-point increase since 2021." 

The report went on to note that the rise in faith is being particularly driven by those in their 20s and 30s -- Gen Z and millennials. "Since the pandemic ... Millennials and Gen Z have shown significant increases in commitment to Jesus, while Boomers and Gen X (especially women in these older cohorts) have remained mostly flat in their commitment levels to Jesus," the group observed.

The data echoed a similar trend happening across the pond in the U.K. According to new research from the Bible Society there, the percentage of Britons who attend church has surged by 50% over the last six years. Driving the rise were young adults, particularly young men. "In 2018, just 4 per cent of 18-24-year-olds said that they attended church at least monthly," the report found. "Today the rate has risen to 16 per cent, with young men increasing from 4 per cent to 21 per cent, and young women from 3 to 12 per cent."

"We've seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church -- particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism," remarked Rhiannon McAleer, co-author of the report. "There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago."

In addition, the percentage of young people engaging with the Bible is also on the rise, according to new findings from the American Bible Society. Released Thursday, the organization's annual "State of the Bible" report found that the number of Bible users (those who read Scripture at least three times per year) increased from 38% to 41%, translating to an increase of 10 million American Bible users since last year. Once again, millennials were found to be the primary drivers of the increase.

On Thursday, John Plake, chief innovation officer at the American Bible Society, joined "Washington Watch with Tony Perkins" to analyze the report.

"We often think about Bible users being anchored by women in America," he explained. "They have a deep faith. Moms and other women in America are deeply engaged with the Bible, typically. And yet what we saw here was that women were statistically unchanged from 2024. Not a bad thing. But what we saw, interestingly, was that men increased their Bible use by 19% year over year, and that really closed that longtime gender gap in Bible use. And not just men, but millennials. The millennial generation has been in the doldrums for quite some time, really one of the least engaged generations in America. But they saw a 29% increase in Bible use in that generation alone."

Plake went on to acknowledge the resurgence in faith happening in the U.K. and a growing revival occurring on college campuses. "We're hearing things coming off university campuses with young people crowding into gospel-focused meetings or crowding into churches. Churches outside Oxford University are beginning to fill up with young people who I think [have] an openness to the gospel that maybe their parents' or grandparents' generation never had. And they're searching for something more."

Plake further pointed to the success of biblically-based films and shows as well as the exponential popularity of Bible and religious phone apps as another measure of burgeoning spiritual awakening.

"If you listen to Dallas Jenkins and some of the people who are associated with 'The Chosen' ... they will be able to tell you story after story after story of people whose lives have been interrupted and really deeply impacted by that wonderful storytelling that's going on, whether it's, Amazon's 'House of David' or these other theatrical productions that are focusing on biblical themes," he noted. "I think that many of the people who view these may have been distant from Scripture, and it is causing them to dig in more deeply into Scripture. In fact, our friends at YouVersion who run the Bible app that you may use on your phone, they actually can track spikes in search activity within the Bible app based on what 'The Chosen' is talking about during their productions."

"I think the production companies that stand behind these kinds of Bible-based features are realizing that there is a yearning for something more and that audiences are coming," Plake added. "It would be different if they were putting out this content and nobody showed up. ... But that's not the case. People are more spiritually open than we would imagine."

Family Research Council Senior Fellow Joseph Backholm pointed to another reason for the rise in faith among young people: the simple yearning for truth.

"I think one of the causes for this is realizing they were lied to," he told The Washington Stand. "Secularism and the Sexual Revolution were pursued aggressively by Gen Z and millennials and found wanting. It promised joy if only you would focus on pleasing yourself, but they ended up the most miserable generations to have ever lived. 

The gospel explains why their reality did not align with the theory. We are not created to please ourselves, we are created to please the one who made us and are promised both eternal life and joy as a result. When people experience the devastation of believing a lie, they don't stop looking for joy and purpose, they start looking for the truth."

Originally published at The Washington Stand