When I was a postgraduate student, my tutor liked to repeat an old saw popular with academic philosophers, to the effect that the discipline “always buried its undertakers”. That is, critics were forever forecasting the death of philosophy, and were forever being proved wrong by its persistence or resurgence.
The same might be said of religion. At least since the mid-1800s, with the twin blows of evolutionary theory and new forms of historical criticism, European intellectuals have been confidently predicting that Christianity will vanish, or lose all credibility among educated people. Yet, despite undoubted decline and loss of influence, it has not done so. And now it has been reported that British members of Generation Z — people now in their teens and twenties — are significantly more likely than their parents’ generation to identify as “spiritual”. There are undoubtedly what the statisticians call “compositional effects” at work here, with a large number of younger Britons coming from immigrant backgrounds where religious belief is much more prevalent. But this may not be the only explanation.
It is also possible that the economic stagnation of the last two decades, and growing cultural fragmentation and alienation, are sharply exposing the limits of the vague and complacent secular liberalism which has tended to dominate British public discourse for several decades. This worldview — insofar as it gave any thought at all to the meaning of the good life — breezily assumed that people would be happy with material progress, technological innovation, and ever-expanding frontiers of personal choice. I am not among those conservatives who disdain economic growth or scientific advance, but it remains true that man cannot live by bread alone.
The possible difference between members of Gen Z and their parents in this area is fascinating. It was observed recently that people whose professional lives and personal finances were largely well-established and comfortable before the great financial crisis of 2008 — a demographic which includes Keir Starmer — struggle to understand just how difficult life has become, materially and socially, for their children.
That older generation, mostly born in the Sixties and Seventies, represents a kind of high water mark as far as disconnection from religious belief in Britain is concerned. Consider, for example, the Government’s plans last week to cut tax relief for religious buildings (known as the “worship tax”), which feels very much like the kind of thing that would be attempted by politicians who have little understanding of or sympathy with religious observance, and who have little contact with it in their everyday lives. They benefitted — if that is the right word — from the fading of Christian belief and observance, but also grew up and lived much of their adult lives in the afterglow of the old orderly, stable Christian Britain, whose positive aspects they have denied their own offspring.
Trends in belief are fickle things, but no observant or thoughtful person should be surprised to see a questioning of unbelief at this time of ongoing radical disruption to British society.
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Subscribe> are significantly more likely than their parents’ generation to identify as “spiritual”.
We start by clarifying spiritual is not religious, and should not be conflated as such, spiritual is a word I generally used by those who want the comfort of something beyond the material but refuse the sacrifice that comes with actually living a religious life, those John the Revelator characterized as neither hot nor cold.
That being said this is hardly surprising Gen Z gets to live in the age where the New Atheism won, where God was regulated out of everything and seen that when you have nothing left they you owe your loyalty to external of yourself everything that holds us together falls apart. It is the ultimate failure of the Marxist dialectical and the failure of the Frankfurt school, if nothing is real or permanent then there is no real impetus to care for my neighbor. Whereas the Christian creed is that we are all children of God with infinite worth and divine potential and that our souls will endure eternally, and when you realize the man you meet on the street is a Divinity, not to mention that your family and loved ones around you are beings with whom you shall likely spend all of eternity. Well that changes quite a bit of how you act and what you do. Your obligation to your posterity becomes greater, your willingness to serve others increases, and your vision becomes much longer than simply having a good time now.
But hey eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die right?
…and when you realize the man you meet on the street is a Divinity…
“Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of these, dying the life of those.”
We start… by recognising that humans are spiritual beings, due to consciousness and curiosity with how we came to be here. This was a process beginning many, many millennia before what we’d now term ‘religion’ became recognised, through the development of settled habitation, requiring power structures and the use of language and then text to codify religious beliefs.
It’s possible that some young people are turning to these organised structures, but the general search for meaning beyond “bread alone” doesn’t have to involve either the established religions or indeed, any belief in a deity.
Using terms such as “new atheists” is just falling into the trap of those who seek to monitor the waxing and waning of our spiritual lives by labelling them. It means… nothing: there’s just “atheism”. I’m an a-theist, and i’ll take no lessons from anyone on the value of the human spirit and wonder at the wider universe we inhabit – something we absolutely didn’t understand when codified religions were being developed.
Religion is as old as humanity, as any student of prehistory will tell you.
Religion doesn’t begin with power structures or codification – those arrive later.
e.g. the story of Abraham was transferred from Jewish parents to their children by word of mouth for a whole millennium before scribes wrote it down.
e.g. Jesus was crucified at the instigation of those in the religious power structures.
If there’s no God, there’s no purpose or meaning in the universe, and it’s wishful thinking to imagine there is
“Any student of prehistory”?
Nonsense. Religion is the codification of spirituality. As such, it stretches back only as far as the written word. Humanity itself, and the rise of consciousness, predates writing by tens of thousands of years, probably hundreds of thousands.
The myopia of religionists is, frankly, risible.
Religion began with an oral history, not a written one.
You sound quite desperate to be right. I hope I’m wrong.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that has “life after death” as a belief.
One of the audience in the Unherd talk with Nick Cave and Tom Holland asked, ‘What happens to us after death?’
What does justice demand? What does love demand? Although both were deeply present in what both men said in their talk, neither featured as a response to the question.
Would it be an abomination if every act of love and friendship that has ever been expressed comes to nothing at death, not even to be remembered as a story?
C S Lewis liked to remind people that our view of God is too small. A mouse regarding an elephant and forgetting how small it was.
One might mistake a person risen from the dead as a divinity. Their presence would be as a shock of nuclear heat and arresting as lighting from a blue sky. Flesh filled with the life of Christ. Against that immoveable reality we would be as an ocean wave shivering into a thousand drops against a granite cliff. Our reality would be transient, ephemeral, a momentary pattern in smoke. ‘Life after death’ is a poor thing in comparison.
Divine love without being humanised would be unbearable. Humanised it’s only just.
The beginning is not, alas, ‘spirituality’, whatever that means. Nick Cave’s wife’s simple confession, “My son has died” is in heart-sympathy the same as the simple confession, “Christ has died”. Yes, he has died. Begin with that.
Christianity is the only one that is “life after death” all the others are “death after death”. Repent and Believe and live.
Lots of religions believe in straight up reincarnation.
Oh well done Unherd. You’ve managed to publish yet another article which ignores Islam. Even when it is about religion!
Or is this writer pretending Islam doesn’t exist in UK like all the other contributors? Just look the other way please.
Or, to give my opinion. Ignore something for so long and then this writer isn’t even aware what he is ignoring.
I think he was talking about spirituality, not rule-following.
He’s talking about the declining belief in the Christian religion.
Well there you go then. It’s not about Islam! You don’t half write some twaddle on here. The other post of yours on here: immortals, mortals etc. what’s that gibberish all about?
Well that is my point exactly. In Unherd nothing is about Islam.
The other post is a bit of very old philosophy.
Nobody except you want every article to be about Islam, Starmer or both. Variety is the spice of life, and we like to discuss other topics that may be happening around the globe
I hope you’re not hoping for Islam to replace Christianity, then we’re all doomed.
You are correct. If 99.99% of UnHerd contributors hate the idea of Islam, worry about what it is doing to the world, believe that it is destructive, etc ….. it is a little gauche not to want to understand more of what it is all about. This is also true of other religions but Islam is perhaps more threatening, or appears so and is certainly in the news. So articles about the spread and power of Islam would be quite important in the world today and UnHerd should see this.
Type the word “Islam” into Unherd’s Search facility, there’s plenty of articles and at least some will match that purpose.
Really, you just keep trying to bolster RL for the sake of it, out of a kind of atavistic sympathy.
I’ve also provided links for him to Unherd articles which he claims don’t exist, which he then ignores by claiming they don’t exist the day after… and the day after…
He has just paid his dues like you. None of us is special and if you think you are – you have a lot to learn.
He might have a particular problem, he might disagree with you, he might think that you have too much wind – but his input is as special as yours, which I think is about getting as many upticks as possible. And that is sad.
Uh-oh, the children are fighting again! And this time its about who is the bigger religious bigot!
On you go, lads, have at it!
I usually ignore you but you have hit the nail on the head.
The submission of the Muslim is, in its theory at least, a mere submission. The submission of the Christian – the person who has a trusted Christ – is also a reception. A reception of Christ into the heart by faith. Not just the house swept and put in order, but now housing a new Resident.
Submission is Islam or surrender, it’s mandatory. Christianity is commission, encouraged to commit but not forced. Judaism is law, follow the laws, or not and don’t participate.
Demographers have been predicting this for almost 20 years now- but it’s great that tangible results like this are starting to come through. The greatest predictor of whether a child grows up to be religious is her parent’s faith, or lack thereof. With the exception of a few African countries, human fertility is falling all across the world. ( An interesting Unherd article published last month by Olympia Campbell called this part of an almost 200 year old trend.) Even if you throw in the moderately religious with unbelievers, birth rates are well below replacement levels. But deeply religious families are immune to this decline, having 5 or 6 children on average. This has been a persistent planet-wide trend for decades now, and is likely going to be quite tranformative for global culture.
Could be the great irony of our time is that instead of the long predicted death of the Christian religion we might be witnessing the slow death of the Social Justice religion that it spawned some hundred or so years ago. It has become a commonplace on the intellectual Right to view Social Justice as a shadowy penumbra of the Christian religion that birthed it.
Social Justice, as political project, can be viewed as a kind of egalitarian evangelism – a filleted, rationalised re-imagining of Christianity, stripped of enchantment and its transcendent spiritual dimension. ‘God loves us equally’ becoming ‘this life on this earth must be strictly ‘fair’ to each and every one of us’. Maybe what’s beginning to happen now is that Gen Z is noticing that the Social Justice religion’s great egalitarian project never seems to actually deliver what it promised.
Well, organised religion yes. But surely peak consumers of all sorts of half baked cod spirituality of all kinds.
“Cod spirituality”? Surely some chips would be in order too?
Don’t worry, the atheists will be bringing shoulders full of them.
The piece of cod which surpasses all understanding
That made me laugh. Didn’t see it coming. Bravo!
There’s no plaice for that, now.
Gen Z is turning back to fundamentals across many dimensions. They favour in person connections, they are developing strategies to avoid the dopamine scrolling hellscape of the smartphone, they are more curious than curated by the zeitgeist, and more confident to stand apart. Dogmatism is giving way to pragmatism, and they are more likely to respond than react. And yes, for some, spiritual enquiry is part of the journey. I would say their interest is more in faith than religion, where faith can take many forms.
I have been teaching 350 of them every year since 2020. I like them very much.
As a British Muslim, I would love it if Christianity is indeed growing amongst young Brits.
A society will eventually decline if it loses its faith. Sooner or later.
Yes, but do you also support the growth of Judaism?
Direct hit!
I support the growth of all religions. But the bloodthirsty sadists of the Likud party do not represent Judaism. Zionism is not Judaism.
Maybe they are but thankfully it does not seem to take the form of the moralising hypocritical Christianity of yesteryear and parts of the US. If anything it resembles the spiritual seeking of the yogic and Buddhist traditions where mastery of the breath is the prelude to mastery of the mind, the emotions and all desire of which the dopamine hellscape of smartphone addiction is emblematic.
Exactly!
They’ll still feel empty and lost then.
Is it religion or it it boundaries and parameters we are talking of here? Most of society prefers order to chaos. Increasingly we are leaning toward the latter. No surprise then that tenet based philosophies are becoming more popular amongst those more exposed and susceptible to the negative and isolating effects of social media et al. That is, the Gen Z of this article.
There’s a god-shaped itch in our society. The young feel this more acutely than older generations and are looking to belief systems for the scratch.
Yes, but the belief systems are not those of their grandparents.
“And now it has been reported that British members of Generation Z — people now in their teens and twenties — are significantly more likely than their parents’ generation to identify as “spiritual”“. There is a world of difference between “indentifying as ‘spiritual'”, and being “Christian” (or indeed embracing any “old” religion). Identifying as spiritual is far more likely to come as a result of a psychedelic drug experience as from visiting a traditional “place of worship”.
Why do I get the impression you’re fervently hoping for your explanation to be true.
I can assure you that I have had plenty of experiences with psychedelics.
After Gen Z, what of Gen Alpha, the ‘New Ones’?
Like Tom Holland has observed, all the young people I know have no knowledge whatsoever of the stories of either Testament. Mention the widow’s mite or the Good Samaritan and they will look blank. Some aren’t even sure where Sweden is.
The phrases from scripture that had passed into common usage by the 19th century, such as ‘the land of Nod’ or ‘Jesus called a little child’, are now never used by Gen Z or Alpha as they would have been by their grandparents.
In an earlier age there was a grander faith. That faith described by John of Revelation is difficult to find even among Christians.
“Some aren’t even sure where Sweden is“. I was unaware that Sweden even featured in the Bible.
I think that’s where Woden lives.
Rather than putting moribund religions on life-support, how about trying something more akin to ancestor worship to fill the spiritual void? At the moment I’m reading ‘In Memory of Memory’ by Maria Stepanova and the author describes days when she was off school and her mum would retrieve the old family photo albums from a cupboard, along with various random trinkets from great-grandparents strewn across time and the Russian empire. After looking at these bearded old men and young schoolgirls in salior suits who later became grannies, a sense of the enormity of it all would overcome her. Surely this is the feeling people are after: a feeling of enormity and depth. And the bonus is that you don’t need to pretend to yourself that you believe something totally incredible.
Another book I read recently was ‘Black Robe’ by Brian Moore about French Catholic missionaries trying to convert the Native American Indians of Canada. The Indians, who already had their ancestor worship, couldn’t grasp what the missionaries were trying to convert them to, and seen from the Indians’ point of view, you could see why. Even the missionaries themselves couldn’t quite believe what they were teaching. You finish the novel feeling that the Indians’ belief that the ghosts of their ancestors constantly guide and interact with them is not nearly so strange as the one peddled by the priests.
Heaven forbid.
As long as Gens Z and Alpha remain atheists or agnostics they will never consider converting to Islam or becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The rise of spirituality is both a response to the same questions that humans have personally had for thousands of years, as well as the human corruption too often present in organized religion. We want a spiritual dimension to our existence, but we do not want the packaging of what is on offer.
The Big Bang is very clearly not an answer to “why is there anything at all?” It assumes a super hot, super dense ball of mass-energy that then explodes. So where did that super hot super dense ball come from? Apparently that is not worth discussing because very simply, it is a question that science cannot answer.
There are many in the West these days that are “remembering” that there are many questions that are not suited for scientific inquiry, that science cannot answer.
Yet it is somehow embedded in us to seek for those answers regardless.