In the introduction to theology course I teach for college freshmen, one of the assigned readings is the third-century account of the martyrdoms of Saints Felicity and Perpetua. For years, the text—which depicts the gruesome torture and death of these women, one of whom had just given birth—provoked negative reactions. It especially seemed to anger the feminists in my classes, who argued it was “patriarchal” and “glorified abuse of women.” But to my surprise, two years ago a student—a self-described pro-choice feminist—said she found the story to be inspiring. The depiction of a mother nursing her baby before being killed for her beliefs was, to this student, “a message of hope and empowerment.”
It was around this time that I began noticing a broader shift in my students’ reactions to religious texts. Whereas they used to be prone to dismissing religion as antiquated and oppressive, the majority of them now deem religion to be interesting or “based.” My sense of a religious vibe shift has been confirmed in recent reporting and in the record increase of zoomers converting or reverting over the past year or so. For many of the religious zoomers I meet, faith is a beacon of hope in an otherwise chaotic world.
Yet I can’t help but feel that there’s a superficiality to this shift. For many in Gen Z, newfound religiosity has taken on a reactionary, performative, and individualist charge. Indeed, many of these converts have yet to discover that religion is meant to bind us to others and transform the way we live, rather than to simply give us ways to set ourselves apart.
Few of my students are capable of formulating an opinion on their own without regurgitating something they heard on a TikTok reel, and religious views are no exception. Rather than arriving at positions through reasoned inquiry and expressing their convictions with clarity and nuance, many of them seem to adopt and recite certain beliefs because of their countercultural charge. This is of a piece with broader generational trends. On top of struggling to think for themselves, many zoomers struggle to perform basic academic tasks without AI assistance, and something similar holds for their ability to navigate social interactions.
Often the form of faith they embrace has a reactionary charge, gaining its meaning through rejection of liberal social trends. This became clear to me last year, when a group of Catholic students held a rosary procession, complete with a Mary statue and American flags, in protest against another group of students who wanted to host a Zionist drag show on campus. A protester explained to me that we need to “take the country back from the godless liberals and perverted homosexuals.” It felt like they were acting out a script that they had memorized from watching too many TikTok reels.
One student, a recent convert to Islam, often went on tangents in class that seemed to fuse sound bites from the likes of Jordan B. Peterson and Muslim influencers like Ali Dawah, about how “prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was truly countercultural because he taught that those in power need to submit to Allah and that Allah will punish those who reject Him.” He also insisted that women need to be more modest in public, much to the chagrin of the girls—including the “cradle” Muslim ones—in class. His “countercultural” insistence on submitting to Allah seemed not to include the imperative to complete his assignments or to attempt to pass the class.
Ed, a cradle Catholic and current college junior, tells me that many of his peers are prone to conflating religion with “some mode of anti-establishment political ideology, which they view as necessary in order to save the West.” A classmate who identifies as a monarchist told him that “culture, tradition, and the things that give humans meaning are dying under the current paradigm,” to which he believes Catholic integralism functions as an antidote. He believes many of his very online, middle-class peers are drawn to such ideas due to their “feeling of social isolation and sense of directionlessness.”
“This tendency typifies an age of waning competence and agency.”
These problems are real and acute, but it seems unlikely the sort of religion these converts are embracing will cure what ails them. I can’t help but feel many young people are using faith as a Band-Aid of sorts to cover their inability to function in—or as an excuse to retreat from—the real world. This tendency typifies an age of waning competence and agency, in which power continues to be concentrated into the hands of faceless “experts” and impersonal systems and technologies; such overly-online iterations of religiosity pose no threat to this status quo.
Rather than serving as tools to reclaim agency, mimetic narratives of resistance—whether “woke” or “based”—that proliferate in our public discourse function as simulations of a challenge to the status quo that only further cede our agency to impersonal systems. Much of the new online religious counterculture follows in this vein.
The cognitive dissonance of the overly online, surface-level iterations of Christianity—whose central tenet is belief in a God who entered the world, worked with his hands, and built a very fleshy, IRL community—is especially alarming. Some Christians are attempting to respond directly. The College of Saint Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, which was the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, is aiming to teach students “to think, but also to pray, to love, and to build.” With the motto “the Word became flesh and picked up a hammer,” the school founded just last year offers training in several manual trades, with the goal to form students “into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor.”
“Some Christians are attempting to respond directly.”
The school’s target population consists of devout youngsters who spend too much time online. “We find them on the internet,” says Jacob Imam, the college’s president. “We bring them here. And we say, ‘How about a life in reality instead?’” The school’s focus on working with one’s hands speaks to a belief in the redemptive nature of manual labor, as well as their recognition of the prophetic nature of the gospel, which calls Christians to forge a new social model that transcends “worldly logic” and instead serves the common good. Accordingly, the views of the school’s faculty members and students don’t fit neatly into the ideological categories that dominate today’s culture wars.
My own experience as an overly online, excessively pious, and obsessively moralistic revert is that it was through belonging to a community—full of friends, mentors, and authority figures who were willing to both encourage and correct me—that I discovered that faith was less an excuse to hide from the world and more an impetus propelling me to run out to encounter God within it.
As families, neighborhoods, and local civic organizations erode, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for young people to experience a sense of belonging to something greater than oneself. There is considerable research indicating Gen Z is the loneliest and most alienated and depressed generation. Without a community of people with varying gifts, needs, and personality types—without elders to look up to—it’s hard to develop into a mature adult who lives as a true protagonist in the world.
Rather than functioning as bubbles of piety or ideological echo chambers, religious communities and institutions ought to strive to become spaces where people can learn to, as the Italian theologian Luigi Giussani put it, “live the real intensely.” Indeed, young believers are in dire need of being educated to seek God in all aspects of life—from prayer and civic initiatives to carrying out tasks as basic as home repair and finishing one’s homework.