Generation Z, those born between 1999 and 2015, and those who will never remember a day when social media did not dominate their lives, has the most atheists in their group than any other generation.
According to data from the religious research company The Barna Group, 13% of Generation Z identifies as atheist. In just one generation, between U.S. Millennials and Gen Z, the numbers of children who acknowledge no divine authority has doubled.
As reported by Church Militant, the data also shows a “decrease in the number of professed Christians. Over the course of four generations, the percentage who call themselves Christians dropped from 75% among Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) to 59% in Generation Z.”
Catholic Christians fared no better, falling a total of 10 points since the Baby Boomers; 27% to 17%.
“More than one-third of Gen Z (37%) believes it is not possible to know for sure if God is real, compared to 32% of all adults,” reports Barna, who collected the data through a series of surveys. “The data were minimally weighted to known U.S. Census data in order to be representative of ethnicity, gender, age and region.”
One positive takeaway about Gen Z, however, is that when they are Christian, Catholic, or Conservative, they are not lukewarm.
According to a 2016 study, 41% of Gen Z report of attending weekly church services, compared to just 18% of Millennials who said they went to church at that age, 21% of Gen X, and 26% of Boomers. So, while there may be more atheists among Gen Z, there are certainly stronger Christians. The moral behavior of Gen Z is dramatically more conservative than Gen X or Millennials. From The American Conservative:
According to a study released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), sexual intercourse among high school students has decreased in the United States by quite a bit. Among males, 43.2 percent of high schoolers surveyed admitted to having sexual intercourse, while 39.2 percent of females answered the same. While that may seem high, it’s a stark decrease from 2005, when 47.9 percent of males and 45.7 percent of females admitted to having sex. And it’s an even bigger dip from the more than 50 percent that the CDC counted in 1995. According to a 1998 Los Angeles Times article, high school sex started to rise in the ‘70s, hit its peak in the ‘80s, then began to slowly decrease in the ‘90s.
So, maybe “Generation Atheists” is an unfair moniker. Who knows? Maybe Gen Z will be the Gen that saves us from destruction.