There is strong evidence that the resurgence, or large-scale Christian “revival” among Gen Z, is concentrated along party lines. Both young Republican men and women have intensified their faith. Young liberal men have become more active churchgoers, but only sparingly, and liberal women continue to leave organized religion in mass, at the highest rate of any group.
The reported surges in Catholic mass attendance and baptisms, concentrated predominantly in major urban centers, come across as surprising. At the same time, conservative mainline Protestant denominations such as Evangelicals and Southern Baptists continue their gradual decline. I began to suspect that young conservatives already born into these Evangelical and Baptist communities have only intensified their existing faith; there isn’t a surge of non-religious or Catholic/Orthodox people flocking in and boosting their numbers. Meanwhile, Catholicism in the US currently leans right, and there are signs that many former Protestants are gravitating toward it too. At the same time, Pope Leo’s staunch criticism of AI, consumerism, and parts of capitalism may spike interest among more progressive or “cultural” Catholics who aren’t currently active in church life. His tenure is too new to know yet; this needs to be observed over a longer span of time.
That last point came into focus for me while interviewing a 26-year-old Gen Z Catholic woman about her own return to the faith. She’d drifted away between 2018 and 2022, the same window the data shows for most of her generation. She came back in 2023 for reasons that had nothing to do with ideology: a move to Hawaii while her boyfriend was deployed with the Navy, and the military parish community that gave her both social footing and a religious one at a moment she had neither. A Catholic women’s retreat in 2024 deepened it further. She didn’t notice the online, algorithmic side of this shift until after she was already back and involved, which complicates the internet-first version of this story I lay out below with Orthodoxy. She also pushed back hard on the idea that her own community skews conservative or narrow, describing it instead as wide-ranging, pulled together less by politics than by a shared search for a third space in a period of general social isolation. And she was, unprompted, a genuine admirer of Pope Leo. She saw his focus on AI especially as speaking directly to the anxieties her own generation is living through, calling his image “very good for Catholic PR.” She also framed him as inherently standing up to Christian nationalism, pointing to his anti-war stance and his emphasis on love and tolerance for others as the reason. She also brought up his nationality unprompted: having an American pope, in her view, makes him more relatable and accessible to American Catholics specifically. She pointed to the aesthetics and permanence of Catholicism, “rich in history, unwavering in values, dedicated to preserving history,” as what’s actually drawing people in.
If Catholicism’s growth looks geographically wide, Orthodoxy’s growth looks almost entirely digital. There is a notable fluctuation of young men gravitating toward Eastern Orthodoxy. It’s worth stating that Orthodoxy represents a tiny minority of Christians in the United States, accounting for only about 1% of the population and consisting primarily of Eastern European and Eastern Mediterranean immigrant communities and their descendants. Many of the men with a newfound interest in the Church have no prior ethnic or cultural ties to it. Many were formerly Protestant, while others had no religious background at all. Almost all first encountered the Church through online content. This male-dominated surge in Orthodoxy provides one of the clearest examples of how algorithmically mediated digital environments have drawn young men toward traditionalist Christianity. The convert profile itself, disconnected from ethnic heritage and arriving through online media rather than family or local community, illustrates the central role digital platforms have played in this trend.
There are real problems with this internet-driven packaging, though. Fr. Andrew Damick, an Antiochian Orthodox priest and one of the most cited clergy voices on this trend, has expressed concern that young men seeking out Orthodoxy for its perceived “masculinity” may find their preconceptions challenged once they arrive. As he put it: “To be a man involves a need for structure, which Orthodoxy provides, but it’s not as if Orthodoxy is inherently masculine.” Orthodoxy can offer young men the discipline they’re looking for, but it was never meant to be a masculine-dominated space. Anyone familiar with recent Orthodox history knows that during the era of Soviet state-backed repression, Orthodox women in the Soviet and Eastern Bloc were the lifeblood of that church community. Orthodoxy is an incredibly ancient faith, and it isn’t built to cater to any underlying political agenda its newer followers may bring to it.
No single story can explain a generation, and this woman’s experience is likely the exception rather than the norm. Taken alongside the broader evidence, however, it highlights the central tension explored here: the Christian revival is real in certain places and communities, but it is consistently narrower, more mediated, and less theologically uniform than much of the coverage suggests.
Author: Hannah Hartley
