The Ryan Vet Show

Is Gen Z Really Going Back to Church? — The Composition Effect Explains What the Headlines Miss

• Episode 20

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Generational futurist Ryan Vet cuts through the Easter headlines: Gen Z isn't experiencing a religious revival — the data reveals something far more nuanced, and far more important for leaders and parents to understand.

Every spring, mainstream media runs the same story: Gen Z is returning to church. But applying the Composition Effect and the Generational Prism, what's actually happening is a structural shift, not a spiritual surge. Fewer young adults are engaging with institutional religion than ever before — and the ones who remain are simply showing up more often, creating a statistical illusion of revival.

This episode traces the generational arc from Boomers through Gen Z, examines the rise of "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR) identity, unpacks why women are leaving institutional churches faster than men, and follows Gen Z's genuine spiritual hunger to where it's actually going.

Key Takeaways

  • The Composition Effect at work: When a group shrinks, the committed members look more intense — but that's not growth, it's consolidation. The Gen Zers who attend church go 1.9 times per month (vs. 1.6 for all adults), but only 10% attended on any given Sunday in 2024.
  • The Generational Prism applied: At age 21, religious affiliation has declined steadily — 74% (Boomers), 63% (Gen X), and now 56% (Gen Z). This is a trajectory, not an anomaly.
  • Belief without belonging: 83% of 18-29 year olds believe in God or a higher power. Only 43% describe that as the God of the Bible. The hunger for transcendence persists; the institution does not.
  • The gender realignment: Women's weekly attendance among 18-29 year olds dropped from 29% to 19% between 2016 and 2024. The "young men returning to church" story is better told as: young women are leaving at a faster rate.
  • Where the seekers are going: Meditation use among U.S. adults more than doubled from 7.5% (2002) to 17.3% (2022). Nearly a quarter of 18-29 year olds consult astrology or tarot at least once a year. Hallucinogen use among adults 19-30 reached 9% in 2023.
  • Hypocrisy as accelerant: In an authenticity-obsessed generation, institutional fractures over baptism, women in leadership, and worship styles aren't just confusing — they're disqualifying.


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About Ryan Vet

Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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On this episode of the Ryan Vett Show. Gen Z is coming of age in a time where algorithms don't just inform us, they sort us. They take our curiosity and turn it into a feed. They take our doubts and turn them into a tribe. Gen Z is just belonging to a new religion. Spiritual desire persists, but institutionalized religion isn't a free fall. Gen Z is not becoming a generation of atheists. They're becoming a generation of seekers who increasingly finds meaning outside the walls of institutions. And Mao, a reading from Ryan Vett's newsletter, Collide. Is Gen Z actually going back to church this Easter? Some major news outlets are talking about it, and it's not quite accurate. Let's talk about the real data. It seems that around the major Christian holidays in the US, primarily Christmas and Easter, mainstream media headlines start rolling in about a Gen Z revival. Are we seeing a return to the evangelical world in this younger generation? I'm going to burst the popular bubble, and I'm going to try to do it with grace and truth, to borrow the words of the Apostle John. The reality is, Gen Z is not facing revival. In fact, it's quite the opposite. There are traces of certain cohorts getting more deeply involved within the church and religion as a whole, but by and large, Gen Z is becoming disenfranchised with institutional religion and is actually moving more towards spirituality. The data supports this. Pugh's religious landscape study shows that among adults ages 18 to 24, 56% identify with a religion, down from 63% in 2014 and 74% in 2007. The composition effect. What we are more realistically seeing is the composition effect. This is a concept that demographers and social scientists use to explain why a group's average behavior can shift simply because the makeup of that group changes, not because anyone inside of it is changed. Let me illustrate the opposite of this to help it make a little bit more sense. Think about a startup. That core team is working long hours, staying up late at night with beer and pizza on their desk until 2 a.m., then waking up bright and early the next morning to pitch VCs and try to close their next funding round. They love their company, they'll do anything for their company, but as they get an influx of cash and start to grow their business, they hire more team members. The composition changes. More people show up to work, but the commitment level is nowhere near that of the founding team. They're no longer in that founder mentality, but a worker mentality, and it shifts. The opposite is now happening with churches. The Barner group shows that among Gen Z individuals who do attend church, they attend 1.9 times per month compared to 1.6 times per month for all church adults. This is actually a significant difference in favor of Gen Z. But we need to understand what's behind that number. It doesn't say more Gen Zers are going to church. It says the ones who go go more. That's not revival, that's a shift in behavior, and it's exactly why holiday headlines can mislead. Intensity among the people still showing up can rise at the same time that the overall pool continues to thin. The generational prism. Age, moment, and label. To understand what's happening, let's use the generational prism framework. The generational prism allows us to look at the current age of a current cohort, the moment and time they were in, and then see if that label fits. Right now, the median age for Gen Z is 21.4, spanning a wide range from ages 15 through 29. So, to make sense of the revival claim, we can loosely compare what different generations look like when the bulk of each generation was around the age of 21. This isn't a perfect science, it's an approximate lens, but it helps separate what's just young adulthood from what's actually unique to this moment in this cohort. A quick note on data. Which means we don't have the same age-specific precision for boomers at age 21 that we have for later generations. But Gallup's broader trend reporting gives us a clear enough cultural backdrop for that era. When boomers, the median average, were approximately 21 in the mid to late 1970s, institutional religion was still the dominant cultural norm. Gallup's long-running trend data shows church membership held above 70% among Americans through most of that decade. And none, as a religious affiliation, was genuinely rare, making up less than 5% of Americans. The idea of opting out of institutional religion altogether was for most young Americans at the time an edge case. Now, when Gen X was approximately 21, roughly the late 1980s into the early 1990s, the picture was starting to shift. Among 18 to 24 year olds, only 9% identified with no religious affiliation in 1990. The vast majority still identified institutionally, even if the cultural authority of the church was beginning to erode. When millennials were approximately 21, somewhere in the early to mid-2000s, something had clearly broken. By 2014, that no religion number among 18 to 24 year olds had risen to 33%, up from nine just two decades earlier. In a single generational span, none went from the margins to roughly one in three young adults. Now let's take a look at Gen Z today. Pew's most recent religious landscape study shows 56% of adults ages 18 to 24 still identify with a religion, meaning roughly 44% do not. And actual attendance is even lower. Using the American Time Use Study, Pugh finds that among adults born 1995 to 2003, only 11% attended religious services on a given Sunday in 2021. A figure that held essentially flat at 10% by 2024. No surge and no great awakening. And that moment matters. Gen Z is coming of age in a time where algorithms don't just inform us, they sort us. They take our curiosity and turn it into a feed. They take our doubts and turn them into a tribe. Gen Z is just belonging to a new religion. Belief without belonging. And why this keeps showing up. And this isn't something new. In fact, there's older peer-reviewed research that explains why patterns like this keep showing up. How and Fisher's work on the rise of nuns, N-O-N-E-S, not to be mistaken with nuns, N-U-N-S, makes an interesting observation. They explain that Americans are decreasingly identifying with organized religion despite still holding religious beliefs. In other words, people leave institutions at a faster rate than they engage in disbelief. The casual cultural Christians stop showing up, and those who remain involved in the traditional religious institutions actually double down and become more committed, and as some news outlets are proclaiming, even more radical, which is where the composition effect that I mentioned earlier comes back around. Spiritual but not religious, SBNR, and where Gen Z is actually going. One trend we are seeing consistently is the spiritual but not religious label, often written about using the acronym SBNR. Pugh finds that 70% of US adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way, including 22% who are spiritual but not religious. We're seeing an increase in Gen Z moving from a religious affiliation tied to an institution like a church or a traditional framework of religion towards something more spiritual, realizing that they are spiritual in and of themselves. They're considering subscribing to individualism and spiritualism, natural spiritualism, and even things like ayahuasca retreats, meditation, and other forms of entering a transcendent state. But Gen Z isn't going nowhere. They're going somewhere, and the data is starting to show us where. Among adults, 18 through 27, identifying as more spiritual than religious, climbed from 22% in 1998 to 34.2% in 2018. That trajectory is not random. It matches a generation that still holds transcendent beliefs just in forms that no longer require membership. Pugh finds that among adults ages 18 through 29, 83% believe in God or some higher power, but only 43% describe that as God as described in the Bible. Another 39% believe in some other higher power or spiritual force. The hunger for a higher being persists. The institution does not. That spiritual hunger is showing up in measurable ways. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health reports that the share of US adults practicing meditation rose from 7.5% in 2002 to 17.3% in 2022, and yoga from 5% to 16% over that same period. A 2024 survey finds that nearly a quarter of adults ages 18 through 29 consult astrology, tarot cards, or a fortune teller at least once a year. And on the more intense end, federal surveillance data shows that past-year hallucinogen use among adults ages 19 through 30 reached 9% in 2023, continuing what the National Institute on Drug Abuse describes as a steep five-year increase. The through line in all of this is the same. Spiritual desire persists, but institutionalized religion is in a free fall. Gen Z is not becoming a generation of atheists, they are becoming a generation of seekers who increasingly finds meaning outside the walls of institutions. Gender and religion. And here's where the narrative gets even shakier. Pugh's broader conclusion is that recent polling shows no clear evidence of a nationwide religious resurgence even among young adults, especially young men. But PRRI helps explain why the conversation still feels confusing. For decades, women have been more religious than men. That pattern is changing fast among young adults, and it's mostly because of women's decline in churches. PRRI reports that among adults ages 18 through 29, weekly religious service attendance among women dropped from 29% in 2016 to 19% in 2024. This is a significant decline in just eight years. However, men's involvement stayed relatively flat, 16% in 2016 versus 18% in 2024. So by outward appearance, it may seem like young men are attending traditional churches, but the narrative that Gen Z males are more involved in church would be better framed through the lens that, while young women are leaving the church in droves, young men are remaining faithful at the same rate as previous generations. Same story with prayer. Weekly personal prayer among women ages 18 to 29 dropped from 53% in 2016 to 38% in 2024, while men only declined slightly, 38% to 34%. So, yes, among the religious remnant, some young men may look visibly more intense. But the more disproportionate story is that women are leaving at a faster rate. That's not revival, that's realignment. Schisms, hypocrisy, and the elimination of the middle. And if you're wondering why Gen Z is disenchanted with institutional religion, we can't ignore the obvious. The church has often looked more fractured than faithful. From the outside, looking in, people have watched churches split over things like baptism, immersion versus sprinkling, infants versus adults, communion, women in pastoral roles, music and worship styles, and a dozen other issues that feel at best confusing from the onlooker and at worst hypocritical. And in an era obsessed with authenticity, hypocrisy is gasoline. Church seems to add to the already existing polarity in our world today. It doesn't seem to be a place of healing and unity. Before the church starts celebrating the headlines, it may want to look more carefully at the entire picture. The spiritual hunger in Gen Z is real. It has always been real. But for the first time in history, a generation is feeding that hunger almost entirely outside the walls of institutional church. Gen Z is searching for grace and truth. They're just not convinced the church is where they'll find it. Thank you for listening to this reading of Clyde. Until next time, I'm Ryan. Thanks for tuning in to the Ryan Bett Show. Be sure to subscribe, comment, and like this episode. Plus, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

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Ryan Vet

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