'Time' утверждает, что среди поколения Z нет религиозного возрождения. Данные их поддерживают

Time magazine ran a piece this month asking whether there’s a religious revival happening among Gen Z. It opens on a 23-year-old named Anthony Gross who moved to New York, didn’t know anyone, started ranking Catholic churches on TikTok, and walked into a packed Sunday mass in Greenwich Village where he says everybody was under 30.

Then it asks the researchers, and they say no.

About 25% of Americans report attending church weekly. Move that to 28% — three points — and you have added 12 million people.

Ryan Burge, a political scientist who has become the designated skeptic in every one of these stories, ran that out for us. There are roughly 300,000 Christian churches in America, so 12 million people means every one of them adds 35 to 40 faces that weren’t there a year ago. The average American church runs about 70 on a Sunday. That church goes to 110, and stays.

“How many stories have you heard of a church that’s 75 people now is 125 people?” Burge told RELEVANT. “I’ve not heard any.”

That’s the modest version. Nobody is describing it because it isn’t happening. So Time got the big thing right. What they got wrong is narrower: almost every scene in the article is Catholic.

The TikToker ranks Catholic parishes. The bishop is the Diocese of Phoenix. Three of the four gatherings they cite are Catholic youth conferences. That’s a strange way to describe a generation that is overwhelmingly not Catholic.

The one evangelical data point they include, they drop. Passion, the largest conference for 18-to-25-year-olds, is expanding into two stadiums for the first time in its history — Texas in December, Georgia in February. That’s 120,000 Gen Z attendees, and it gets a clause.

Bishop Dolan’s hundreds of Easter baptisms, most of them Gen Z, get the same treatment. If the argument is that the anecdotes don’t add up to a trend, the anecdotes are worth gathering first.

There’s also a number doing work it can’t do. Time cites PRRI finding more than 75% of Americans over 65 identify as Christian against 54% of adults under 30, and offers it as evidence against a resurgence. That gap isn’t new and it isn’t a direction. Young people have been less religious than old people for as long as anyone has measured it, and the distance between two age groups says nothing about which way either is moving. The decline stopped.

For 30 years every survey of American religion pointed the same way, down, generation over generation. That’s no longer true.

The share of Gen Z claiming no religious affiliation has flattened around 42%. The religiosity gap between millennials and Gen Z is roughly half the gap between millennials and Gen X, or Gen X and boomers. Pew finds people born in the 1990s and people born in the early 2000s look about the same.

Burge won’t give an inch on the word revival and gives that much. He puts the country’s floor at about 45% Christian, 45% unaffiliated, 10% everything else. “That’s still an amazingly Christian country for a Western democracy to be,” he said.

A generation that was supposed to keep falling stopped falling. Nobody posts about it, because it doesn’t come with a stadium photo. It’s also the first floor anyone has found in three decades.

Both things are true at once, and holding both is harder than picking one. There’s no national revival. There are also full rooms, and they aren’t imaginary — Burge allows the pockets of growth even while the macro number sits flat.

The move to avoid is the one that’s been everywhere this year: finding the single survey that points the right direction and treating it as settled.

“I got one poll over here is not extraordinary evidence, folks,” Burge said. “It’s cherry picking.”

The people filling those rooms don’t need the national number to move. It would be nice, eventually, if it did.