It’s really important to understand this distinction, or else folks will draw the wrong conclusions (and reading through the comments, it seems like many are).
Young people are not becoming “more religious” or more Christian. Young people are still leaving Christianity in droves and each generational cohort is less religious than the previous one. On top of that, the whole thing about young people leaving the church but then coming back after getting older isn’t really holding either.
This data takes one subset - people who identify as Christian - and trying to gauge how more or less devout they have become. Frankly, when I was a Christian I wouldn’t have considered going to church once a month all that devout anyway. But I think it is showing that young people who were already “in the tent” and crucially remain in the tent while tons of other young people are leaving it are by one measure becoming more devout.
The idea that all Gen Z and Alpha are becoming a bunch of TradCath Crusader LARPers is a total myth that feels real when you are way too online.
It doesn’t measure a question of “do you identify as Christian”. It assumes that about someone who goes to church once a month for the purposes of the title. They asked everyone a multiple-choice question of how often they went to a regular church service.
The population sampled in the poll is the general population of the UK.
It’s really important to understand this distinction, or else folks will draw the wrong conclusions (and reading through the comments, it seems like many are).
Young people are not becoming “more religious” or more Christian. Young people are still leaving Christianity in droves and each generational cohort is less religious than the previous one. On top of that, the whole thing about young people leaving the church but then coming back after getting older isn’t really holding either.
This data takes one subset - people who identify as Christian - and trying to gauge how more or less devout they have become. Frankly, when I was a Christian I wouldn’t have considered going to church once a month all that devout anyway. But I think it is showing that young people who were already “in the tent” and crucially remain in the tent while tons of other young people are leaving it are by one measure becoming more devout.
The idea that all Gen Z and Alpha are becoming a bunch of TradCath Crusader LARPers is a total myth that feels real when you are way too online.
It doesn’t measure a question of “do you identify as Christian”. It assumes that about someone who goes to church once a month for the purposes of the title. They asked everyone a multiple-choice question of how often they went to a regular church service.
The population sampled in the poll is the general population of the UK.