Category: Religion

Examining religious belief from around the world.

When God Comes Back: A Note of Caution for Gen Z (from an Ex-Pastor)

On 11 January 2026, Sky News ran a piece with a headline that would have sounded unlikely a decade ago: “How did Gen Z become the most religious generation alive?”

The article reports an uptick in religious belief and church attendance among young adults, with social media playing a surprising role in how faith is “discovered” and spread: short-form religious content on TikTok and Instagram, influencers speaking openly about God, and churches receiving enquiries from young people who first encountered religion online.

Sky’s piece includes voices from Christian influencers who say they’re seeing a noticeable rise in young people asking how to get involved, and it references YouGov data suggesting a marked shift: among 18–25s, monthly church attendance rising from 7% (2018) to 23% (2024), and belief in a higher power rising from 28% to 49% across the same period.

Even the sceptics appear in the report—young atheists who say this doesn’t match what they see online, or who wonder whether the change is temporary and pandemic-shaped.

So: something is happening. And if we care about society, about meaning, about the moral atmosphere we all breathe, we should pay attention.

Why this makes sense (even if you’re not religious)

I teach university students. I write about social meaning. And I have to admit: the trend itself is not mysterious to me.

When a society loses confidence in its shared story, people don’t become “purely rational.” They become hungry.

For a long time, the West lived off inherited moral capital: ideas of human dignity, restraint, compassion, truth-telling, fidelity, responsibility—values that were once anchored in a Christian metaphysics, then carried forward as if they could survive on sentiment alone.

But sentiment doesn’t sustain a civilisation.

What we increasingly offer young people instead is:

    • Ethical drift: everything negotiable, nothing binding
    • Performative role models: influence without character, aesthetics without responsibility
    • Thin narratives: “be yourself,” “live your truth,” “manifest your future” — slogans that collapse under suffering
    • A destabilised world: economic fragility, housing impossibility, ecological anxiety, war returning as background noise

Under those conditions, it is almost inevitable that many will reach for something older and firmer than the modern self. Something that says:

    • this is real
    • this is right
    • this is wrong
    • your life is not an accident
    • your suffering is not meaningless
    • there is a way through

And in the Western world, that “something” is most readily available in Christianity.

Which churches will benefit most

If Gen Z is turning toward Christianity for meaning and stability, we should be honest about where the gravitational pull will land.

It will not primarily be the churches that sound like ritual, bored faces and committees.

It will be the churches that sound like conviction.

The kinds of churches most likely to grow are the ones that offer:

    • non-negotiable truth (not “your personal journey,” but The Answer)
    • a strong identity (“this is who we are; this is how we live”)
    • high emotional impact (music, lighting, atmosphere, collective intensity)
    • clarity about enemies (the world, the devil, “compromise,” secular decadence)
    • belonging that feels immediate and total

The Sky News article points to the rise of Christian content on TikTok and influencer culture around faith.

That ecosystem naturally rewards certainty, compression, drama, and transformation narratives—all things charismatic and fundamentalist Christianity has always been good at packaging.

If you want a religion that fits social media, you will end up with the kind of religion that performs well on social media.

And that is where my caution begins.

My stake in this: I used to be one of them

I am not writing this as an anti-Christian hit piece.

I am writing this as someone who once stood inside that world—as a pastor, not merely a visitor. I believed. I preached. I led people. I sold my house and car and moved abroad with my family. I was part of the machinery that makes a high-commitment church feel like home and destiny at the same time.

I no longer believe in God.

And because I know what these churches can do—both the beauty and the damage—I want to say something directly to any Gen Z reader who is moving toward Christianity because the world feels hollow and unstable.

You are not foolish for wanting meaning.

You are not stupid for wanting a moral anchor.

But you may be walking, without realising it, into a system designed to take more from you than it gives.

So let me offer a warning, not against faith as such, but against a particular style of faith that is increasingly likely to catch you.

Four warnings before you hand over your life

1) It offers “ultimate truth” — but it cannot prove it

Fundamentalist Christianity sells certainty.

It tells you the world has a secret structure and it possesses the key: virgin births, miracles, demons, healings, resurrections, prayers that alter reality. It gives you a total explanation and calls that “faith.”

But human beings will believe almost anything if it fits the narrative they are offered—especially when the narrative arrives wrapped in community, music, belonging, and moral purpose.

That is not an insult to believers. It is an observation about humans.

A strong story can feel true even when it isn’t.

And the stronger the story, the more it demands you interpret everything through it: your sexuality, your friendships, your doubts, your pain, your ambitions, your money, your family.

Once you interpret reality through a sacred script, the script becomes self-sealing. Evidence against it becomes “temptation” or “attack” or “pride.”

That isn’t truth. That is a closed system.

2) It trains you to call the selflessness “love” — but salvation is still about you

There is a reason Nietzsche was so ferocious about Christianity.

Christianity can produce remarkable acts of compassion—real kindness, real service. Many Christians are genuinely good people.

But at the structural level the religion often contains a hidden centre of gravity: your soul, your salvation, your standing before God, your purity, your afterlife.

Even love can become instrumental:

    • I love you because I must be Christlike
    • I witness to you because your conversion validates my worldview
    • I “forgive” you because it keeps me clean
    • I help you because it stores treasure somewhere else

When salvation is the central preoccupation, the self never truly exits the stage.

You may feel you are becoming “more loving,” but you may also be becoming more morally anxious, more self-monitoring, more dependent on approval, more afraid of your own doubt.

3) The sacrifices will not deliver what is promised

High-commitment Christianity often sells a paradox:

Give up the world and you will gain joy.

And sometimes, at first, it works. Early conversion can feel like oxygen: clarity, unconditional love, a new tribe, a new identity, a new sense of direction. In a lonely world, that is powerful.

But over time the bargain changes.

You will be asked to sacrifice things that are not merely “sinful,” but simply human:

    • parts of your identity that don’t fit the template
    • questions you’re not allowed to keep asking
    • desires you must rename as temptation
    • relationships that become “unequally yoked”
    • your own inner authority

And here’s the trap: the moral standard is often impossible.

You will be told to be holy, pure, humble, grateful, surrendered, joyful, obedient, servant-hearted, faithful, prayerful, disciplined, generous, forgiving, and to treat doubt as rebellion.

That produces one of two outcomes:

    1. you become a performer: outward righteousness, inward fracture
    2. you become perpetually guilty: never enough, never clean, never sure

Neither is freedom.

4) You may be entering a soft prison you won’t easily leave

This is the warning I most want to underline.

A church can become a total social world:

    • your friends
    • your dating pool
    • your weekends
    • your music
    • your language
    • your moral framework
    • your sense of being “safe”

And once that happens, leaving is not like changing a hobby. It is like exiting a country.

The gravitational pull is real:

    • leaders frame departure as betrayal
    • friends become wary, then distant
    • doubts must be hidden or confessed
    • your identity becomes fused with the group
    • your fear of “backsliding” keeps you inside

Even if nothing “cultic” is happening, the system can still function like a sect: high belonging, high cost, high control.

And if your life later falls apart, as lives sometimes do, the love you thought was unconditional can become conditional very quickly.

I have lived that.

When my own life imploded, many of the people who had once spoken the language of grace stepped back. Disappeared. Some rewrote history. Some behaved as if I had never existed. It was as though my entire Christian life was deleted overnight.

And the cruelty of that is specific: because Christianity is often sold as the cure for rejection. You think you are finally safe.

Then you discover you were safe only while you were useful, coherent, and compliant.

A closing word to Gen Z: don’t outsource your hunger

If you are drawn toward Christianity because the world feels unstable, I understand.

The moral void is real.

The longing for meaning is not childish. It is the most adult thing about you.

But please, before you hand over your identity, time, sexuality, money, and inner authority to a high-commitment religious system—pause.

Ask:

    • Does this community make me more honest, or merely more certain?
    • Does it strengthen my conscience, or replace it?
    • Does it widen my compassion, or narrow my world?
    • Can I doubt here without being punished?
    • If I leave, will love remain?
    • What is the cost of belonging—and who benefits?

If you still choose faith, choose it with open eyes.

And if what you are really seeking is meaning, moral seriousness, and community, remember: religion does not own those things. Human beings do.

We built religion to carry them. We can also build other vessels.

The point is not to mock your hunger.

The point is to protect you from people who know exactly how to use it.

“I might believe in the Redeemer if his disciples looked more redeemed.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Is It Time For A Peaceful Revolution?

The return of Donald Trump is not merely a political event. It is a moral diagnostic.

It tells us something deeply unsettling about the state of our world: that values, principles, and ethics have slipped from the centre of public life. They have been displaced largely by financial gain, grievance politics, racialised fear, and the steady erosion of democratic norms.

This is not an American problem alone. It is a global one.

Trump is not the cause of this collapse; he is its most conspicuous symptom, like a mirror held up to societies that have quietly traded moral seriousness for spectacle, responsibility for outrage and truth for tribal loyalty.

The Disappearance of Principle

Where are the people of principle?

Where are the politicians who speak honestly about limits, responsibility, and restraint, rather than promising everything while meaning nothing? Where are the leaders willing to say “this is wrong” even when doing so costs them popularity, office, or power?

And where, more troubling still, are the faith communities — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, secular humanist — when democracy is undermined and human dignity reduced to a slogan?

Too often, there is silence.
Or worse: rationalisation.

Ethics in a ‘Post-God’ World

We increasingly describe ourselves as living in a “post-God” world. Whatever one’s beliefs, this framing carries an uncomfortable implication.

If there is no higher authority to appeal to, no divine judgement, no metaphysical reckoning, then responsibility does not disappear. It intensifies.

In such a world, ethics cannot be outsourced to tradition, scripture or institutions. They must be embodied in individuals.

We are fully and finally accountable for what we tolerate, excuse, and normalise.

The collapse of shared ethical frameworks does not free us. It leaves us more exposed.

When Systems Fail

When political systems fail, when institutions rot from within, when law bends to power and truth bends to profit, waiting politely is no longer a virtue.

Peaceful resistance is not extremism.
Civic courage is not disorder.
Refusing to normalise injustice is not naïveté.

History does not judge societies kindly for their patience in the face of moral collapse.

The GDR: Proof That Change Is Possible

I live in the former German Democratic Republic.

Within my own lifetime, I have seen proof that enormous social change is not only possible, but inevitable, when large numbers of ordinary people rise up peacefully and say: Enough.

No tanks.
No violence.
Just people.

The fall of the GDR was not engineered by heroes or generals. It was brought about by teachers, factory workers, church groups, writers, engineers: people who withdrew their consent from a system that no longer deserved it.

That lesson should haunt us and teach us.

Have We Gone Mad?

As a warning light on the dashboard of history, young Germans are once again being asked whether they are prepared to fight for their country.

After everything Europe has lived through: after the ruins, the camps, the mass graves, the promises of Nie wieder — have we learned nothing?

The question should not be how to prepare the next generation for war, but how we allowed ourselves to drift back towards the conditions that make war imaginable again.

Democracy Belongs to the Ordinary

Democracy does not belong to elites.
It does not belong to parties, platforms, or billionaires.

It belongs to writers.
Teachers.
Lawyers.
Nurses and doctors.
Construction workers.
Refuse collectors.

It belongs to all of us.

When democratic systems disintegrate, it is not because “the people” failed. It is because too many people were persuaded that their voice no longer mattered.

Silence Is Not Neutral

Some of us are old enough to know where silence, blame-shifting, and passivity lead.

Writing from exile as Europe collapsed around him, Stefan Zweig issued a warning that has lost none of its force:

“The greatest danger threatening humanity today is not fanaticism itself, but the silent toleration of fanaticism.”

Zweig understood that history is not undone by villains alone, but by the quiet compliance of the reasonable.

So Where Is the Line?

If Zweig was right, then the question is no longer whether we see what is happening.

The question is this:

Where do you draw the line?
What responsibility do professionals, educators, faith communities, and citizens have when institutions fail?
What does peaceful resistance look like now?

Enough silence.
Enough normalisation.
Enough waiting.

History does not move only through great men. It moves when ordinary people decide that they will no longer cooperate with the unacceptable.

The moment is not coming.

It is already here.

“Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.”

—Stefan Zweig

Meaning Before Language

At the start of the New Year, I began growing mung bean sprouts on the kitchen counter. Nothing ambitious: a glass jar, a handful of dry beans, water, patience. It was partly practical — a small attempt to eat better — and partly seasonal, a gesture of beginning again.

But as so often happens, attention did the rest.

Each morning and evening I rinsed the beans, drained the water, and tilted the jar back into place. Within a day, change began. Roots appeared. Pale shoots followed. By the third day, the jar was quietly alive with direction and momentum. Nothing dramatic. Nothing expressive. Just steady response.

Watching this simple process unfold gave rise to a set of thoughts that have stayed with me.

There is something quietly reassuring in discovering that:

    • order doesn’t require intention
    • meaning can emerge from conditions
    • responsiveness is not the same as consciousness

A seed doesn’t care —
but it is exquisitely attuned.

That distinction matters far beyond botany.

A mung bean has no brain, no awareness, no sense of purpose. It does not want to grow. It does not know that it is growing. And yet, when the conditions are right — moisture, warmth, oxygen — it responds. Enzymes activate, stored energy is released, cells divide, and a process begins that looks uncannily like purpose.

But it isn’t.

What the seed demonstrates is something both humbling and quietly radical: meaning can arise from structure rather than intention. Order can appear without a planner. Direction can emerge without desire. Life can move forward without knowing why.

“Life is not obliged to make sense to us.”
— Richard Dawkins

We tend to assume the opposite about ourselves.

Much of modern human anxiety is rooted in the belief that meaning must be consciously created: unless we are constantly choosing, narrating, justifying, our lives risk becoming meaningless. We speak as if significance must always be meant by someone, preferably articulated, preferably defensible.

And yet, much of what shapes us most deeply happens long before we have words for it.

Which brings us to language.

There is a quiet assumption, widely shared and rarely examined, that meaning only exists where language exists. I certainly absorbed this idea early on: that without words, symbols, and narratives there could be no meaning, only blind mechanism. Animals, plants, seeds may be somehow alive, but they are not conscious of their existence because they do not have language. But is this assumption true under closer attention? Language does not so much create meaning as name it. Long before we describe a situation as safe or threatening, nourishing or hostile, our bodies are already responding. Long before a child can articulate belonging or neglect, those conditions are shaping who they become. Meaning, in this sense, precedes language. Language arrives later, not as the origin of significance, but as its echo.

Taken seriously, this idea does not just reshape education or psychology; it also presses uncomfortably on our concepts of religion.

If meaning precedes language, then religion becomes structurally vulnerable in a way it rarely acknowledges. Religious systems depend on language to define, order, and sanctify a reality that was already unfolding long before it was named. Just as the seed germinates without reference to our metaphors, doctrines, or reverence, the world generates complexity, order, and awe without requiring theological narration. Religion, in this light, does not create meaning but gathers around it — stabilising, preserving, and sometimes claiming ownership of what would otherwise continue unbothered. The danger is not that religion is false, but that it mistakes itself for the source rather than the afterimage of meaning: a linguistic architecture built around processes that do not need to be spoken in order to be real.

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Seen this way, the seed is not a lower form of life waiting for consciousness to redeem it. It is a reminder that attunement comes before articulation.

This has implications for how we think about human agency. To say that meaning can emerge from conditions is not to deny responsibility or choice. It is to relocate them. Agency is not constant control; it is responsiveness within constraints. The skill is not to will meaning into existence, but to recognise what kinds of environments allow growth — in ourselves and in others.

And this is where education enters the picture.

Much of contemporary schooling still reflects a modernist inheritance: knowledge divided into discrete subjects, timetabled and assessed in isolation. Biology here. Chemistry there. Physics somewhere else. Meaning nowhere in particular.

We teach biology largely as a catalogue of facts — cell structures, taxonomies, cycles, pathways — accurate, necessary, and often lifeless. Rarely do we teach it as the study of responsive systems. We talk about genes, but not environments. About mechanisms, but not emergence. Students learn that a seed needs water, warmth, and oxygen, yet miss the astonishing implication: life does not need a mind in order to organise itself.

By separating biology from physics and chemistry, we also reinforce a subtle illusion — that life is something apart from the rest of reality, rather than a continuation of it. As if metabolism were not chemistry in motion. As if growth were not physics slowed down and shaped by constraint. As if living systems did not obey the same laws as rivers and stars, only at a different scale.

A more truthful curriculum would dissolve these boundaries.

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
— Werner Heisenberg

Imagine teaching “life” as a conversation between disciplines:
chemistry becoming organised,
physics learning to linger,
energy flowing through matter long enough to notice itself.

In such a curriculum, a sprouting seed would not be a marginal example but a foundational one. Students would be invited to ask not only what happens, but what it reveals: that responsiveness predates consciousness, that attunement is older than intention, that meaning does not need to be imposed in order to arise.

The ethical consequences would follow naturally. Instead of moralising failure, students might ask better questions: What conditions were missing? What environments are we creating? What do we reward, nourish, neglect?

Education, at its best, does not manufacture outcomes.
It creates conditions.

A seed doesn’t care.
But it responds.

So do children.
So do communities.
And, more often than we like to admit, so do we.

Perhaps part of the task of education — and of adult life — is to relearn this modest, hopeful truth: that meaning does not always need to be pursued or declared. Sometimes it only needs the right conditions in which to emerge.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
— Albert Einstein

A Perfectly Absurd Christmas Story

The other evening, in the spirit of seasonal escapism, we were watching Man vs Baby—a piece of festive fluff involving slapstick chaos, an unruly infant, and, inevitably, a primary-school nativity play.

At some point, my husband—who grew up in Indonesia and is unfamiliar with Christian traditions—turned to me and asked, quite innocently, what the story was actually about.

So I explained.

A teenage girl called Mary, who was also a virgin, gives birth to a baby. This baby is God. He is born in a stable because there is no room for him in the local accommodation. A star appears in the sky, guiding three wise men and a group of shepherds to come and worship this baby and bring him gifts. This child will later be executed, rise from the dead, ascend into heaven, and now sits—still in a human body—on the throne of the universe, exercising ultimate authority over all of existence for all eternity.

My husband listened politely. He nodded. He asked no follow-up questions.

But as I heard my own voice recounting this story, I had a sudden, almost comic moment of estrangement. Detached from carols, candlelight, stained glass, and nostalgia, the narrative sounded astonishingly absurd.

And yet.

It is also undeniably beautiful.

As a story, it has extraordinary power. Told aloud. Set to music. Painted. Sculpted. Recreated each December in glowing wooden cribs in living rooms, churches, town squares, and shopping malls. It is gentle. It centres on vulnerability rather than force. A baby rather than a king. Straw rather than marble. Hope for the world arriving quietly, unnoticed and poor.

I once believed it all.

Not only as a child, but later for about fifteen years of my adult life, when I was a Bible-believing fundamentalist Christian. I genuinely thought this story, set in the Middle East two millennia ago, explained everything: meaning, love, suffering, death, and the ultimate destiny of the world. I didn’t experience it as absurd at all. It felt profound, coherent, and necessary.

But with distance, the story didn’t simply become implausible; it became troubling. Not because it is poetic or mysterious, but because of what has been built upon it. The same “cute” story about a baby has been used to justify division, exclusion, cruelty, war, and extraordinary human suffering. Not by accident, but repeatedly, systematically, and often with great confidence and moral certainty.

That, for me, is the real tragedy—not that the story is implausible, but that it has been weaponised.

And yet, here we are again.

Lights are going up. Schools are rehearsing their nativity plays. People are travelling, eating too much, falling out, making up, missing those who are no longer here and trying, in their imperfect ways, to be a little kinder.

So this is not a call to cancel Christmas. Nor is it an attack on those who still believe the story literally. It’s simply an honest moment of reflection: a recognition that something can be both moving and absurd; beautiful and dangerous; comforting and deeply problematic.

In any case, beliefs aside, I want to take this opportunity to wish you—whoever you are, wherever you are—a genuinely restful and enjoyable Christmas and New Year break. May there be moments of warmth, laughter, good food, and quiet. And for 2026, I wish all of us what really matters: peace, goodwill, good health, and a little more humility about the stories we tell ourselves—and each other.

Happy Christmas.

“Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind.”
— Calvin Coolidge