Tag: #religion

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

Faith and doubt

The Bible defines faith in strikingly absolute terms:

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
— Hebrews 11:1

For years, I lived inside that definition. To believe in God, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, in heaven and hell, was not to speculate but to be certain. I remember how real that certainty felt — as if the ground beneath me could not possibly give way.

Looking back, I can still see why conviction is so attractive. It simplifies life. It gives you direction. There’s something reassuring about being guided by a strong sense of rightness, rather than drifting on vague, half-formed notions. For a time, I admired that in myself and in others — the courage to stand firm, to be sure.

But certainty has a darker side. It divides the world into believers and non-believers, insiders and outsiders. I’ve seen how quickly that division hardens into judgment, superiority, even hostility. History is full of examples where religious certainty did not just separate communities but helped justify oppression and war. That recognition has been painful for me, because I once participated in the same mindset.

Doubt, by contrast, has never started wars. It doesn’t silence art or suppress science. If anything, doubt has opened doors — for creativity, for discovery, for dialogue. In my own life, doubt has forced me to pause, to ask questions I once thought dangerous. Strangely enough, it has made me more compassionate. To give someone the benefit of the doubt, even in ordinary relationships, is to allow space for understanding rather than condemnation. On a larger scale, when whole cultures are willing to live with doubt, it creates the possibility of cooperation instead of conflict.

For me, the shift from certainty to doubt has not been easy. It feels like stepping off firm ground into open air. But it also feels more honest. Faith, I now see, is not always confidence; it can just as easily be the refusal to face uncomfortable truths. Doubt, far from being weakness, has become — for me — a condition of dignity, the beginning of humility, the chance to meet others without the armour of superiority.

Voltaire once wrote:

“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Perhaps he was right. But if we are honest with ourselves, we may also need to invent doubt — not as a threat to our humanity, but as its safeguard.

The Architecture of Reality

What seems eternal is often only the echo of human agreement

Most of us move through life believing that reality is simply “out there”—something fixed and solid, waiting for us to discover it. But over time, I’ve come to see that what we call “reality” is not just given to us; it is made, sustained, and passed on through people.

Think about it: the rules of marriage, the value of money, the rituals of religion or education—none of these fell from the sky. They were created by people, agreed upon, repeated, and eventually treated as if they had always been there. A piece of paper becomes “wealth.” A ceremony becomes “holy.” A set of expectations becomes “the way things are.”

The most fascinating part is that once these human creations are in place, they begin to feel objective, untouchable, almost like laws of nature. We grow up inside them, and they become the air we breathe. By the time we are adults, much of what we take as “normal” or “true” is simply what has been handed down to us.

And yet, these worlds are not neutral. Some people and institutions get to decide which knowledge counts, which voices are heard, which rules are legitimate. That is why two cultures—or even two families—can live in entirely different realities without ever noticing how constructed those realities are.

For the individual, this becomes especially challenging when the world we grew up in collides with the wider world outside. The lessons we learn at home—about trust, love, authority, or shame—are sometimes at odds with what we encounter later in school, work, or society at large. When these two realities clash, it can leave us confused, even broken inside, as if we’re expected to live two lives at once.

I’ve come to believe that the way forward begins with awareness. If we can see that these worlds are made by people, then we gain the freedom to question them. We can decide what to carry with us and what to lay down. We can stop being passive products of two conflicting realities and instead become active authors of our own lives.

At its heart, this is not just about society. It’s about self-knowledge, grace, and the courage to treat ourselves kindly as we sort through the contradictions. The more we learn to accept ourselves, the less power those clashes have to tear us apart.

In the end, we both build the world and are built by it. The challenge is to remain awake to that truth—and to choose, with as much wisdom as we can, the world we want to live in.