The New York Times ran an unintentionally uplifting story this week headlined, “Why So Many Gen Z-ers Are Drawn to Conservative Christianity.”
I’ve covered this remarkable and reassuring revival trend in C&C several times over the last year. This article is no outlier. The trend is real.
“Gen Z is clouded by despair,” the author observed. Thanks, scientists. Thus, “In the aftermath of Covid,” the op-ed reported, “a sizable minority of Gen Z-ers have found their answer in conservative Christianity, fueling both a religious and a political revival among these young Americans.” It added, “They bring a new attitude to the combination of faith and politics, and many see politics as a matter of spiritual warfare against demonic forces.”
The Times’ editor, of course, found this spiritual revival among young Americans to be a troubling sign of the dark rise of fascism.
“Americans who think that Generation Z might offer hope for a less divisive, less polarized political future should think again.”
Worse, “many of these young Christians have turned to conservative politics — a near-seamless mix of Christian faith and the MAGA message.”
That stupid sentence did unintentionally disclose one thing. The movement Trump started — the Make America Great Again movement — is somehow related to or involved with a massive, sudden, and unexpected Christian revival. The pandemic is also part of it.
But what sounded like good developments to us terrified the author. It’s the worst thing ever. This growing revival “has led at least some younger conservative Christians to question liberal democracy and religious pluralism altogether and to entertain the idea of a postliberal framework.”
How soon can we start building the post liberal framework? I’m ready to get started. How about you?
As we’ve seen in other similar reports, the article reported that it’s the young men.
“Young male churchgoers now outpace young female churchgoers in weekly attendance.”
(Fear not, the girls will follow.)
It reflects a return to a more muscular, masculine Christianity, pushing aside the effeminized hippy-dippy version that infected churches following the 60’s and 70’s.
And that is exactly what troubled the Times the most, causing it to drop its Lababu comfort doll from nerveless fingers and hallucinate that it was living in The Handmaid’s Tale again. But it is terrific news for the rest of us.
