Young men are turning back to the church. As per recent reporting from The New York Times, Gen Z men are more religious than our female counterparts. Young men are staying in churches even as young women leave them—the gender breakdown of Gen Zers disaffiliating from religion is 54 percent to 46 percent, with women in the majority.
In a world where two-fifths (40 percent) of Gen Z women describe themselves as “religiously unaffiliated,” only about a third (34 percent) of Gen Z men are willing to adopt the same label. As researchers ponder this unprecedented trend, a question emerges: Ought the church to view this reversal optimistically, as a sign of abnormal spiritual renewal; or cynically, as the inevitable result of widespread institutional disparity in which young men get the short end of the stick?
Young Men as Patients
Augustine is often attributed as saying, “The church is not a hotel for saints but a hospital for sinners.” If this is the case, American masculinity is a population of perfect patients. Young men in America are, by many meaningful metrics, not doing well.
As I’ve written elsewhere,
On average, men my age are underperforming academically and taking fewer specialized courses—if they pursue higher education at all, which we’re also doing less on average. In three decades, the number of men reporting having zero close friends has jumped fivefold, while suicide rates among men 25–34 years old have risen by 34 percent. My generation’s tragic decline is, in far too many cases, quite literally a matter of life and death.
Social scientist Arthur Brooks lists four building blocks for human happiness: faith, family, work, and friends. Men are struggling with at least the latter two. Add to this the decreasing prominence of social spaces curated specifically for men, and you can begin to understand why many young men perceive themselves as having been cast aside even as the culture ran to support and empower young women.
Young men in America are, by many meaningful metrics, not doing well.
As researcher Richard Reeves points out, “The trend has been for male organizations to become co-ed, even as female ones remain single-sex, or at least keep their specific mission to serve girls and women. . . . We’ll look back on the decision of so many organizations, especially those focused on boys and young men, to abandon a single-sex approach as a mistake.”
Church as Hospital
Against that backdrop, then, why are young men picking the church? It isn’t an institution with a single-sex approach—arguably, its desire to be a space for both genders has played a major role in its status as a formative institution that shapes both congregant and culture, as opposed to a performative institution shaped by culture.
And yet, that’s just it—young men are staying in the church because we believe the church actually offers something more than a pro-masculine space. It offers an anthropology rooted in biblical responsibility instead of earthly identity.
If, as sociologist Philip Rieff noted in the 1960s, the church is once again becoming an institution people seek out for “a rationale for their misery,” Gen Z men’s willingness to stick with religion is no surprise at all. Young men who feel cast aside by a culture where fixing female struggles means ignoring male ones will be better served by a culture where fixing earthly struggles means reorienting to a heavenly philosophy of human purpose and vocation.
To the Gen Z man, the one battling loneliness or disenfranchisement or the PornHub tab that’s too easy to click on, the postmodern vision of enforced gender parity where all are one in the equal sharing of identity-based misery is far inferior to the Christian vision of human equality where all are one in Christ.
Opportunity
So how should the church view this surge of young, meaning-starved, community-hungry men coming through its doors? The temptation to view this as an opportunity to immediately pump them full of culture-war training points is strong. But that comes later.
The church offers an anthropology rooted in biblical responsibility instead of earthly identity.
Before channeling that formative energy into what the church can get young men to do for society, we need to view young men’s willingness to stick with the church as an unexpected opportunity to correct the errors the world’s philosophy has fed them, whether through the godless extremes of the manosphere or the insidious male guilt that progressivism has so widely sown to teach young men their struggles are some oppressor’s burden to be borne in silence.
The church needs to view young men rediscovering the value of church the same way as anyone who comes through the doors on a Sunday—as an individual capable of profound virtue and excellence, and one whose soul can be cared for best by lifting the profoundly heavy burden of postmodernity and replacing it with the easy yoke and light burden of the only One by whom man’s chief end is ever to be achieved.