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November 8 – 14, 2025 | No. 575
November 8 – 14, 2025 | No. 575
November 8 – 14, 2025 | No. 575
Comment
There are times when I am truly astonished, in the best conceivable way, by the young.
Yes, there is much of which to be critical. For me at least, the worst of Generation Z can be flippant, unserious, shallow, intellectually vapid, vain, artistically uninspired and gripped by life-deflating ennui.
Don’t blame them, however. Blame us. This is the world my generation gave them. We stopped listening to Bach and reduced Shakespeare to an exercise in miserable critique. We put the Bible at the back of the bookshelf.
Some young people are dusting it off. Despite their parents, the best of Gen Z are increasingly looking for meaning beyond the vacuous temptations of our age.
I witnessed this at solemn mass last week. Amid burning incense, as the processional cross passed by, a young girl in front of me crossed herself with such intent, devotion and humility that I felt she truly made present the mystery of Christ.
It was transcendent. In that moment she answered a question that often troubles me: What does the church have to say to young people today?
Throughout the West, statistics show faith is declining. A church that lectures, judges and is so rightly accused of moral hypocrisy has no future.
Yet that girl showed me we are a species of yearning and there is still a place for the sacred, the beautiful, the good, true and holy. She came to mass to participate in ritual. She came to stand in tradition. She came to embrace the mysticism of faith, in a world that has made reason or technology our secular God.
She is not alone. I have noticed in recent times young people returning to church. The demographics of mass are revealing. I look around and among my generation I see more people of colour than so-called white Europeans.
Among the young it is different; they truly reflect the range of diversity in our society. Intriguingly, many of the young come alone, without their parents. I see more younger women covering their heads. I sense an intensity in their worship.
This is more than anecdotal. Throughout the West there are green shoots of resurgence in faith. In France, the Catholic Church has reported that baptisms among 18- to 25-year-olds have quadrupled in the past four years.
In Ireland, there is an upswing in youth Catholicism. This year, the Church says Dublin had the largest ever group seeking adult baptism.
A 2023 Harvard University study revealed an increase in Gen Z Americans identifying as Catholic, especially young men.
In the United Kingdom, a YouGov report released in April showed a sharp uptick in 18- to 34-year-olds attending church regularly. Five hundred years after King Henry VIII’s split with Rome, more young churchgoers are identifying as Catholic than Protestant. The report found that in 2018, just 4 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds said they attended church at least monthly. Today, that figure has risen to 16 per cent.
This has been called a quiet revival. No street marches, sit-ins or soggy weekend music festivals. No big bang moment to get the media’s attention. The press has very little theological literacy and fair to say even less interest, so it has largely missed this.
It is of particular interest to me that during the past 30 years the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholics has grown by nearly 190 per cent. First Nations people represent the youngest and fastest-growing demographic of Catholics in Australia.
This would be more obvious to more people if Indigenous people were not reduced to politics and forever seen through a lens that utterly misunderstands us.
I am always astonished by how astonished everyone else is when I remind them that Aboriginal people are and always have been a people of powerful faith. Whenever I am asked how I can be Aboriginal and Christian – and it is often – I remind them God did not arrive on the First Fleet.
In my most recent book, Murriyang: Song of Time, I explore the dimensions of my faith and my Aboriginal culture. It has struck a chord unlike anything else I have written.
At writers’ festivals my sessions have been sold out. Afterwards people wait patiently for sometimes up to an hour not just to have their book signed but to talk, to have a human connection.
Some tell me they are not religious, but they feel as though they need something spiritual in their lives. Many buy more than one copy to give the book as a gift.
It is the most beautiful reward for a writer to speak to the soul and not just the mind.
It would be premature to say we are witnessing a reversal of secularism in the West, but some are suggesting there is a floor under the decline of faith and it is the young who are leading this revival.
Why? Immigration is a factor, changing the demographics of secular Western countries. Among those who study such things, there is also a consensus that young people are particularly battered by our age: climate change, the Covid pandemic, financial insecurity, forever wars, lying politicians, hollowed-out democracy, corrupt bankers.
If it was simply community and fellowship they wanted, though, they could join a book club or a yoga class. Why church?
I would suggest they want more than the world they inherit from their parents. They want to believe in something again.
What has especially caught my eye is that young Catholics crave tradition. In a liquid world, they want to stand on solid ground.
Various reports point to a resurgence in people attending the Tridentine Latin Mass, despite the Vatican’s resistance.
Some studies show that in recent years attendance at Latin mass in the United States has grown more than 70 per cent. The young point to its beauty and reverence. Ceremony matters, as does mysticism.
In an age when we are told God is dead, returning to church, especially traditional mass, is the most radical countercultural act the young can perform. They want something of weight – and who could fault them? They need only look at the lives of their parents or grandparents to know there must be more than that.
Re-reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being recently, I was reintroduced to the character Sabina. Living in the Prague Spring of 1968, and the Soviet invasion, Sabina and her friends engage in a meaningless, hedonistic life of indulgence and mechanical, lifeless sex.
After discarding another lover, Sabina realised she lived a “drama not of heaviness but lightness”, Kundera wrote: “Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?”
Kundera’s novel was published in 1984. In the decades since we have seen the end of the Cold War and its replacement by neoliberal nihilism. Our children didn’t get a future, only a past. Our age is marked less by optimism than a militant nostalgia.
The faithful Gen Z are saying no to that. They have eschewed the lightness of being for the heavy grace of God.
Lamorna Ash, a young British writer, has explored her own journey from atheism to God. She says she has met Catholics who are trans, left-wing radical evangelicals and conservatives. She still can’t say just how far her belief extends, but the ritual of churchgoing, she says, has helped her live more closely the life she always felt she wanted.
Ash writes that, at its worst, religion “can be applied as a tool to perpetuate violence, divide us from one another, to make our worlds smaller and more myopic. At its best, though, it might teach people how to act more courageously, from a position of love.”
Of course, the risk is the church will fail these young people. I struggle to know what Christianity stands for. It is too prone to capture by political whim, culture war or social experiment. That’s not what the young are telling us they are looking for.
At least when it comes to Catholicism, they want the church as Christ intended, a rock.
Eighty years ago, Albert Camus, an atheist, said “the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians”. He said that while he did not share Christian hope, he shared “the same revulsion from evil”.
The world, he said, expects that “Christians should speak out loud and clear”. They should speak in a way that doubt never “could rise in the heart of the simplest man”.
He implored Christians to reject abstraction and “confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today”. He said Christianity must never lose “the virtue of revolt and indignation”. If it did, he argued, Christians would live but Christianity would die.
More young people are saying they don’t want it to die. They want something to believe in. The church must show that it is worth believing in.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as “Faith in the young flock”.
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November 8 – 14, 2025 | No. 575
Edition 
November 8 – 14, 2025
News
Inside the Coalition split: ‘Like washing the bear without getting its fur wet’
Where are they now: The politicians who lost their seats
The $4.4 million case against Murdoch
One simple way to lift children out of poverty
Crisafulli’s first year as premier in review
Inside Labor’s plan to tax EVs
Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York buoys Democrats
Comment
What is the purpose of Barnaby Joyce?
The lonely fear of this climate catastrophe
An Australian coup: Reflecting on Whitlam’s dismissal
The young Australians turning to religion
Letters & Editorial
Oslo Davis cartoon, November 8, 2025
The rise and rise of Pauline Hanson
Sacrificial man
Culture
Actor and author Tasma Walton
Twinless
Mavis Staples’ Sad and Beautiful World
Revisions exhibition
Three poems by Jo Gardiner
Books
A Woman’s Eye, Her Art
The Best Australian Science Writing 2025
Exclusive! Dispatches from The Paris End
Life
Finding inspiration in Watership Down
Bistecchina balsamic sandwich
History is written at the Pollies v Press cricket match
The Cryptic
No. 575
The Quiz
In the film Finding Nemo, Dory is mainly what colour?
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Stan Grant is a theologian, writer and Charles Sturt University distinguished professor.
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