Depending on who you ask, America's young people are experiencing a religious revival. Gen Zers are now more likely to attend church weekly than millennials, with young men in particular leading the return to religious services. While Gen Zers are still more likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated than previous groups, there's evidence that certain kinds of religious devotion are also growing in popularity—earlier this year, Roman Catholic dioceses around the Western world reported spikes in adult conversions.
As the decline in religious attendance has slowed, the past few years have also seen a clear rise in the status of religion. It's becoming more and more socially acceptable to be religious in elite intellectual spaces—something that could have a real impact on how religion is perceived by everyone else.
This is a big change from the past few decades, in which internet "New Atheism" effectively framed religion, Christianity in particular, as fundamentally anti-intellectual and subtly low-class. Christians were cast as uneducated rednecks—creationists, climate-change deniers, and pearl-clutching censors. This framing of the religious was obviously influenced by the backlash to George W. Bush-era conservatism. Movies like Jesus Camp and shows like 19 Kids and Counting, which portrayed evangelical "fundies" at their most mockable, only reinforced the impression that religion is a small-minded, bigoted, and jingoistic endeavor.
