There's something unprecedented happening in the religious and political landscape of the US right now, and I'm betting you're overwhelmed enough with horrible current events that you've missed it. If you've seen right-wing news stories about a Christian revival among Gen Z, you might think that's what it is. Well, you know, they say everything is bigger in Texas, and that includes the Sunday service, thanks in part to the growing number of young people in the pews every week. Religious leaders say Gen Z or Gen Z is reversing a trend of religious decline that's been seen across the West for decades. — All right, so we've been tracking the youth revival across America, but it's not just happening on Sundays. At one Long Island church, young people are opting to go on their Friday nights. But no, that's not quite it. More on that soon. If you've seen this truly excellent video from Tom Nicholas, you might think you know what it is. Over the past couple of years, politics and Christianity have been on an unignorable collision course. Not only here in the UK, but in Europe and the US, too. Which isn't entirely without precedent. America in particular has had a well-defined and extremely vocal Christian right for decades. What's new is an apparent embrace of Christianity as part of a much broader political strategy. The political right aren't just trying to appeal to Christian voters. They're placing God front and center of their political messaging for everyone. This is like an all-time revival, isn't it? An all-time revival. — I love and appreciate you and your work, Tom, but there's more precedent for this than you might realize. The American right-wing did this back in the 1940s and '50s, and it worked extremely well. I have a whole video about this already, so I'll keep it brief. In the 1930s, FDR's New Deal policies created Social Security and raised taxes on corporations and the wealthy to create social programs for regular people. In response, super rich men in the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, particularly those in the oil and automotive industry, launched an organization called Spiritual Mobilization. Through their mouthpiece, Reverend James W. Fifield, they created a new theology, which might sound familiar. He preaches a message that they like to hear, which is that the New Deal is evil. It is a form, he says, of pagan statism. And instead, what we need is a return to, again, this kind of unfettered free enterprise. He links Christianity and capitalism. He sees that that they're deeply intertwined. In his view, both are systems that stress individualism above all else. So, as he tells it, Christianity is a system in which if you're good, you go to heaven. If you're bad, you go to hell. Capitalism is the same way, he says. If you're good, you make a profit. If you're bad, you go to the poorhouse. And any system that interferes with that divinely prescribed order of things, he says, is a form of pagan statism and is itself evil. Their first step was to convince Christian ministers of this, who would then preach this theology to their congregations. This worked very well and kicked off a reciprocal relationship between American Christian organizations and corporate America. Big businesses like Sun Oil fund pro-capitalist Christians. Those Christians preach pro-capitalist theology. Their congregations then vote against their own interests and for the interests of big corporations. Business leaders make even more money, and the cycle repeats. These preachers also spread the message that communism was literally satanic. In 1949, Billy Graham preached that "Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the devil himself, who has declared war against almighty God. " This anti-communist messaging especially propelled capitalist Christian theology to the forefront of right-wing politics in the US, and in turn, a massive Christian revival began. Church membership soared to an all-time high of 69% For the first time, Americans began to think of their country as an officially Christian nation. Spiritual Mobilization's motto was Freedom Under God. It became so popular among right-wing America that the Eisenhower administration in the '50s adapted it to one nation under God and inserted it into the Pledge of Allegiance. They also made In God We Trust the United States official motto. In short, the American right placed Christianity front and center in their political messaging in the '40s and '50s and it was so successful that it changed the religious landscape of the country and propelled right-wingers to even greater power. Most people today think of the American religious right as something that really began in the 1980s and there's a reason to see it that way. This is when Paul Michael Weyrich, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Reagan administration conspired to use abortion as a wedge issue to drive Christians to vote for overtly racist right-wing politicians. That strategy also worked. It's the reason why evangelicals are now a right-wing political block. But finally, here's what's happening now, which is genuinely unprecedented. The American right-wing is placing God front and center in their messaging like they did in the 1940s, '50s, and '80s, but this time it's not working, at least not like it used to. I think it's obvious to everyone at this point that the right is targeting young people, particularly young men, through Charlie Kirk's organization Hitler Youth. I mean, Turning Point USA. This is where fascists get up in front of thousands of people and claim their rule is simply a manifestation of God's will. — We will defend this world. We will defend goodness. We will defend light. We will defend virtue. You cannot terrify us. YOU CANNOT FRIGHTEN US. You cannot threaten us because we are on the side of goodness. God. — So, I guess I would just say this gathering and God's presence, God's very obvious presence in this room, the presence of Jesus is a reminder of what we've known for 2,000 years, which is any attempt to extinguish the light causes it to burn brighter. Every single time. — What you might not realize is how similar Turning Point USA's approach has been to spiritual mobilizations. Turning Point was a purely political organization until 2021. That's when Kirk started Turning Point Faith, which had Pastor Rob McCoy, no relation, and Kirk himself visit churches and convince their leaders to preach a theology which explicitly favored Turning Point's politics in exchange for church growth resources. This they hoped would set up another reciprocal relationship between Christian organizations and Turning Point's backers in corporate America. Turning Point would give churches the resources to attract more people, those churches would reach and convert those people to a far-right Christianity, and those new Christians would support the interests of Turning Point's backers. But like I said, this is not actually working. Americans are not converting to Christianity, especially not Gen Z. I was giving a talk on this exact subject in Washington D. C. a couple weeks ago actually. We are like one of the biggest religious groups in the country or — the biggest by religious affiliation, which is none. It was a little hard to see the crowd up there, but I believe that the person who corrected my mistake was none other than Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Next time I'll be sure to get it right because not only am I speaking at the FFRF National Convention this October, but Annie Laurie personally, in person, right before my speech, personally saw to it that my viewers get a huge discount on their tickets. Here are the details. The convention is October 15th through the 18th at the Baird Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It'll feature great speakers like Jan Welsh, Jim Obergefell, Forest Valkai, and one pretty okay speaker, that's me. Registration for non-members is usually $160, but with my discount code, non-members can register for just $25. I know. Just enter GMS in all caps at checkout. The link to get tickets is in the description and in the pinned comment. Come celebrate this big moment with me. FFRF and its legal team fight religious overreach in our government. They stop Christian nationalists in court on a regular basis. They are the church-state watchdog organization in my mind. And being able to speak from their stage after being a member for the better part of a decade and going to their conferences is a big deal for me. I hope you can come and enjoy it, too. Thank you for everything, FFRF, including sponsoring this video. I'll see you in Milwaukee this October. Just click that link in the description and pinned comment to get tickets. Back to rebutting the Gen Z religious revival. Over half of Gen Z don't identify as Christian. 54% of Gen Z who are already Christian don't pray regularly. 75% of them don't attend church even monthly. Gen Z even doubts the existence of God at unprecedented rates. 60% say they have some doubts that God exists or don't believe in God in the first place. This makes them the least Christian generation ever polled in American history. And those among them who are Christian are the least church-going ever recorded. But what about all those reports of Gen Z men flocking back to church in huge numbers? Wow, it's now confirmed that Gen Z is the top church-attending age group in the United States as of 2025. Right behind them, millennials. Read that again. The youngest generations aren't rejecting faith, they're running toward it. This completely shatters the left's narrative. No wonder Charlie Kirk has been saying the spiritual revival is coming. He'd love this. Faith is back. Truth is back. The next generation isn't buying the nihilism. Keep it going. Well, according to Dr. Ryan Burge, an actual social scientist, this is BS. I've seen this one result repeated over and over again. It's clear to me that no one read the actual report. The sample that Barna is analyzing here is not all adults. It's all church-going adults. So, their data claim is that church-going Gen Z are attending with greater frequency than church-going millennials. So, that's a humongous caveat that's often missed. The other thing that needs to be considered is the size of the effect. Their data indicates that church-going Gen Z are attending 1. 9 times a month compared to 1. 8 times per month for millennials. So, here's the most accurate headline. Among Gen Z folks with a church-going habit, they attend one more church service per year than millennials from the same subgroup. Come on. Additionally, religious switching in the US actually looks like the opposite of a revival. According to Pew Research, among both younger and older US adults, Christianity loses far more people than it gains through religious switching. And among adults 18 to 24, 26% are former Christians. By contrast, 5% are converts to Christianity. A part of this change is the fact that Americans who were raised Christian are more likely to leave and become religiously unaffiliated than ever. Meanwhile, people who were raised religiously unaffiliated are less likely to become religious than ever. Another way of saying this is that being non-religious is now a stickier position or identity than Christianity. Now, for decades, the population of the religiously unaffiliated has been growing incredibly fast, while Christianity has been shrinking. But, that has leveled off a bit in the last few years. But, still, every single age group either remaining constant in their religious identities or becoming a little less religious does not constitute a religious revival in the least. And when you consider the stickiness of non-religious identity along with the irreligious makeup of Gen Z, we can probably expect to see even more ex-Christians and lifelong irreligious people in the future. This leads us to a couple of questions. One, why isn't the religious right strategy working this time if it worked so well 80 years ago? And two, why is the religious right lying about their plan working when it's clearly not? I can only guess as to why their strategy isn't working. I'm not a political scientist and I'd still only be guessing if I was. So, take what I say with a grain of salt. The most obvious answer may be that people have more exposure to non-Christian sources of information today than in the 1940s and 50s, you know, because the internet exists. But also, and maybe more importantly, the US is more religiously diverse today than it was back then. There are way more Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, and spiritual but not religious people here now. They could provide Americans a window into how religion can be done differently than Protestant Christianity, and so we're less likely to be confident that there is just one right way to be religious. Another reason may be that the US today doesn't have as close a rival for the place of dominant world superpower as it had back in the 1950s with the USSR. As much as the capitalist class today fear mongers about China, I don't think people are really buying it like people bought the idea that the Soviet Union was literally run by Satan himself. Without fear of the devil's own country nuking us at any moment, we could just be less motivated to seek the comfort of religion. And honestly, from my experience, younger people actually see China as preferable to the US in some ways. Not always, but some definitely. Finally, and this is the only one of these guesses I really have data to support, a lot of religious nones say they don't like or trust religious organizations. 47% of nones give this as a reason they aren't religious, and 30% say they've had bad experiences with religious people. With all the cases of religious scandals and abuse that have gotten mainstream attention for years, maybe people hear the messaging of Turning Point USA and think "Yeah, no thanks. I am totally done with your bullshit. " Why is the right promoting the lie of a Gen Z Christian revival then? Again, this is a guess, but I think it goes beyond simple answers like they're trying to intimidate their political rivals or they're saying young people are flocking to churches in the hopes that young people will hear that and try to follow the crowd. No. I don't think this lie is just for us. It's for them. We went over how the model of spiritual mobilization and Turning Point works, right? Big business types invest with the expectation that the organization will engineer a religious right-wing shift, that religious shift will motivate working-class people to promote the interests of big business, and that the investors will see a long-term return on their investment. Well, what do you do if you've promised all the titans of industry this kind of return, but you haven't produced one? What do you do if you, as a part of Turning Point or the current administration, promised to sell capitalist Christianity to a whole generation, but that generation is the most secular in history and, according to polls, largely views socialism favorably? What do you do if you've promised to convince Americans to buy the ridiculous lie that acts of US imperialism are necessary to usher in God's kingdom on Earth, but most people reply that bombing Iran is a war of choice, which they oppose? You either own up to your mistake, dissolve your organization, liquidate your assets, and try to claw your way out of debt forever, or you stall, mislead your shareholders with false story after false story of your success, and in the meantime, try to find a way to escape accountability in the long term. Maybe they're lying about converting young people just to save their own ass. Like I said, it's a guess, but I won't be surprised if history views Turning Point and the Trump administration as short-term successes in terms of electoral wins, but as long-term failures in all other ways. All of this leads me to the conclusion that we secular leftists have a colossal opportunity and an even bigger responsibility before us. The nuns are pretty resistant to insidious religious appeals. Great. But they're not well integrated socially or politically. While they have a religious purview traditionally associated more with the left, the nuns largely politically identify as moderate. To me, that doesn't indicate that they have deeply rooted political convictions which rest firmly between the two parties in the US. No, that says to me that they aren't firmly rooted politically, that their political imagination is constrained to the Overton window of current American politics, and that they're more or less up for grabs for those capable of shifting that window. They're still vulnerable to those who would have them advocate against their own interests. If it were made known and available to them, though, a certain political and some might even say spiritual or philosophical movement would look like home for an extraordinary number of the nuns, I think. Religiously unaffiliated people in the US say more than any other group that their sense of morality is based in a desire not to hurt people, compassion, and their own use of logic and reason, and that this sense has nothing to do with religious teachings or supposedly revealed truths. There's a term for that outlook. That's secular humanism. We members of the American Humanist Association have been saying this for a while. If you believe science tells you what's real and compassion tells you what's right, if you believe you can be good without a god, you're probably a humanist. I've said this before, but I'm going to keep saying it. Those of us who can, like myself, need to build social infrastructure like community centers, clubs, and even schools explicitly for humanists. If we want people to organize to create political change, people first need a place to call home. And even though an unprecedented number of people align with humanism today, most of them have nowhere to go to get plugged in. My wife, Taylor, our friends, and I have been working hard to expand the capacity of our humanist community center in Austin, Texas, because, in large part thanks to Taylor, a bunch of religiously unaffiliated young people have discovered it, and we've suddenly outgrown our building. There's another humanist community center in Denver that has the same very good problem, I hear. I urge you to check the resources in my description for finding the humanist community in your area, and I ask you to join it not just with the intention of finding a home for yourself, but with the goal of making that community a home for the countless other nuns who need it. This is my vision for long-term political change, and I genuinely think we have a chance if we seize the opportunity we have right in front of us. I'll leave you with a word from the great political scientist, the late Dr. Michael Parenti, as delivered from a Universalist Unitarian church, an effectively humanist institution. Well, don't think for a moment that our reactionary rulers don't care what we think. That is their most important concern. Oh, do they care? Oh, are they watching? Oh, do they try to keep us convinced of their lies? They're trying to get in our heads all the time, getting into our heads. They're trying to close our mouths all the time. To wave the flag in our faces, to manipulate and pretend, to keep the boys and girls fighting and dying in some land uh which most of those kids couldn't have even found on a map last year. To some extent, ladies and gentlemen, to some extent all regimes, all governments ultimately rest on public opinion. And when that opinion shifts, and when support declines, then those rulers have to backpedal. They have to hide their arrogance, they have to pretend that they share our outrage and our concerns, and they're as concerned as any of you, I swear. And to keep that pretense credible, they have to take actions and make concessions that they don't want to make at all. And that's what we've got to do. We've got to keep pressuring, agitating, getting our opinion out there at two levels. One, horizontally building our base wider and wider, and two, impacting vertically upon them and letting them know how we feel and what we feel and when the people are ready to lead, the leaders will eventually follow. Thank you, brothers and sisters. Thank you so much for watching. I've been Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic. A special thanks to my patrons for their constant love and support, and praise be unto our lady, River, my top patron and the official savior of this channel. If you want to support my work, then subscribe, check out my Patreon, also subscribe to my second channel. If you're an apostate in need, there are resources, like I said, linked in the description to help you find a community and mental health support. Remember to be kind to others in the comments, and until next time, stay skeptical.
