Rosalía is “Hot for God.” In her fourth album, ‘Lux’, the Spanish singer’s exploration of faith – rosary beads, a nun’s habit, and divinely-inspired lyrics included – has received critical acclaim, even from the Vatican. She’s not the only mega-star to reexamine her relationship with God. Fellow musician Nicki Minaj surprised fans by backing US President Donald Trump’s claims of Christian persecution in Nigeria, while highlighting her own Christianity. Gospel songs are peppered through pop music, from Beyoncé’s “Amen” on Cowboy Carter to “FORGIVENESS”, the final track on Swag by Justin Bieber. And shows like the rabbi romance Nobody Wants This and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s Mormon cast reflect our growing appetite for more stories about God.
I, too, have felt this hunger. Over the last couple of years, I’ve started celebrating the holidays with my Jewish partner. I wear white and go to Synagogue for Yom Kippur, attend for Rosh Hashanah, go with Jewish friends and their non-Jewish loved ones to long and lively candlelit dinners for Passover and Hanukkah. As someone who was raised Christian and let my faith dwindle into my twenties, I’ve noticed that it’s sparked feelings about religion that I’d perhaps brushed under the carpet for the best part of a decade.
Some of these are sensory and embodied; remembering the sensations of warmth and observance that accompany rituals like the quiet lighting of coloured candles in the winter, eating symbolic foods, telling the same stories again and again and trying to find new meanings, fasting and praying. But I also noticed a feeling that was a bit like a mild envy. There was a grounding that faith gave people to make sense of their political grief, particularly around state violence, transphobia and rising extremism. It made me wonder whether I’d been too hasty to turn my back on my own faith, something I’m still mulling over.
This appetite is strongest in young adults, with consecutive surveys suggesting that young millennials and Gen Z are increasingly turning to religion. A particularly dramatic shift appears to have occurred over the last half-decade or so, with the number of young people believing in a supernatural deity doubling since 2021. This runs counter to the widespread assumption that religion has been slowly declining across generations in the UK. But young people have grown up in a markedly different political, economic and cultural context to that of our parents, which I think shows up in our changing relationship to faith.
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Lamorna Ash, author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion, says young people are facing political and existential anxieties somewhat unique to their cohort. “I feel like our generation [millennials] and the generation below us grew up with this sense of looming terror,” she says. “What you do in the world seems to matter. There's little space for nihilism.” Lamorna cites a sense of urgency and imperative to act on issues ranging from climate change to Palestine. “There’s this sense that we need to work out what we’re meant to be doing on Earth.”
In attempting to answer these complex questions, sources like social media often offer oversimplified explanations. Contrastingly, she says that religion offers a deeper approach: “Churches and all religious spaces are these repositories of deep, deep time. People often like that, turning to something that has persisted for thousands of years. There's a kind of transcendent element that goes beyond the daily changes of the world.”
Evan, a 30-year-old scientist and community organiser who has recently returned to Christianity having grown up in the faith, tells me that religious spaces help bolster his own political action. Organising around housing, Palestine solidarity and climate justice, he says: “I’ve had a growing feeling that our political movements really need to be built on solid foundations. Like, yes, principles of solidarity and mutual aid and a call to justice, but what is the emotional and spiritual well that you can draw from when the fight is inevitably exhausting?” He recounts organising around the climate conference COP26 and seeing his peers getting burnt out. “There was no space in our movement to actually hold those feelings as a group and the feelings of grief and loss and rage that often come in political struggle.”
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Faith isn’t the only way to find community in difficult times, but Evan says it seems likely that faith spaces are plugging a gap left by cuts to community spaces like youth centres. “There’s no place to go aside from work, the pub or the gym to find and build community,” he tells me. “I think the ‘community centres’ that have survived austerity are the churches and mosques and synagogues.” These are some of the only remaining “third spaces” where people can go without existing as commodities, and also often offer things like community meals or food banks.
Other young people I speak to report a sense of disillusionment with the “doctrines” that have been made most available to their generation: neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, or perhaps political parties. This isolation and disorientation can lead people across the political spectrum towards religion in a search for meaning. The recent UK Quiet Revival survey found that church uptake is highest in young men, which some suggest is tied to a misogynistic swing to traditional values.
This may partially explain the recent resurgence in Christian nationalism in the UK, most visible during Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in September. During the anti-immigration demonstration, which attracted over 100,000 people from across the country, attendees carried wooden crosses and depictions of Jesus alongside St George’s flags.
Lamorna says that young people find themselves in right-wing churches, “Where there are entrenched, traditional ideas about gender, about the family. Someone telling you exactly what is going wrong with progressive society might feel like a balm for you. It might feel like a relief to find this structure that maybe reflects back some of the things you might have been thinking anyway.”
But this quest for political guidance through faith also stands for those who trend leftwards. Meg, a 21-year-old student who converted to Christianity at 17, says that Gen Z is used to being reduced to what they buy, the brands they wear and the ways they present their lives on social media. “For people my age, that’s been their entire socialisation and it’s exhausting. It’s so fake. Christianity, on the other hand, offers this idea that you are who you are by how you can love – how you can serve other people.”
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Rosalía herself discusses this exhaustion with consumerism and materialism, telling the Guardian: “I’m [tired] of seeing people referencing celebrities, and celebrities referencing other celebrities… I’m really much more excited about saints.”
Meg sees her faith as explicitly guiding her politics, offering a moral framework and reassurance in times that can feel hopeless. Meg is very well versed in religious texts – citing the Beatitudes, the idea that the poor and the oppressed are blessed, and tells me about her political interpretation of the crucifixion. “Jesus is killed by the empire, and the people who are relying on him to bring hope and be the Messiah are devastated,” she says. “Then he rises again. It’s this ultimate promise that, time and time again, love defeats death – and that’s the epitome of my outlook on activism and organising. But also, in terms of coming to faith, it was actually quite a rocky time for me. I needed something a little bigger than myself.”
This understandable desire to transcend isn’t only ideological or moral. It can manifest in a way that is sensory, visceral and bodily, through the use of ritual. Rosalía also discusses music as a means to become “a channel, a vessel”, reminiscent of the transcendence found in dancing and speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church.
Crucially, this generational quest for escape is traceable across numerous avenues beyond religion, including an uptick in these age brackets experimenting with tarot, astrology, somatics and psychedelics, which was most stark during the outbreak of Covid-19. Meg describes herself as being “hippy dippy” and “New Age-y” before she eventually became religious. When I mentioned to a friend, a book editor in her 30s, that I was writing this piece, she told me that while she isn’t necessarily curious about religion, she has found herself recently preoccupied with the quest to “have a transcendental experience”.
And who might blame them? Spiritual spaces offer calm, beauty, communal singing, incense, candles and coloured light scattered through stained glass. Meanwhile, Lamorna says, “Our world looks uglier and uglier. We're always looking at our phones.”
I’m surprised by how many people, across religions, tell me that the ongoing genocide, as described by Amnesty International, in Gaza is a factor that led them towards faith. Faima, a young Muslim journalist, told me that she started wearing the hijab after 2023, and felt closer to both Islam and to hijabi Palestinians. She found community in morning prayer and a Muslim run club.
Meanwhile, Halima, a 36-year-old charity director, tells me that Gaza and the UK’s role in the war have changed people’s relationship with faith in her own Muslim community: “I think people are seeing how morally bankrupt the UK is, and faith enables them to uphold values and morals.”
Conversations about religion and its connections to the land clearly play a role. Emma, who recently converted to Catholicism, tells me that she was galvanised by both the hypocrisy of Western leaders and the land on which this violence took place. She says: “Something about the situation made the story of Jesus feel so immediate, near and present. The values he stood for were being decimated in the land that he stood in. In October 2024, I walked into a Catholic Church for the first time and converted almost instantly.”
Some of the young Jewish people I speak to say that it felt particularly important to carve out their own unique relationships to Judaism during this period. Ella, a 28-year-old who grew up secular and had family in Israel, felt that the nation was her primary connection to her Jewish identity. “When the genocide was underway, that was definitely a bigger prompt for me to be like, look, I need to find a way to connect with my Jewish heritage that isn't anything to do with the occupation and the genocide. I thought, ‘let me re-meet this faith’”.
Shortly after, Ella started attending retreats with the Jewish land justice group Miknaf Ha'aretz, which helped her reconnect with the Hebrew language. “It was like a really powerful experience for me to be in a space where there was Hebrew singing,” she says, having previously felt that she might leave the Hebrew language behind. “I was like, oh, I can have this language, and it has nothing to do with occupying a people – it can exist in a different way.”
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Like all generations, we respond to what came before. Young millennials grew up in the heyday of what has since been dubbed “New Atheism”. During this period, figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens framed religion – often specifically Islam – as antithetical to science and tied to violence. Although they framed their arguments as rational, level-headed and objective, it feels clear that their ideology was shaped by the political context of the war on terror, and was also a form of dogma in itself. It makes sense that those who lean towards the left would grow up to question this.
Lamorna suggests that, while perhaps rebelling against the more atheistic wave that came before us, young people are also dissatisfied with the simplicity of the ideas they have often been offered. “In such an ambiguous, ambivalent and porous world moment, it feels foolish when someone says something so definitively.” Lamorna also thinks that, as Britain becomes more pluralistic, young people are more likely to have religious friends, and to reflect on their own relationship with faith. “So it just feels ridiculous now to say we are certain we don't need a God. There’s a particular arrogance to it, which just feels particularly Noughties, and I think doesn't seem to exist in our generation.”
While young people’s move towards faith might feel unexpected, the realities behind this pattern are hard to capture in a simple headline. Across faiths, younger generations are negotiating nuanced, intentional and self-directed ways of engaging with faith in order to find community, to guide their politics, to make sense of the world and the disorientation of contemporary life. While it’s easy to assume that our current religious revival is a simple indicator of a shift rightwards, young leftists are actively integrating faith into their radical politics.
This is perhaps made all the more possible by the gradual and casual integration of faith into progressive-leaning popular culture. Take this summer’s All Points East festival, which saw Kirk Franklin, SAULT and Cleo Sol performing a surprising biblical-themed set at an otherwise secular festival. Moments like this see faith blending into everyday life, with less of a division between who is religious and who isn’t – and more space for experimentation and flux.
Lamorna says: “I think there's something about coming to any faith as an adult, that means that you come to it with this more fixed sense of self. Hopefully, that then allows you to hold more ambiguity.”
For those who choose to nurture a relationship with faith, this relationship is often dynamic and complex. As I conclude these conversations, unsure whether I’ll revisit my relationship with faith or not, I notice this question doesn’t necessarily feel so important. I want to sit with that spirit of openness, of holding multiple things, and of asking questions, rather than necessarily finding the answers.
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