Philosophy, claimed Étienne Gilson, always buries its undertakers. Gilson was himself a philosopher, so perhaps he had an interest in believing this. But there might be something in it: as the complaints pile up, about cultural stagnation and loss of meaning, Britain’s young people are on a renewed quest for higher things.
One of the forms this seems to be taking, at least for some, is a turn toward God. According to a new study a “Quiet Revival” is afoot in British Christianity, with young people leading the way: reportedly, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024: a startling increase. And yet it may also be true that England’s Christian heritage is as moribund as ever — at least in an institutional sense. For this reported church attendance is mainly growing in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, while the established, national Church of England continues to languish.
This isn’t the first indicator that some kind of religious backswing is underway among the young. A poll in January, for example, revealed that Gen Zs are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheists. The trend reaches beyond England as well, with the French journalist Solène Tadié recently pointing to a revival of traditional Catholicism in Europe, again especially among the young. Last year, too, Rod Dreher documented a similar pattern of Christian revival across the West, especially among young people, setting this in the wider context of a general, youthful turn toward spirituality.
Dreher argues that the governing feature of those churches that are thriving is their orientation toward the numinous, whether expressed through adherence to ancient high-church liturgy, or through intense, charismatic spiritual communion. But why would this be happening at all? Why especially young people, and why the mystical edge? I wonder if this trend is less about a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, and more about how sharply this contrasts with the generation that raised them: so-called “Gen X”, born roughly 1965 to 1980.
I belong, just about, to this demographic. It’s an open question for me whether Gen X exists at all or just comprises those Boomers born too late to enjoy the fun phase of smashing history, heritage, and the future. Either way, by the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in; and yet, growing up in an unusually peaceful and prosperous era, we combined this sense of post-cultural anomie with far too much time to think.
“By the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in.”
The result was a pervasive sense of nihilism as a kind of moral duty, and profound unshakeable truth. It’s difficult to convey in these virulently ideological times, but back in the Nineties Nirvana’s anthem to existential boredom felt fiercely real in its raw but morally empty energy: “Here we are now, entertain us.” The same restless, angry alienation energises the work of writer Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting (1993) was for a while the definitive edgy zeitgeist text for younger Gen X: so much so, in fact, that Trainspotting’s opening monologue made its way onto t-shirts, posters, and other merch, all spitting in the face of what it meant to “Choose life”.
For Welsh’s heroin-addicted anti-hero Renton, “life” is empty of meaning and purpose. It’s mere mechanical, dull consumerist tedium grinding toward a loveless, pointless, neglected end: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”
Renton declares: “I chose not to choose life.” And the 1996 movie adaptation, starring Ewan McGregor, enthroned Renton as one of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heart-throbs: as enthrallingly self-destructive a cultural icon as Kurt Cobain.
But what happens, then, when nihilists have kids? Raising kids requires innumerable choices, all of which tacitly concede a vision of the good. How does this square with a cultural outlook that denies any such thing? Describing his own predicament as a Gen X parent, the novelist Ewan Morrison — a friend and contemporary of Irvine Welsh — captured this paradox in a recent talk when he recalled seeing a young woman in the Nineties wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, over a visibly pregnant belly.
What does it mean to disavow futurity even as you’re gestating it? And how do you go about raising the resulting kids? The object of philosophy and religion has classically been eudaimonia: human flourishing. But by the end of the 20th century, pace Étienne Gilson, even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.
In Trainspotting, the only parents are the addicts Lesley and Sick Boy, whose neglected baby dies while they are high on heroin. But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy, when it came to pursuing eudaimonia for their own children. Very simply, much of the circle was squared by pragmatists: parents who embraced a vague humanism, or New Atheism, while teaching their kids to say please and thank you and answering questions about Christmas and Easter with a shrug.
And yet at a deeper level the ambivalence remains, between the need to model the good for your kids and the relativist’s aversion to any such definitive moral stance. In turn, this produced a distinctive approach to child-rearing that the philosopher Agnes Callard characterises as “acceptance parenting”. Acceptance parents, Callard argues, disavow any obligation to provide a substantive account of the good for their kids. Instead, children are left to determine what “happiness” means for themselves.
As the children of Gen X reach adulthood, we can thus ask: what kind of adults does such an upbringing produce? In What Are Children For?, published last year, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer some indication of how it feels to grow up under “acceptance parenting”. Wiseman recounts quizzing her own mother about whether there was anything at all she could choose to do that would disappoint her mother. Her mother demurred. Wiseman found this less supportive than incomprehensible: “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”
It’s not difficult to see how a generation that sang “oh well, whatever, nevermind” and pinned Welsh’s “Choose Life” monologue to their student bedroom walls might baulk at defining eudaimonia for their kids. Who are they, after all, to say what the good life looks like? But this reluctance to impose values, Wiseman gently suggests, can result less in an enabling freedom, than a moral vacuum: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”
Is it really so strange, then, that a generation raised in this void might, in some cases, turn to religious faith in search of clearer guidance? When the world’s faith traditions offer cumulative millennia of writing and practice on how to live well, it stands to reason that some young people would opt not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to fill the void.
And this, in turn, sheds light on why such an exploration might take literally any form other than the mainstream Anglican Church: in its conventional form, Anglicanism functions as a continuation of “acceptance parenting” by religious means. There are, of course, a great many deeply devout Anglicans; but by virtue of its historic role, the Church of England walks a precarious institutional tightrope between politics and faith, political and spiritual England. And this invites a public image less as a spiritual body, than as the representative of whatever remains of British institutional Christianity that hasn’t been subsumed by the welfare state and mainstream secular liberalism.
In fulfilling its duty as far as possible to offer spiritual welcome to the whole national community, our established Church risks appearing to stand for nothing much, or at best to embody the Christian equivalent of the moral vacuum Wiseman describes. Against this, young people weary of the effort to define their own values and happiness ex nihilo, and eager for guidance from somewhere — anywhere — might be forgiven for concluding that such direction is not to be found in a church whose leaders shrug at turning over their sacred buildings to silent discos or helter-skelters. Confronted by what looks overwhelmingly like a mass abdication of moral authority by parents and religious institutions, then, perhaps the last form of youthful revolt available is against nothingness itself: a rejection of relativism, and embrace of doctrine and mystery.
We can perhaps draw a few inferences from this. Firstly, taken at the broadest level, this presages an increasingly faith-inflected world as this generation matures — not just within the Christian Church but also across the fast-growing “spiritual but not religious” cohort. Secondly, as regards Christianity in particular, it suggests that predictions of the coming end of established, institutional Christianity in Britain, at least in the form it’s taken for the last century or two, may well turn out to be accurate. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is dying out in Britain.
If anything, what’s on the wane now is nihilism, physicalism, and the reductive “nothing-butness” characteristic of the “Nevermind” era. By contrast, Christianity appears to be growing stranger, more countercultural, and more resistant to corralling in mainstream political institutions. This is a faith whose God rose from the dead; a generation of relativists will not finish it off.
