Young Men Are Fleeing Woke Culture for Something Radical

Liberty Check

• Gen-Z men now show the highest religious commitment in 25 years—up 14% since just 2023
• Young churchgoers now attend services more frequently than any other generation, marking a ‘historic reversal’
• Bible sales doubled since 2019, hitting a 21-year high in 2025 as Americans reject secular emptiness

If you’ve attended church recently, you may have noticed something unexpected: twenty-somethings filling the pews again. After decades of decline, they’re coming back. And the reason they’re returning reveals everything about where our nation stands—and where it’s headed next.

The resurgence of faith among young Americans has been both dramatic and swift. A Gallup poll this year found that 42% of young men now say religion is “very important” in their lives—the highest level recorded in a quarter century and a stunning 14-point jump since just 2023.

According to the Barna Group, Gen-Z churchgoers are now attending services more frequently than any other generation, marking a “historic reversal” and the “first time Barna has recorded such spiritual interest being led by younger generations.”

Secular sociologists are baffled. Something profound is happening, but they can’t explain what. I have a theory—in part because my own faith journey mirrors that of these young men.

I was raised in a Catholic home and attended Catholic grade schools. But while most of my high school classmates enrolled at Holy Cross or other Jesuit institutions, I chose Williams College, a secular playground—and left my faith behind.

Like so many rebellious kids in the early ’60s, I was seduced by the promise of breaking free from religion to live a self-indulgent life. For a time, the questions of that age seemed more compelling than the answers I had been given.

I recall the headmaster of my Catholic high school, Father Anthony McHale, telling me:

“We will get you in the end.”

He was right. I returned to Catholicism by my mid-twenties—largely for the same reason today’s young men are returning now.

The past decade mirrors the 1960s in disturbing ways: progressive overreach, cultural secularism, moral bankruptcy, and political turmoil. Like my generation, today’s young people were told that meaning could be found in self-expression and political activism alone. But it left them rootless and empty.

Many began asking the question I had once asked: Is this all there is? And in their search for truth, they found the answer.

The boundaries of religion aren’t restrictive—they’re liberating. Through secularism, we find communities that accommodate every desire. Through faith, we find communities that call us to be better. And that’s what every young man craves: purpose forged through struggle, sacrifice, and service to something greater than self.

My prayer today is that this marks the stirring of a new Great Awakening in America. If it takes hold, it may lead us back to the politics my own generation discovered in the Reagan years—one that exchanges progressive relativism for the pursuit of a moral society rooted in tradition and shared conviction.

This isn’t wishful thinking. A generation that recovers a sense of the transcendent will not accept the idea that the state is the highest authority. They’re likely to value the family, resist the politicization of childhood and education, and defend religious liberty not as a special interest but as essential to a free society. They may also prove less susceptible to the despair and rage—even violence—that have characterized so much of recent political discourse.

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk last September, Bible sales jumped 36% in a single month. Sales reached a 21-year high in 2025, double what they were in 2019. Kirk’s brave witness of faith, and the callousness of his murder, inspired questions about mortality and meaning that social media could never answer.

I’m encouraged by these signs. I believe today’s young people might not merely match the faithfulness of my generation but exceed it. The dark clouds looming over their time—AI replacing human dignity, democratic socialism threatening free enterprise, gender ideology targeting children—are even more ominous than those that hovered over the 1960s. The greater the darkness, the brighter the light can shine.

History shows that the hunger for God never fully disappears. It can only be suppressed for a season. When it reawakens, the political and cultural consequences can be profound—and, with God’s help, profoundly hopeful.

Our freedoms depend on staying vigilant.