REACHING GEN Z - OPPORTUNITIES AND RISKS

Fr Conor McDonough OP

Delivered at the Iona Institute annual youth conference ‘Does Gen Z have a future without religion?’ on Saturday, Oct 11, 2023

Today (11 October) is the anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, so I’d like to begin by reading a passage from Lumen Gentium (‘Light of the Nations’) which summarises magnificently the spiritual reality underlying the sociological trends we’re discussing today:

‘When the work which the Father gave the Son to do on earth was accomplished, the Holy Spirit was sent on the day of Pentecost in order that He might continually sanctify the Church, and thus, all those who believe would have access through Christ in one Spirit to the Father.(10) He is the Spirit of Life, a fountain of water springing up to life eternal. To men, dead in sin, the Father gives life through Him, until, in Christ, He brings to life their mortal bodies. The Spirit dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, as in a temple. In them He prays on their behalf and bears witness to the fact that they are adopted sons. The Church, which the Spirit guides in way of all truth and which He unified in communion and in works of ministry, He both equips and directs with hierarchical and charismatic gifts and adorns with His fruits. By the power of the Gospel He makes the Church keep the freshness of youth. Uninterruptedly He renews it and leads it to perfect union with its Spouse. The Spirit and the Bride say together, Come, Lord Jesus!’ (Lumen Gentium 4).

It’s a real pleasure to be with you today, brothers and sisters. I’m a Dominican friar, and a priest, and what I’ll be saying today is very much from a Catholic perspective, unsurprisingly. I’m sure there are people here from other traditions here today, though, as well as unbelievers who are interested in the question of the future of religion, and I look forward to hearing from all of you in the Q&A.

One question that interests us all here is, simply, ‘What’s going on with Gen Z and Christianity?’ Although talk of a revival can be exaggerated, it’s undeniable, I think, that an unexpectedly high proportion of under-30s in the developed world are well-disposed to the claims of Christianity and the community offered by the Church, in spite of the onward march of secularisation. This is borne out by many different surveys, including, most recently, the Iona Institute’s survey in Northern Ireland. There is a clear uptick in belief in God, in personal prayer, in Church attendance, and so on.

And this ‘vibe shift’ manifests itself in Ireland in many different ways: a fitness influencer who uploads a video of himself lighting a candle in a church; a beauty influencer who captions a video, ‘Get Ready with Me for Mass’; secondary school students asking their chaplain if they can set up a prayer group, inspired by videos they watched on TikTok; lecture theatres packed with students for talks by visiting theologians; student Catholic societies booming against all the odds.

All this is against a background of massive indifference, of course, but it’s real, and it wasn’t happening ten years ago. My own experience as a priest chimes with the evidence of surveys, and I’ve had all kinds of encounters recently which would have been unthinkable a few years ago: with a former Marxist who converted to Catholic Christianity with the help of AI; with a young man who was a practising Buddhist for a decade and now feels an intense desire to return to Jesus and his Church; with a student who came to faith in spite of an explicitly anti-Catholic upbringing; with a teenager who travelled for hours on his own to attend a retreat, because he ‘believes in God and wants to get to know him’. These stories sound almost like fantasy, given what we know about the decline of the faith in Ireland, but I assure you they are very real.

Now sometimes when I share stories like this with older clergy, my sense is that they don’t really believe me, or they think I’m exaggerating. Generally speaking they can’t see this trend themselves, and I sometimes think they won’t allow themselves to see it. They’re committed, in some cases, to the narrative of decline. I know of some priests who get angry at any talk of a quiet revival among the younger generation. It’s all just politics, they say, it’s Trumpism dipped in holy water, it’s an ugly counter-culture, it’s shallow, it won’t last, and it’s not something we should be celebrating.

That’s certainly not my position. I’m convinced the Holy Spirit is at work in every generation, working in all kinds of unexpected ways, and I’m convinced it’s our mission as the Church to welcome and nurture to maturity all those who express even the slightest curiosity about Christ, no matter who they are or what’s motivating them, even if their phone is full of Crusader memes.

But at the same time the Church, which is perpetually on mission in every time and place, is called always to reflect on how it carries out this mission. There is something profoundly unchanging at the heart of the Church’s mission, of course: the invincible love and peace and joy of the Blessed Trinity which is perpetually reaching out through the life of the Church to the world inviting each and every soul without exception to a share in abundant life. This is the beating heart of the Church’s mission, this is the source of our confidence, and we should never lose this theocentric understanding of the Church’s mission. We should never imagine our mission is primarily a matter of human strategy or manipulation. Christian mission is God’s work in which we find ourselves to be his servants and cooperators, and our first task each day is to receive the Holy Spirit afresh, and to be rooted in Christ through prayer, the reading of Scripture, the sacraments, and works of love. But as God’s servants and cooperators we are endowed by him with natural and supernatural gifts, called to read the signs of the times, and to judge how best to present to our contemporaries God’s invitation to the fullness of life.

So we’ve got to reflect on what we’re doing and not doing. How might we build bridges to the world in which young people find themselves? How might we make it easier for Gen Z in Ireland today to see for themselves the fullness of life in Christ, and to take concrete steps towards knowledge and love of him?

That’s a vital question for the Church today, but there’s a related question, the question of risk associated with mission. Whenever, throughout history, the Church engages in mission, building bridges to cultures which do not know Christ, there’s always the chance that, in building these bridges, the Church might take on some negative aspects of that culture: beliefs, practices, attitudes which then undermine the Church’s ability to witness to the fullness of the faith. In practice, mission is not just a matter of the Church sharing her inner life with the world, it’s also a matter of the Church being influenced by the world, and this challenge demands great wisdom.

In the case of the conversion of Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, for example, early evangelists were active in a culture that was intensely hierarchical, obsessed with status, and utterly accepting of human slavery. I’m sure there were some who challenged this worldview from the perspective of the Gospel, but the Church in early Christian Ireland actually came to be associated with preserving this system of status, including the practice of slavery. We like to speak of a Golden Age of Christianity here, but it wasn’t until the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the twelfth century that the institution of slavery was finally ended, on the basis of Christian values which had been conveniently forgotten on this island.

Mission to Gen Z in our time is a beautiful and necessary mission we should all be excited about, but it involves risks all the same, and we should be alert to them. I’m naturally a fairly optimistic character, but in this talk I’m going to highlight some of the risks associated with the new opportunities for mission that present themselves. This is not aimed at pouring cold water on our enthusiasm for mission. Instead my hope is that we gain some of the wisdom necessary to carry out this mission in a sustainable and fruitful way.

Opportunity 1: Dissatisfaction with the Secular Worldview

Here’s the first opportunity I’d like to point out: profound dissatisfaction on the part of many members of Gen Z with the secular worldview, in many cases, of their parents, their teachers, their lecturers. Many young people come to realise that a godless universe is necessarily a universe lacking in purpose, and therefore lacking in colour and adventure and romance. One member of the Legion of Mary who engages in street evangelisation told me recently that he can’t get over how many people in our time live very bleak lives. They’re not happy, and the worldview they have inherited provides few resources for happiness or hope. I’ve recently started reading the novels of Sally Rooney, and that’s my main takeaway too: life without God is bleak. Life with God is hard, certainly, but life without God is bleak.

This is an opportunity for the Church because we do have a vision of life and the universe which yields happiness and hope, and when the Gospel is shared and received, we really do see people stepping from a grey world into a world of colour.

What are the risks associated with this opportunity? Firstly, I would suggest, a kind of Gnosticism. Young Christians can come to think of themselves as a small and secret club who have found deep truths inaccessible to secular boomer. There’s a risk of a certain sense of superiority, and even a simmering anger directed at an older generation who gave up the truths now being rediscovered. That’s obviously something that needs healing.

A related risk is a kind of hatred for mainstream secular culture. I’ve given talks on a number of occasions to young adults about how to be on mission to their peers, how to make use of their knowledge of the surrounding culture – video games, pop songs, TV shows, and so on – in communicating the faith in youth groups they’re running. Recently, though, I’ve noticed young missionaries pushing back strongly against this strategy. Mainstream secular culture is the culture that these young converts have left behind. They’ve rejected it. They know the harm it did them, the harm that it’s doing others, and their principal message to their peers is: ‘Run away from anything that is not explicitly Christian’, in music, and movies, and so on. At its most extreme, this tendency leads to viewing all cultural artefacts that are not explicitly Christian as probably demonic. If that’s your starting point, you’re perhaps unlikely to win over many of your friends who find elements of goodness, truth, and beauty in the secular culture in which they’ve been raised.

So the Gen Z disappointment with the secular worldview presents an opportunity, but includes the risk of importing a certain anger and hatred which risk undermining the mission of the Church.

Opportunity 2: Rejection of Mainstream Ideas

The second opportunity is related. It’s not just a matter of finding a secular worldview unappealing, but a new willingness on the part of Gen Z to reject specific ideas associated with mainstream secular orthodoxy. These might be ideas associated with gender roles, health, even  history: there was a period during the pandemic where lots of young people on TikTok were convincing themselves that the Roman Empire was a hoax, that it never really existed.

Partly as a result of the sheer glut of questionable information and alternative views available online – something that’s only going to get worse with the rise of AI – Gen Z are particularly keen to question and discard received orthodoxy. This even extends to the natural sciences. I’ve developed a workshop on science and faith that I’ve delivered in dozens of schools, aimed at showing the positive relationship between the Catholic Church and scientific research. But in recent years I’ve noticed that the young people I’m speaking to are less attached to science and the scientific method than they used to be. In one school I was explaining that medieval scientists knew perfectly well that earth was not flat, but a sphere, at which point I was interrupted by a student who said, “Can you prove the earth is a sphere, though? I think it’s flat”. He had watched videos of Flat Earthers online and found them more convincing than his own science teachers.

Now, this is an opportunity for the Church. It’s good for these young people to be skeptical of many of the ideas of secular orthodoxy because many of these ideas are uninspiring at best and dangerous at worst. I rejoice when I meet a young person, for example, who has thought through the abortion issue and who comes to the counter-cultural conclusion that the unborn child is one of us and deserving of rights.

Questioning the ideas of secular orthodoxy can in many cases lead young people to explore Christian alternatives, and that’s a wonderful thing. We should meet these people where they are and be ready to take up these conversations.

There’s a risk associated with this opportunity however. Sometimes among Gen Z there can be a kneejerk rejection of whatever ideas are presented by mainstream authorities. It’s not always the case that young people calmly think through alternative ideas. Sometimes counter-cultural Gen Zers simply reject authority. That can become problematic in the life of the Church. Authority matters in the life of the Church: the authority of the college of bishops united with the Bishop of Rome, for example, to teach the faith authoritatively. The intellectual habits of Gen Z might in some cases make them likely to chafe at this claim to authority in the life of the Church, rather than seeing it as a gift.

There’s another related risk. In the rejection of what we might call ‘wokeism’, young people sometimes end up with a full suite of ‘anti-woke’ views, not all of which are equally congenial to the Christian faith, and the life of the Church in our time. This can lead a healthy tension and good conversations, and we have to be careful not to browbeat a younger generation who arrive at our doors armed with some alarming ideas about women, or nationality, or whatever it might be. But we shouldn’t be afraid to challenge problematic views either, provided we do so by drawing on the fullness of Catholic faith and teaching. What we want to avoid, I think, is that Catholic communities become nothing more than bastions of anti-woke views.

Opportunity 3: The Search for Purpose

A third opportunity involves what might be called the search for personal meaning, the search for a sense of purpose, the desire for self-actualisation. As I’ve noted, the worldview associated with secular orthodoxy doesn’t always help young people to gain a sense of their own purpose, and there’s a whole new energy among Gen Z – especially young men, I think – concerning self-improvement. This might involve thinking about financial gain, or health, diet, exercise. It might involve reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or listening to a podcast like Modern Wisdom.

All this I think is generally quite healthy, and it certainly wasn’t a feature of my generation when we were young adults. There’s an earnestness associated with this Gen Z search for authentic existence that would have had my peers cynically rolling their eyes when we were in our early 20s.

This desire to ‘live your best life’ represents an opportunity for the Church because the Church really can help in this respect. In the life of the Church you can find others who are seeking to be their best selves, you can find role models to emulate, wisdom for your personal journey, words of inspiration, and spiritual disciplines to add to your other disciplines: fasting, meditation, pilgrimage, and so on.

What’s the risk to be identified here? It’s the focus on the self, or the lack of any sense of self-abnegation. It’s not always clear where service of others fits into the winning mindset of a ‘sigma male’. Our faith tells us that it is in active love of others that we really become our true selves. Think of what Our Lord himself teaches: ‘Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it’ (Mt 16:18). This paradoxical wisdom is not always evident to Gen Z believers, and that’s something we need to be alert to.

Again, some of those I know who are cynical about Gen Z religiosity will state this objection more strongly: “I’m not impressed that this young fella is listening to fifteen Catholic podcasts, I’m not impressed that this girl is wearing four scapulars and three mantillas; I’ll be impressed when they start feeding the poor and visiting the lonely”. I wouldn’t be so dismissive, but it’s a concern we should bear in mind. Is the question of service sufficiently prominent among young believers? Do we as the Church present opportunities for service to young believers? Pope Leo’s recent apostolic exhortation is essential reading in this regard.

Opportunity 4: The Internet as Tool of Transmission

The next opportunity is an obvious one: the Internet as a tool enabling those distant from the life of the Church to become familiar with the person of Jesus, the teachings of the Church, and so on. In the past, you relied on your parents, your teachers, your local bookshop, and so on to supply you with good resources to learn about the Catholic faith. That chain of transmission broke down in Ireland a few decades ago, for the most part. But now the Internet makes it possible for people to reconnect with the transmission of the faith entirely apart from their local community. And it works, it leads to real conversion, real conviction.

The algorithms which cause so much spiritual chaos in our time can, in some cases, produce real spiritual fruit. Just a few days ago I met an Asian young man whose only real exposure to Christianity was online, and especially through the excellent TV series, The Chosen. He had watched every episode, researching the Catholic faith online as he did so, and he is now, I’m very happy to say, a catechumen, preparing for baptism.

All this represents an enormous opportunity for the Church, and I’m convinced we’re nowhere near realising the missionary potential of the Internet. How much time do parish and diocesan bodies put into in thinking about our use of the Internet? Hardly any, for the most part. How much money do we invest in hiring laypeople with professional skills I this area? Not much! So there’s an immense opportunity there which we might be neglecting.

But, of course, there are risks associated with learning about the faith through the Internet? They are legion! There’s the fact that the influencers we’re learning from, for example, often choose to talk about topics that are likely to get views, rather than aiming at a systematic, balanced presentation of the faith. There are great exceptions: The Catechism in a Year, presented by Fr Mike Schmitz, and Crash Course Catholicism presented by Caitlin West. On the whole though, there is a very real risk with online catechesis that we miss out on important aspects of Catholic faith and life.

There are other risks associated with the Internet which we should note briefly: firstly, the the fact that spending a lot of time there militates against the development of an interior life, and secondly, the fact that it tends to disassociate us from our local ecclesial setting, our parish, our diocese. Who needs Fr O’Grady down the road when I have direct access to Fr Mike Schmitz?

Opportunity 5: Lack of Baggage

I just have two more opportunities to consider before concluding. The first is what we might call the lack of baggage among Gen Z in Ireland concerning the Church and its very real failings in twentieth-century Ireland. In my experience, people under 30 are unlikely to carry visceral anger towards the Church in the way that older generations often do. This is in part an effect of immigration, I think. I’m tutoring at my university for the first time and it’s quite striking how many of the students are not ethnically Irish. I have many students with parents, or at least one parent, from India, Nigeria, Germany, Slovakia, Poland, and so on. All this means it’s less likely that they have inherited a monolithic story about the Church. Added to this, young Irish people simply have very little substantial contact with the Church in its institutional forms.

This is an opportunity, on the one hand. It means there’s a whole new freshness in the encounter between young Irish people and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is very exciting to see.

But there is a risk, I think, that we fall into amnesia about the real failings of the Church. Archbishop Eamon Martin was once asked when he thought the Church would be able to move on from the abuse scandals, and his answer was: ‘Hopefully never’. There’s wisdom in that, I think. We have gained through bitter experience a certain valuable appreciation of human frailty and the pitfalls of spiritual power, and we should be careful not to discard that wisdom simply because a younger generation knows little about the darker side of Church history.

Opportunity 6: Young Men’s Religiosity

A final opportunity: young men specifically are becoming more religious. It’s a real surprise, but very well borne out in the evidence, that the relative religiosity of men and women flips in this younger generation, for the first time ever in recorded sociology.

Just one example: I know a priest in a small rural town in Ireland who was chatting to an electrician. The conversation turned to spiritual questions, and this man told the priest that it’s fairly common for his friends to have these conversations. They’re not all practising, but they’re all interested in the Catholic faith, or at least open to it. So this priest set up a men’s group, and on the first night 45 men turned up.

This is a great opportunity, an unexpected opportunity, but what’s the associated risk?: that we forget young women are far more likely to have a negative attitude to the Church. They’re likely to see Christianity as an enemy of women’s freedom, and they often have personal experiences that are likely to present serious obstacles to faith – personal experiences around abortion, for example.

We should rejoice in the fact that young men are so positive about Christ and his Church, but we should also be asking ourselves how we can reach Gen Z women. How can we show them that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is good news for them too?

There’s a lot more to say, but my time is limited, and I think I’ve said enough already. What do you think? Is there anything I’ve said that you particularly agree with, or disagree with? Are there more opportunities and risks that come to mind? And above all, can you think of good, real life examples of communities, or initiatives, which help mitigate some of the risks I mentioned?

I’ll conclude, though, by returning again to the spiritual reality that is at the heart of our shared life and mission:

‘The Spirit dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, as in a temple. In them He prays on their behalf and bears witness to the fact that they are adopted sons. The Church, which the Spirit guides in way of all truth and which He unified in communion and in works of ministry, He both equips and directs with hierarchical and charismatic gifts and adorns with His fruits. By the power of the Gospel He makes the Church keep the freshness of youth. Uninterruptedly He renews it and leads it to perfect union with its Spouse. The Spirit and the Bride say together, Come, Lord Jesus!’ (Lumen Gentium 4).