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There I sat, just 16 years old, in the cold, muted-tone training room of one of the nation’s largest retailers. It was my first paid-by-the-hour job. A TV sat on a rolling cart, and a video had just wrapped up as a jolly old man in a red shirt (no, not Santa, just our trainer) continued to discuss special instructions around “this time of year.”

“Under no circumstances are you permitted to say Merry Christmas,” he barked, as all joy was immediately sucked right out of the room.

A study dating back to 2010 showed that just 49% of Americans believed businesses should greet customers with “Merry Christmas” rather than something more generic (PRRI, 2010). And yet, more recently, Pew Research has found that 90% of Americans still celebrate Christmas in some form (Pew Research Center, 2017).

Let that sink in. Nine out of ten Americans celebrate Christmas, but for more than two decades, fewer than half have felt confident that saying Merry Christmas in public spaces was appropriate.

Even more interesting, in our increasingly polarized culture where nearly every issue feels like it demands a side, today in 2025, 52% of Americans say it actually doesn’t matter how stores greet customers at all (Pew Research Center, 2017). I’m not here to reopen a “War on Christmas” debate or to argue about preferred holiday greetings.

Instead, I want to narrow in on something far more interesting.

I want to talk about Gen Z and religion.

Because beneath the surface-level arguments about words and wreaths is a much deeper question: Is Gen Z putting Christ back in X-mas… or are we watching them remove Him for good?

In just the past few months, headlines have hinted that Gen Z is ushering in a new Great Awakening. And when we look through the Generational Prism, religion is one of the seven key levers that have historically accelerated or decelerated generational change. So it’s a fair question, and it’s worth the deep dive.

At first glance, the data surrounding Gen Z’s religiosity appears unusually contradictory.

On one hand, belief in a higher power is clearly rising among young adults. According to the General Social Survey, the percentage of 18 - 34-year-olds who say they believe in “some higher power” has more than doubled, rising from 7.1% in 1988 to 17.6% in 2024 (GSS, 1988–2024). 

When framed differently, asking Gen Z if they believed in a higher power, saying, “whether it be God, gods, or some other divine source or universal energy,” 75% of Gen Z believed in a higher power, with 43% of respondents saying they had “no doubt” a higher power existed (Springtide Institute, 2025).

On the other hand, contrary to some of the headlines, organized religion is in fact on the decline, and institutional participation is collapsing amongst Gen Z.

Among young adults, the share who report never attending religious services has climbed to 35.2%, the highest level ever recorded, up more than three times, from just 11.6% in 1972 (GSS, 1972–2024). 

Looking at Christmas by itself, across all generations, even among self-identified Christians, participation is waning.

Gallup reports that only 61% of Christian celebrants now say they attend church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, down from 73% in 2010 (Gallup, 2025). In that same study, there has also been a 10% decrease among self-labeled Christians (Catholic, Protestant, etc.) who display explicitly religious décor, such as a nativity scene, during the holiday season.

At first glance, this reinforces the idea that Christianity is simply fading. But the story is more nuanced.

Among Gen Z individuals who do attend church, we are actually seeing signs of increased commitment. According to Barna Group (2025), churchgoing members of Gen Z attend an average of 1.9 times per month, compared to 1.6 times per month for the average U.S. churchgoer. In other words, while fewer Gen Zers are crossing the threshold of a church, those who do are often showing up more consistently (USA Today, 2025).

There is also a notable gender shift underway. For decades, women attended church at higher rates than men. That pattern is changing. According to Copeland and Kinnaman (2025), women’s church attendance has declined over the past 25 years, while young Gen Z men, particularly over the last five years, have increased their participation, now approaching 45% of adult males, indicating they attend church (this graph is fascinating to view).

And for fun, let’s add even more data to the complexity. Bible sales in the United States surged 22% last year, with many purchases likely coming from first-time buyers (Trachtenberg, 2024).

So how can these two truths coexist? How can belief and engagement increase for some while overall participation declines?

The answer may lie in a growing divide between two words that are often treated as interchangeable, but increasingly are not: spirituality and religion.

As the Generational Pendulum swings, we often see certain traits skip a generation and resurface in the next. That is true of Gen Z and Gen X.

Both generations came of age during moments when trust in large institutions eroded. Gen X grew skeptical of corporations, governments, and hierarchies that promised stability but delivered layoffs, scandals, and broken systems. Gen Z mirrored that skepticism and intensified it. And today, religion is absorbing much of that distrust.

Much like Gen X experienced a steady stream of government failures and public scandals, Gen Z has grown up watching church and religious scandals unfold in real time. They’ve witnessed the rise and fall of large megachurches and the moral failures of high-profile leaders, failures that represent the very opposite of authenticity and instead embody pure hypocrisy. They’ve seen pastors accused of misusing funds while wearing expensive outfits and traveling on private jets. Accounts like @PreachersNSneakers, a popular social media presence, amplify this perception by highlighting evangelical leaders wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing and shoes, reinforcing the growing narrative against organized religion.

Big evangelical movements, large denominational structures, and even the megachurch model that resonated so deeply in the late 1990s and early 2000s now feels overly produced to many in Gen Z. Where older generations experienced these environments as welcoming and energizing, Gen Z often experiences them as performative.

At the same time, Gen Z longs for authenticity, perhaps more than any generation before them. They live in a world saturated with filters, fake news, algorithms, and now AI-generated content. As a result, they are unusually sensitive to what feels real and what doesn’t.

Alongside that desire for authenticity is an equally strong appetite for information, data, and knowledge. With answers available instantly, Gen Z has grown up believing that truth is searchable, verifiable, and deeply personal.

And that brings us back to one of the oldest stories we have. In the opening pages of the Christian Bible, humanity’s fall isn’t rooted in pleasure or power, but in the pursuit of knowledge. Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because they wanted to possess knowledge like God. There was definitive right and definitive wrong: good and evil. It’s that same kind of absolute truth Gen Z longs for today, even as they search high and low for where to find it.

If Gen Z’s skepticism of institutions explains what they are stepping away from, it doesn’t explain what they are stepping toward. Gen Z is engaging in spirituality, but often outside traditional religious frameworks.

Practices like meditation and mindfulness are rising in popularity. CivicScience (2019) reports that eight out of nine Gen Z individuals who have tried meditation say they liked it and continue using it, often as a form of emotional regulation or self-care. Nearly half of Gen Z (41%) engages in some form of mindfulness or meditation on a regular basis.

Importantly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, peer-reviewed research shows that Gen Z frequently frames spiritual practices as mental health tools rather than as belief systems. A 2024 scoping review published in the Interactive Journal of Medical Research found that spirituality among Gen Z is commonly defined in terms of grounding, self-connection, and emotional well-being, often detached from doctrine or institutional authority (Park et al., 2024).

In other words, spirituality hasn’t disappeared. It’s been recontextualized.

Over the past year, I’ve written more than 55,000 words to you here in my weekly COLLIDE essays. We’ve explored in great depth many of the forces contributing to the emotional state of Gen Z as a whole, and now, why fragility, anxiety, and loneliness are pushing them to question spirituality and religion. We’ve examined what has shaped this generation’s values and ideals, what’s shaping Gen Alpha (and soon Gen Beta), and we’ve looked back at Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers along the way.

If you’ve been with me on that entire journey, thank you.

This piece isn’t meant to stand alone. It’s meant to pull those threads together, specifically as we talk about religion. Religion is one of the seven key indicators that helps us anticipate generational movement. When you zoom out, the question isn’t really whether you’re allowed to say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. That debate, as loud as it’s been, is mostly noise. The real signal is underneath it.

Gen Z is showing us something important. On one side, there are clear signs of people doubling down on faith, organized religion, belief, and spiritual commitment. When they engage, they don’t do it halfway. They commit deeply. They show up more often. They anchor themselves with conviction.

On the other side, we’re seeing just as clear a doubling down in the opposite direction. A growing share of Gen Z has never attended church at all. For them, organized religion isn’t something they’re leaving, it’s something they never entered. The “church experience” today is simply not what many of them are longing for.

And maybe most importantly in all of this, this is the polarity of this moment.

Religion has always been one of the major accelerators or decelerators in the Generational Pendulum. It has often been a taboo topic. But it is an important indicator of culture and society. Whenever you see a force that pushes people sharply in opposite directions, toward deep engagement on one side and total opt-out on the other, you’re watching a society enter a more polarized phase.

That’s the futurist lens here.

Gen Z is not indifferent. They are discerning. They are hyper-aware of hypocrisy, deeply allergic to inauthenticity, and unwilling to borrow belief systems that don’t hold up under scrutiny. At the same time, they are lonely, meaning-hungry, and searching for belonging in a world that feels increasingly unstable and incoherent and fake.

When belief makes sense and when it’s lived, not staged, many will move toward it with intensity. On the contrary, when belief feels performative or inconsistent, others move away just as quickly and write it off for good.

That dynamic isn’t limited to churches. It applies to leaders, institutions, communities, and even workplaces. Gen Z is asking the same question everywhere they go: Is this real? Does this hold together? Can I belong here while being my authentic self?

So whether you say Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, or nothing at all, that’s not the defining crossroads of this moment.

What’s worth paying attention to is the increasingly polarized expression of religion within Gen Z. As we know, when friction shows up in one of the seven pillars of generational change, momentum builds. That tension often spills over, accelerating shifts across the rest of the pendulum.