In 1910, the Azusa Street Revival led to an explosion of growth of the Pentecostal church around the United States, as members of the Silent Generation forever changed the religious landscape in America. In the 1970s, baby boomers had a similar experience as the Jesus Revolution swept across the country. Now, in 2025, Generation Z seems to be reversing the trend as many choose more traditional churches over contemporary ones.
The Catholic, Reformed, and Orthodox churches are some of the fastest-growing in the U.S. Membership in the Presbyterian Church of America between the ages of 18 and 29 has increased by 8.9% since 2018. The overall percentage of Gen Z Christians has increased from around 45% in 2023 to 51% in the current year. Catholic converts steadily climbed from around 50,000 in 2021 to 160,000 in 2025. Pew Research Center found that around 14% of all Catholics in the country are between the ages of 18 and 29. By contrast, a much smaller number of all Baptist or Pentecostal denomination members are within the same age range.
“They’re craving a solid rock of truth and tradition and morality,” Richard Ackerman, host of the popular YouTube channel Redeemed Zoomer, told the Washington Examiner. “And traditional forms of Christianity seem to provide that, whether it’s Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Reformed Christianity.”
It’s not just Gen Z choosing more historic or traditional denominations. Millennials like Vice President JD Vance are as well. “There were a couple of things that really appealed to me [about Christianity],” Vance told the New York Times. “I was thinking about the big questions.… I just kept coming back for very personal reasons.”
A catalyst for Gen Z exploring new denominations has come from an increase in technology, which gives them greater access to a variety of information regarding church style and theology than any other generation. Paul Washer elaborated on this, saying, “Sometimes people maybe are browsing through the internet, or they may be browsing through the TV and come across some TV evangelist, screaming and ranting.” He explained that this has led to many young people having a distorted view of Jesus.
However, the ability to explore various options has also led many people to attend a church different from the one they attended growing up. “A lot of Gen Z Christians were raised nondenominational,” Ackerman said, “which might be sort of morally and socially conservative, but it’s definitely not aesthetically conservative, and it’s definitely not a traditional form of Christianity.“
WHY GEN Z IS FLOCKING TO STRONG RELIGION
It would be remiss to talk about trends in Gen Z without highlighting that this generation is shown to have a higher rate of anxiety and depression than any previous generation. This has likely been a factor in the shift as traditional denominations are known for their stability in worship and theology. Those suffering from mental health struggles have found safety in Catholicism and Reformed or Orthodox denominations.
The question remains if Gen Z’s trend toward traditional Christianity will continue, whether nondenominational and contemporary churches will start to change their style of worship, or whether they will continue as they have in the past. It is difficult to determine the exact trajectory of the American religious landscape, but it will most likely look very different from the way the baby boomers might have expected at the height of the Jesus Revolution.