THE growth of a “revolutionary trend” of spiritual revival among young people in reaction to today’s secular culture has been predicted by a European religious sociologist, who urges Churches to respond more imaginatively and effectively.
A professor emeritus of Pastoral Theology at the University of Vienna, the Revd Paul Zulehner, said: “Far from being a simple regeneration, this is a complex process — Churches and religious movements are both gaining and losing young people.
“But we’re clearly witnessing a protest against mainstream secularisation, as groups of youngsters yearn for re-spiritualisation or re-enchantment. Many are looking for meaning beyond material success, when such perceptions have become enfeebled in our pluralistic societies.”
Professor Zulehner spoke to the Church Times after the Roman Catholic Church’s Jubilee of Youth on Sunday, which had been a million-strong gathering in Rome led by Pope Leo XIV.
The week-long Youth Jubilee included a range of cultural, artistic, and spiritual activities, culminating in last weekend’s vigil and mass at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
In mid-July, a report by Youth For Christ, part of an international Evangelical network, said that weekly church attendance by young people had doubled from four to eight percent in five years. Half of young people were now declaring a belief in God and 96 per cent expressing an openness to “supernatural experience”.
The number claiming to pray regularly had also increased sharply, although it is still small, the report said. Sixty-five per cent said that they now viewed churches “positively”, compared with just eight per cent in 2020 — defying “every prediction about declining religious engagement”.
Professor Zulehner added that many young people apparently remain deeply sceptical about institutional Churches, but were finding a “medium and language” through social media for sharing their religious interests.
“What we’re witnessing are rivulets of religiosity, rather than any great flood — but these small streams have the capacity to grow,” he said.
“Gospel influences are at work through Instagram, TikTok, and the networks today’s youngsters rely on, which may ultimately prove as important in finding followers for Christ as the Church’s leaders and traditions.”
Church events like the Jubilee, he said, often resembled “straw fires – blazing spectacularly but quickly dying down” and he hoped that youth energies would now be mobilised to organise “pastoral and social projects in local churches”, as young people return home to “act as missionaries” among their contemporaries.