Talking heads and commentators routinely oversimplify the issue of where young Americans fall in today’s culture wars and ideological battles. The data paints a more complicated picture.
Politically and otherwise, young Americans are ideologically complex and diverse. Contrary to the narrative that emerged especially after last year’s midterm election, they have by no means assembled into a cohesive voter monolith. If, as a whole, they are trending liberal, a few statistical anomalies still frustrate those that think they have Gen Z and Millennials pegged.
For example, polling shows belief in a higher power or God is on the rise among young people.
“About one-third of 18-to-25-year-olds say they believe—more than doubt—the existence of a higher power, up from about one-quarter in 2021,” The Wall Street Journal reported in April. “Young adults, theologians and church leaders attribute the increase in part to the need for people to believe in something beyond themselves after three years of loss.”
In one pastor’s estimation, “the pandemic, racial unrest, fears of job loss and other economic worries, stripped away the protective layers that many young people felt surrounded them. No longer feeling invincible, he says, some are turning to God for protection.”
And while this does not necessarily correlate to church attendance or affiliation with an organized religion, Pew Research notes that since the height of the pandemic (July 2020), “the total share of U.S. adults participating in religious services has barely budged.”
Of course, this number is largely offset by the fact that the West is increasingly secular and areligious. Specifically, it is increasingly non-Christian. According to NPR, America’s “Christian majority has been shrinking for decades. A Pew Research Center study shows that as of 2020, about 64% of Americans identify as Christian. Fifty years ago, that number was 90%.”
And while Pew suggests church participation “has remained remarkably steady” since the pandemic, church membership fell below 50% in 2020 for the first time in eight decades. From 76% in the 1940s and 70% in 1999, Americans’ membership in religious houses of worship dipped to 47% before the pandemic.
Curiously, however, an impressive 39% of Millennials report attending church every week as of 2023. This puts their weekly church attendance higher than that of Gen X or Boomers. In fact, while Boomers show a decrease in attendance, Millennials are up 18 percentage points from 2019.
Altogether, as Pastor Timothy Keller posited in “The Reason for God,” the answer to whether “skepticism or faith [is] on the ascendancy in the world today.… is Yes.”
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Politically, young Americans are no less baffling.
According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, in the 2022 election, “young people’s preference for Democratic candidates was almost universal.” Young women, in particular, rallied to the left (with 71% of young women voting for a Democratic House candidate, compared to 53% of young men), probably because of the abortion issue.
Nevertheless, the study concluded that youth are not a monolith.
Christian Paz, senior politics reporter at Vox, noted that, despite what he calls the “Youth Voter Savior Complex — the belief that young voters are some mystical political force that will forever save Democrats,” young Americans were actually less enthusiastic to support left-leaning candidates in 2022.
“This year,” Paz reported after the election, “young people appear to have made up a smaller portion of the electorate than in 2018, and they supported Democrats by a thinner margin than in the last two elections.” Seemingly, while young voters certainly aren’t fans of Republicans, they aren’t necessarily Democratic Party devotees either.
July, reports surfaced that high school boys are trending conservative by wide margins and are now “nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative versus liberal.” Data from the University of Michigan shows that in 1976, 25% of 12th-grade boys identified as liberal; 17% identified as conservative. As of 2020, the number of liberals in that same category dropped to only 13%, the lowest number on record for either camp. At the same time, only 12% of 12th-grade girls are conservative.
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Leaving high school and moving on to college, many on the political right have decried the university as a bastion of indoctrination, both political and religious. Interestingly, in 2022, the vote choice gap between youth with and without a college degree was negligible.
Also contrary to popular opinion, Ryan Burge argues in his Substack column that Americans “with higher levels of education are less likely to identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular when it comes to religion [emphasis mine].” Pulling data from 2008 to 2022, he points out that “college educated people attend church at higher rates than those with a high school diploma or less.”
All the data can be so conflicting as to seem inconclusive. Young people clearly do not fit into any one box. But there is at least one lesson we can and must pull from it all: dangerously, at the precise historical moment at which young people are showing a newfound openness to God and wavering political convictions, more traditionally-minded folks are closed off to even trying to reach younger generations. For a voter bloc oscillating on the fence, our divisive and unfair rhetoric, fueled by our misunderstanding of the moment, threatens to push them over.
Young people—even those adamant in what they believe—are generally more open-minded than older demographics. Part of this, presumably, is owing to their attending wildly diverse universities.
Let’s say, for example, a college-aged student and an older, suburban man both listen to the same conservative podcast, which frequently employs incendiary, extreme characterizations of the other side. Which listener is more likely to distinguish inflammatory exaggeration from reality? One would assume the college student. Why? Because he’s surrounded daily by people who debunk (or at least challenge) the rhetoric about them. He must debate these people. If he wants to win, he cannot resort to demonizing; he must take the time to know what they actually believe, which almost always begets a certain degree of empathy for opposing beliefs and open-mindedness.
Ben Shapiro makes a similar point in his book “How to Destroy America In Three Easy Steps.”
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“Americans,” he writes, “increasingly misperceive the nature of those who vote for the opposite political party…. 55 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that a majority of the opposing party believed extreme views; in reality, that number was 30 percent. So, for example, Democrats believed only half of Republicans would acknowledge that racism still exists in America; in reality, the number was approximately 80 percent. Conversely, Republicans believed that just half of Democrats were proud to be American; the actual number was about 80 percent.”
Our mischaracterizations of the other side might work for those who live in ideology-affirming filter bubbles but are less likely to convince open-minded college students and young people. We need a political vision and message that speaks to them in such a way that accepts their lived experiences without watering down core conservative principles.
Ultimately, it means our messaging to young people needs a radical makeover.
Conservatives and culture warriors must come to terms with two terrifying truths: we cannot save the country without young people, and our current methodology for “saving the country” is extremely off-putting to young people.
Teens and young voters are far more interested in racism, gun control, and climate change than Hunter Biden’s laptop or Florida’s war on Disney. Again, to be clear, the solution is not to abandon traditional, conservative values. But we must learn to talk to a bloc whose interests are totally incompatible with ours.
Now is a crucial moment in the culture war—and a golden opportunity. Social angst, tumultuous politics, and the failed promises of a secular society have left countless young Americans confused, unsettled, and open to new ideas. We can either write them off (because we believe the media and alarmist right’s rendering of them as hopelessly radical). Or, we can revolutionize our messaging and, with their help, take back the culture.
But let’s be honest with ourselves about what we're doing: to choose the first option is to give up on the country.
