According the polling organisation, YouGov, Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, are more religious than any other age group. Bible sales are up, church attendances are up, in the younger generation quite dramatically, as 23% of them now attend church monthly compared to 7% before. What’s going wrong?
37% of Gen Z now believe in God. That’s a higher number than among old people – the over 65s – of whom 32% consider themselves to be believers. The old have always been more inclined to believe in a supernatural creator for the very obvious reason that death is creeping up on them – well, us: I’m a doddery old pensioner, too – and they’d rather like to live forever in some kind of heaven. There is no evidence that any of us are going to somehow survive our own deaths but I suppose there is comfort to be gained by clinging to the hope that one might. But in the modern age, where science has proved that evolution is a fact and that we know how the Earth came to be, why are so many people seeking evidence-free explanations to somehow explain why we are here and where we go when we die? The answer, as ever these days, is social media.
Until now, the life and times of the Love Island and TOWIE star Matilda Draper have not entered my world. But now she has become that supremely modern person: an influencer. And while the world of fake tans and lip fillers has not left her life at all, she now spreads the word of God online. She has her followers and when she was baptised – online, obviously – the video had 1.3 million views on TikTok.
Ms Draper certainly had a head start on the religion department. Her transition to religious superstition didn’t come from nowhere: as a child she was taken to church by her parents. In an interview with Sky News, we do not learn why she, and other young influencers came upon or returned to God but she says that it is”becoming more normal” to have faith as a young person – as “more people talk about it online“.
I take issue with the idea that it is ‘normal‘ to have faith in a deity created by humans – on the first day, man created God – but there is one reasonable explanation as to why young people are “looking for answers“.
Dr Edward David, a lecturer at King’s College London, did some digging into why younger folk are finding religion and it is, 100% down to social media. They see a brief clip and “they are hungry for more“, he says, adding thatGeneration Z have got the “short end of the economic and social stick“, citing the pandemic and cost of living crisis as examples. All demonstrably true.
Ms Draper says this:
“There’s so much bad in the world, there’s so much negativity that you see online. The stuff we fill our brain with – it doesn’t have any substance and I do think that people are yearning for purpose and fulfilment“.
Again, all demonstrably true. Social media can be a poisonous and, yes, evil place (have you been to X lately?) and the doom-scrolling that we see each and every day has clearly had an effect in the rise of belief in God. But here I part ways with Ms Draper’s analysis. There is so much bad in the world, there is a lot of negativity on line and it’s right to say we fill our brains with things that have no substance – you know, things like TOWIE and Love Island that gave her a semblance of fame in the first place – and I agree that people of all ages are “yearning for purpose and fulfilment“, but are they really going to get it through religion? I don’t see how.
The tenets of religion have been around for thousands of years on the basis of words that were written when no one knew what was going on. As Christopher Hitchens put it, the idea that”God speaks to some illiterate merchant warlord in Arabia” … “is bullshit“. Maybe I wouldn’t put it quite as strongly as the late, great Hitchens, but his point is, to my mind, unarguable. Ms Draper, and all the other Gen Z influencers, are pushing belief without evidence. As we said, comforting but likely false.
Hopefully, this is just a phase Gen Z is going through. There was a time when we believed in Father Christmas – in my case Sinterklaas, the Dutch version – and that a man, Superman, could fly – and I confess that in adolescence when I was suffering from terrible panic attacks and night terrors I did pray to the God I never believed in for him to stop them. Sadly he didn’t, on the grounds he wasn’t there and an actual human being, a psychiatrist, stepped in.
I go back to Ms Draper’s assertion that, “There’s so much bad in the world, there’s so much negativity that you see online. The stuff we fill our brain with – it doesn’t have any substance and I do think that people are yearning for purpose and fulfilment” and conclude that maybe she hasn’t thought things through properly. Religion, I would strongly contend, has created much of the bad in the world and the God character has clearly recused himself from doing anything about it. The genocides, wars, cruelty and downright evil in the world carries on and God is absent. How on Earth can someone who is AWOL all the time give the young “purpose and fulfilment“?
Hopefully, this is a temporary reverse on the evolutionary journey to a God-free world. I would defend the right of anyone to believe in and worship the God of their choice, for as long as it has zero impact on how I live my life and by the same token I would expect theists to respect my atheism.
I cannot prove that there is no God, but then I cannot prove there are no fairies at the bottom of the garden, either. Both, I contend, are equally unlikely. Religion may make you feel better, but that doesn’t mean any of it is true. And to date, no one has been able to prove there is a grain of truth to it, certainly not Matilda Draper.
