Are There Two Types of Gen Z When It Comes to Religion?

Did COVID-19 had a impact of the religiosity of young adults?

Every now and then someone has a somewhat original thought on Twitter. That was certainly the case a couple of weeks ago when Rachel Janfaza, who writes a newsletter called The Up and Up, posted a picture of ‘two Gen Z’s.’

The inflection point she is highlighting is COVID-19 and how it had a tremendous impact on young people who graduated in 2020 or later. For what it’s worth, Rachel is doing what a lot of social scientists do when they criticize the idea of ‘generations.’ From a purely methodological perspective, generations aren’t that helpful. I mean, the Baby Boomer generation is people born between 1946 and 1964. That means that a Baby Boomer could have given birth to another Baby Boomer. Things change a lot over 18 years. So, it makes more sense to create micro-generations like this Gen Z 1.0 vs Gen Z 2.0.

But, does the suggestion from Rachel Janfaza really make any methodological sense? Of course, I wanted to focus my attention on the question of whether there are any real religious differences between the two types of Gen Z. So, I created two subsamples - Gen Z 1.0 are folks born between 1996 and 2001 and Gen Z 2.0 are those born in 2002 or later. Of course, the surveys only sample adults, so we are only getting data on young people born no later than 2005.

Let’s start with religious attendance.