By Wyatt Flicker, Juicy Ecumenism.
Readers of the mainstream press will be familiar with a recurring staple of human-interest feature desks since the pandemic, heralding revival of Catholicism among Generation Z. As The New York Times announced in 2022, “New York City’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church.” This week, The New York Post asserted that “Gen Z Catholic Influencers Make Church Look Cooler Than Ever.“ Certainly, among the chic crowds in the City and the Beltway, these journalists observe a real trend. Yet, away from major cities and largely out of media sight, another, quieter revival of evangelical Protestantism is underway among a young audience.
I study at a large land-grant state university on the East Coast. The movements and aesthetics of the Catholic revival in the metropoles are felt, but only softly. Our Newman Center has welcomed, for them, a record number of catechumens into the Church this Easter. Yet the figures from the Catholic Church are easily trounced by those students who have converted to evangelicalism while in university.
InterVarsity and other heritage parachurch ministries are bursting at the seams, hosting prayer meetings on our secular campus with hundreds of regular attendees. The death of evangelicalism, clearly, has been overstated. Yet these new Protestants differ from their older counterparts in a few key ways that will fundamentally reshape the face of the evangelical movement in this country.
Perhaps the most identifiable change are the diverse backgrounds of these new evangelicals. On our campus, this movement is racially and ideologically diverse, with notable amounts of black, Hispanic, and LGBT-identified people joining Christian ministries.