The Loneliness Gospel: What to Make of America’s Current Religious Revival
- Alexander Lang
- 6 minutes ago
- 7 min read
You may have seen the recent survey from Gallup that found a sharp rise in the share of men under 30 who say that religion is very important to them. It went from 28% in 2023 to 42% in 2025.
Even more interesting, in 2025, the share of non-religious Americans dropped for the third year in a row bringing the number of atheists and agnostics down to 2014 levels.
The definitive decline of religiosity in America has taken a noticeable pause over the past five years. Prior to this, every new group of young adults has been less religious than their parents or their grandparents.
Pew published a report that shows Americans 18 to 23 years old are more likely to attend religious services at least once a month than those just older than them.
In other words, if you’re 24-years-old, you are unlikely to go to church at all, but if you’re within this six-year cohort, you are more likely to attend church services.
In this article I would like to explore 1) what I believe accounts for this bump in religious participation among this age group and 2) what my own research has revealed about how those outside of this cohort view religion.
The Rise of the Manosphere
The pandemic in 2020 saw the explosion of social media content promoting hyper-masculinity, anti-feminism and extreme misogyny.
Originally relegated to the fringes of internet forums such as 4Chan, by 2022 content creators such as Andrew Tate, Kevin Samuels and Sneako had millions of followers, particularly among young men in their teens and early 20s.
These influencers spoke to their audiences about how women are essentially the property of men. Incapable of making logical decisions due to being driven by pure emotion, women require a man to guide, protect, and govern their actions.
According to these influencers, women want Alpha Males or High Value Men who are muscular and physically imposing. Alpha Males have achieved complete financial freedom and display their wealth with opulent houses, tailored clothes and luxury automobiles.
The success of the Manosphere is primarily driven by the male loneliness epidemic. Many young men have very few or no friends and the community cultivated by these influencers creates an instant brotherhood of thousands of peers.
Even more importantly, these influencers offer easy answers to complex problems—if you do X, Y and Z, then you will get money and attract women.
Since this level wealth and physical prowess is impossible for large swaths of the male population to attain, the influencer’s fallback is to position women as the enemy.
The result is a wave of rage towards women has rippled out among young men consuming this content due to their belief the dating game is rigged against them.
If only a realm existed where women abandoned their feminist ideology and acknowledged male superiority—enter conservative Christianity.
Traditional Christian Values
The first statistic I cited in this article is from Gallup where the number of men under 30 who say that religion is very important to them rose from 28% in 2023 to 42% in 2025.
What is left out of this statistic is how this increase is happening almost exclusively among conservative churches. I’ve heard the pastors of these churches state this resurgence is due to Jesus’ message of salvation healing their lostness.
Although I’m sure this is partially true, there’s another more accurate reason.
What these churches offer is a theological repackaging of the messages they inherited from the Manosphere.
Imagine hearing these influencers talk about male superiority. This belief does not easily translate to the secular world where women have inherited feminist ideas about equality.
The result is many men who subscribe to the Manosphere philosophy have a tough time finding a partner.
Then, one day, you enter a church where the pastor is talking about how God created man first and woman was created second to be his helper.
No longer is your belief simply backed by an influencer. Now you can point to scriptures that directly state how the God who created the universe views men as superior to women.
What’s more, the women in these church communities buy into this theology. You don’t have to convince them that men are superior. Patriarchy is baked into their approach to dating.
Conservative Christianity provides these young men with the perfect arena to find women who are not repelled by their toxic masculinity.
The Six-Year Itch
The second statistic I cited is the Pew report demonstrating that Americans 18 to 23 years old are more likely to attend religious services at least once a month than those just older than them.
I disclosed in a previous post that I teach World Religions at a community college in my area. With rare exceptions, my classes are comprised almost entirely of this demographic.
When I ask my students why they decided to take World Religions, besides the fact that it fulfills numerous graduation requirements, they will often say they are curious to learn more about their religion of origin and other religions of the world.
What makes this generation different, according to Pew, is they are physically showing up at church services. I have witnessed this trend in my classroom.
The first day of class, I ask my students to handwrite an account of their religious upbringing. Within their narrative, I regularly read about how the pandemic dramatically altered their lives. Not only did it negatively impact their education, but it often decimated their personal relationships.
Although the pandemic was global, this trauma fostered an unusual dynamic within this younger cohort who were in the prime age of adolescence (11-16 years old) when the pandemic began.
The pandemic instilled in them a deep quest for the meaning and connection they lost. One of the ways they are trying to make sense of what happened to them is through the lens of religion, which explains why there is a major uptick in attendance of religious services among this cohort.
A good comparison would be how 9/11 impacted the same cohort (11-16 years old) as it resulted in a notable, if temporary, surge in military interest among that generation.
My expectation is that this new religious fervor will slowly dissipate as they age. If my classes are any indication, this cohort is just as skeptical of religious truth claims as the previous generations.
Since they grew up around people of different faith backgrounds, they do not blindly accept their religion as being the ONLY religious truth.
This is particularly true in the case of a religion like Christianity, which claims that anyone who does not believe in Jesus will suffer an afterlife in hell. Only a very small percentage of the students in my classes subscribe to such extreme doctrine.
I believe this cohort, like the generations before it, will come to terms with these truth claims and fall away. I see it happening in real time in my classroom, so I do not think this is a trend that will last.
Moving On
Over the past year, I conducted dozens of interviews to understand the needs of my ProSocial customers.
I spoke with people ranging from their late 20s into their late 60s about their understanding of spirituality. What I discovered was three universal traits across these generational divides:
For those who have left religion behind, they are not looking for institutional religion to be repackaged in a different format. They are DONE with religion.
For this growing percentage of the population, spirituality is embodied not externalized.
They experience spirituality in spaces that they deem sacred and allow them to feel in touch with their body (gyms, line dancing, nature, singing music, etc.)
I will admit that this information was quite shocking. As a former pastor, I assumed that the reason why most people abandoned their religion of origin was due to a lack of relevance.
Case in point, the number one compliment I received from first time visitors to my church community was how my sermons were practical and down-to-earth. Many stated they had never heard a pastor speak so plainly about the issues they were facing.
Due to this feedback, my assumption was that if you could simply repackage your religion (no matter the faith background) into something engaging and relevant, you could win people back into religious communities.
These interviews proved my assumption dead wrong.
What I heard repeatedly from those who left their religion behind was how they have no intention of ever returning.
Every person’s reasoning for leaving was unique, but where they consistently overlapped was a sense that institutional religion was like a shackle they never wanted to reattach. In other words, without institutional religion, they felt free.
Another consistent factor was how they experienced spirituality.
They all talked about spirituality in terms of a resonance within their body. Spirituality is something within them rather than something that is gained by entering a holy space like a synagogue, mosque or church.
For them, externalized religion, such as going to a religious service and repeating liturgies and listening to sermons, is performative. These rituals do not connect them with their spirituality due to a lack of meaning and resonance.
Instead, they feel most spiritually aligned when they are doing things with their bodies that are traditionally seen as non-spiritual. Working out, dancing, singing, gardening, hiking are all commonly cited as activities where they feel spiritually alive.
This research opened my eyes to the fact that there’s a watershed moment for many adults following an embodied spiritual experience.
Before this embodied experience, institutional religion still retains value. Afterwards, that value diminishes so significantly they decide to move on and never return.
They will participate in religion on occasions where there is a familial, cultural or communal benefit, but beyond those circumstances, they feel no desire to return.
Conclusion
I think the assertion that a religious revival happening across the United States is a bit overblown.
In my estimation, the stalling of secularization is the direct result of two demographics—disaffected young men and COVID impacted young adults—searching for meaning in what they have experienced as a volatile and unfair world.
This is not to say that their pain is not real. I have no doubt that these young people are enduring suffering.
Loneliness is an agony unlike any other we experience as humans. Institutional religion represents an important opportunity for community that many people are lacking.
My only real point of contention is when these communities reinforce sexist or misogynistic prejudices against women. When a religion encourages abusive thinking and behavior, our society pays a steep price.
Perhaps we need to develop other ways for young men and women to find community outside of religion?
That’s my goal through ProSocial. If you’re interested, take a look at what I’m doing to help restore community.