Why young men are returning to religion

There's a trend coming in business that pretty much everybody missed, and it's been surprising to a lot of people, and it showed up a lot in the recent election. And that thing is the return to religion. Um, and you're starting to see undercurrents of this a lot. Uh, and the most stark proof of this was a study I just read recently. 5,000— they studied 5,000 young Gen Z folks, so kind of the people that are in their 20s and early 30s right now. And for the first time in modern history, young men are more religious than young women. And look, this is an interesting thing, and it's a trend that has kind of caught everybody's surprise. And this has good news and bad news for big business and small business and CEOs. So how did we get here? And like, what can we take away and where's it going? So, uh, starting from kind of the pilgrims coming to the United States to escape religious persecution, and a lot of that stuff is, you know, mysteries and rumors and all that kind of stuff of real reasons people did stuff. But in modern times, we started measuring the participation in religion, and specifically the participation in church, uh, back in the 1930s. And so the Pew organization started to do studies of how, how much people participated in church. And back in 1945, at the tail end of World War II, that's when really participation in going to church and being— identifying as religious kind of peaked. And it peaked in kind of the 75% of the population range. In In other words, 3 out of every 4 people back then were going to church on a regular basis. They were finding, you know, a regular set of camaraderie and participation in organized religion. And this held steady at like around 70%. It went down a little bit in the '60s and '70s, and it held steady at 70% for nearly 60 years. And then right around the year Y2K, something changed. And so what happened is really two things. So the first of those is the rise of non-believers. So in 1999, a study showed that only 8% of people were non-believers in total. They didn't believe in any higher spirit or religion at all. Uh, but by 2020, that number was 21%. It had almost tripled just in two decades. And by that, fully 1 in 5 Americans were non-believers. But that only explained kind of half of the drop that we've seen recently. The second half of this explanation of the drop in, in religious participation was people staying religious but leaving organized religion entirely. Right? Uh, suddenly you saw that organized religion, uh, was having to compete with what people were finding as entertainment or vocation or social connection, which is a big part of church life for people. They were finding that in other places. And something happened in the late '90s that started to become, well, really widespread in American society, and that thing was the internet, which made it very easy to go find a lot of those things that people used to get from church. They would go find that stuff online. And look, until recently, this trend was only going to get worse. Uh, if you look at kind of the data, and I'll try to put it up on the screen amongst cohorts of generations, right? You have Gen X, of which I'm a part. Baby Boomers is the generation before me. Millennials, the one after. Uh, by the year 2K, by Y2K, and moving on to the 2000s, fully 31% of Millennials— in other words, people born 1980 to 1995— were entirely secular, no religion in their life whatsoever. But that doesn't mean they didn't believe in a higher power, but they just weren't affiliated with any religion at all. And if you actually look at who during that period of time was really was leaving religion the fastest, it was people who self-identified as liberals, AKA Democrats. Uh, people who are, who are self-identified Democrats or liberals were twice as likely in the 2000s to be leaving organized religions versus everybody else. And there's some interesting data, like I'll put links to it below, about how this, uh, how this happened in different other cohorts by, by married, non-married, race, all that kind of stuff. Uh, it's fascinating to see what's happened with these different segments of our population and religion over the past couple decades. But look, so this trend continued for the past couple decades, right? Uh, but today's young men are doing something different, and you're starting to see it covered in a lot of the media, and we're starting to see it show up in studies like the one I mentioned at the beginning of the video, which is they're starting to become a lot more religious. They're going back to church. And anecdotally, like, I've read some of the quotes from some of these young men. They're trying to go find a place of real. They're trying to find a place of reality. Uh, they're trying trying to find meaning in their life. And to some extent, the other word they use a lot is they're looking for leadership, right? A lot of these young men going to the church are looking for someone to, to follow. And whether that's Jesus or the pastor or some combination thereof, they're on the hunt for it. But like, we tied the underlying theory of why this shift is starting to happen, which is the internet has entered our life, right? And if you think about how these young men that are Gen Z, right, kind of in that 20 to 25, 30, 35 right now here in 2024 age, right, they were born '95 to 2012, right? These people and young men grew up in an era of pervasive internet. They were the first, first generation ever to do that. They grew up as the first generation ever to have social media exist from the moment they kind of attained consciousness, uh, and they're the first ones to be bombarded their whole life with just an avalanche of information. And all that information has come at them in a way that comes at it so fast and is so hungry for their attention that they don't know what to trust, right? To get— a lot of times you get eyeballs, you just make stuff up, right? So, and so they've seen that you can't trust the media, you can't trust social media, uh, you can't trust basically anything you get. I mean, even down to the emails these young people get. When was the last time you read an email that you're like, yep, I trust that this is a real email and it's not somebody trying to scam me? Like, you don't. And these young men experienced Me Too, they experienced just very confusing ideas of masculinity. And a lot of all of this stuff where the world doesn't feel real, uh, it feels like you're pressured in a certain way. Well, they're doing a lot of what young men have done in history, which is rebel, right? Except this time it's a very different rebellion, right? In the 1960s, '70s, and to some extent the '80s, rebelling was going against convention. You were going against institutions, you were going against, uh, doing, doing, being clean, right? So back then you grew out your hair, uh, if you're in the '60s and '70s, you become a hippie, you do drugs, you drink, Well, uh, if the interesting thing is those people in the '60s, '70s, '80s are now the parents and the grandparents of these Gen Z folks. And how are you supposed to rebel if you're going to go do exactly what your parents and grandparents did in the '60s, '70s, and '80s? Well, like any sort of rebellion, you have to do the opposite of what, what the people before you did. And that's what these young people are doing. And so it's interesting that rebellion is actually going and being what we would consider us olds as being good for these Gen Z young men. Uh, and it's just a total fascinating perspective to me because I see my kids and I'm like, wait, you know, are you guys considering being bad? It's kind of fun. That's what my generation did. And they're like, why would I do something stupid like that? And it's kind of, kind of hard to argue at that point. So bringing this all back to business, this behavior by these cohorts of young men, uh, has a significant impact on how business is going to work in the future, right? Uh, we're gonna— you see changes in consumption, you see changes in all that type of behavior based on this rebelling to goodness that they're doing. You see that start to show up in how the economy starts to perform and how small business gets to either do business with them or not. And look, these, uh, these young men are much more likely to want to have a conventional family, maybe a single family, a single-earning family, rather than, you know, mom working. They're much more likely to want to live in the suburbs. They're going to just kind of do the things that, uh, you know, seemed crazy as, as a rebel, but they're rebelling against the people like us. So it just totally makes sense. And look, one, one of the things I'll add about this change of behavior of these folks wanting to kind of live more, more of the lives that the baby boomers' parents lived, right? So if you think about what these folks are doing, like they're going to church more, these young men are looking for more conventional single-family homes. Who lived this kind of way? Well, it turns out the generation ahead of the baby boomers. So the baby boomers were born '65 to '80. The generation ahead of them, this is how they lived, right? They went to church and they did all this stuff, right? Remember, remember church participation peaked in 1945. So like, they're just kind of doing the same thing again, right? History repeats itself. Well, same things with generations. We're just seeing this generation do the same thing again. And look, there's, there's good reason for doing this. The Walton Family Foundation, uh, did a study of Gen Z, and 42% of them reported being basically like depressed, right? Which is horrible. Like, 42% of a whole cohort of young people reporting being depressed. Like, there's something that's causing all that. And of course, it's the internet and social media and the media in general, right? It is making these young folks sad. So Personally, I feel kind of good that they want to be good. Like, this is a great way to fight this kind of depressive influences that they have. And yeah, it's terrific. And going back to some of the changes, like, I expect to see in business, right? Like, the suburbs are going to keep growing. Like, if you want to live this kind of lifestyle, a lot of these Gen Z men want to, like, single-family homes, like minivans, all that kind of stuff should continue to grow. You're going to see, I think, a continued furthering of churches and all the kind of stuff that churches buy and build, right? Like one of the jokes I would always make to my friends here in Texas, if you want to always be employed, figure out how to get involved in building schools and building churches, because in Texas there's a never-ending demand for those things to be built. And then there's interesting stuff in business about all the stuff that churches need. Like there's a lot of thriving businesses that build AV systems, audiovisual systems for a lot of these churches. And, you know, like, given that a lot of these churches are very different than your typical Catholic church, right? They're much more modern. They're much more kind of evangelical where a lot of these men are going. Like, those have a bright future. They're going to need to buy these types of systems from small businesses and they'll spend more money on church retreats, travel, all that kind of stuff. Like, that's— and even something as simple as like, it's a good time to be in the Bible printing business. Can't go wrong with that. And then the other end of the spectrum that I would expect is a lot of the stuff that was done a lot by the older generations, right? People who grew up in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, including mine. Like, wine drinking is down precipitously amongst young people, and it's causing like a huge problem. Young people, these Gen Z folks, they don't have that much interest in drinking as much as their predecessors did. My generation, like, I have friends with huge wine cellars. My kids, totally disinterested, and they're teenagers, they're young Gen Z, but you can kind of see the trend here, right? If you own some wineries, it's not a good time to be in business, 'cause either your baby boomer customers are getting ready to die, or like the youngsters, they just don't wanna buy what you're offering. So in the end, like where does it go from here? Look, generations and economies and countries, they swing in pendulums back and forth, and this is just a natural pendulum shift of people like, doing different than what their parents did. And I think we're just at the beginning of it now. You're gonna continue to see this shift towards this kind of more classical, conservative, religious-leaning type stuff. And that's to some extent what we're seeing in the most recent election. You're seeing that Trump and those sort of folks did really well with young men. And so if you're gonna do business, like it's just time to recognize what wave is happening here, which is we're seeing a shift towards this stuff amongst the young consumers and the young buyers, the young business people, people and the young employees, and it's up to you to figure out how you're going to work with them and adapt to that or not. And going back to the example of the winemaker, uh, you know, this would be a good time to sell your winery because the future does not look bright. And lastly, like, I think this process has a high likelihood of accelerating. Um, the, the competition for eyeballs and giving us fake stuff on the internet, uh, that at its core is the root cause of a lot of what's causing this pendulum swing amongst these young people to be bigger than it otherwise. And, uh, you know, everybody from TikTok to Facebook to Instagram to Twitter, like LinkedIn even now, uh, they all are highly motivated to show you stuff that's going to catch your eyeball. And the best way to do that is to not worry about whether it's that true or not, or how it makes the recipient feel. And in this case, like, with that showing no signs of stopping and the government showing no signs of putting it, you know, to rest, um, this kind of pendulum swing will continue. So anyway, you know, next time you make a friend, maybe at church. That's what I think. Links to all the articles, uh, below. If you like this kind of stuff, please subscribe. Thanks, bye.