Brian MOUNTFORD (editor). Religion and Generation Z: Why Seventy Percent of Young People Say They Have No Religion. Alresford, Hampshire (UK): Christian Alternative Books. 2022. pp. 151. $17.95. ISBN: 9781789049312.Reviewed by Sarah Louise MACMILLEN.  Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Rev. Brian Mountford is a priest and chaplain having served at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.  Mountford collected and curated this series of reflections from Oxford students – undergraduate and graduate.  The advantage of this type of book is that unlike the thin accounts of statistical data on decline among Millennials and Gen-Z’ers from Pew and other sources, these narratives convey the emotional-historical-cultural-social intersections of experiences of young people.  This is a deeply insightful set of self-narrated case studies that reflect demographic and cultural dynamics as they intersect with the challenges and rewards of religious affiliation and practice in the UK and beyond.

The student narratives are sampled from a variety of perspectives: the agnostic to the pietist, from a devout Muslim to a cultural Irish Catholic.  They include stories of struggling with teenage anomie and depression, sexual assault and sexual abuse in the Church, finding one’s academic/career and balancing with an existential sense of “vocation,” sexuality and traditional church teaching, the looming environmental crisis and faith, and other topics.  In each chapter, though ranging across the degree and type of affiliation, the students speak authentically on issues related to navigating “faith” in a world where it seems more and more “counter-cultural” or even controversial. 

A substantial proportion of this text’s pages has some brilliant observations on liturgy, music and the question of “What gets youth in the pews?”  Surprisingly, there is a challenge here from these student authors: to stick to the transcendent gift of traditional expressions of Christian art and music rather than the popular “saccharine” (my word) mode. This encourages the idea that young people are actually drawn toward a “radical” Christianity as “rooted” in a dynamic aesthetic and theology; not simply appealing to Christian rock/pop theology and the like.  The late Christian author Rachel Held Evans spoke to this in a famous April 2015 Washington Post op-ed where she argued to “stop trying to make church ‘cool’.” 

Due to technology, globalization, and other related factors today’s youth are naturally cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.”  They are also rather cynical about institutions as intrinsically fallen, especially “organized” religion.   But there is also an existential hunger in young people today.  “Spiritual not religious” is a common label among sociologists of religion and related academics and religious authorities/clergy.  But this label can be said and used with a misplaced disdain – there is a spiritual striving among young people today faced with global threats of destruction due to the environmental crisis and other forms of geopolitical destabilization.  We live in an “age of uncertainty,” as a few student authors in the text highlight—and the theological “answer” will not satisfy if it is mere certainty. Rather it is in the ancient example of rooted, religious traditions’ fathers, and mothers: as the experience of “going out” into the unknown.  It requires faith, with the experience of doubt intact.   Unreflective faith or certainty within religion “lacks something” according to one author of the volume.  The bombastic, the religious huckstering, the opium of the people as an escape from the world: none of these models will suffice.  To survive, religions must adapt to a new secular baseline, with a sense of humility and subtlety, but also earnest and provocative theology.