The Return of the Prodigals: Why Gen Z is Walking Back Toward God, By Mrs. Vera West

 For nearly a century, the story of the modern West has been told as a narrative of religious decline. Each generation, we were assured, would be more secular than the last. Faith would retreat, reason would advance, and God would become an artifact — preserved in architecture, perhaps, but not in belief.

And yet, quietly, something unexpected has begun to happen.

The very generation raised in the most aggressively secular environment in human history — surrounded by smartphones, algorithmic entertainment, and a culture that treats transcendence as superstition — is rediscovering faith. Not as nostalgia. Not as inherited habit. But as necessity.

This is not supposed to happen.

For decades, intellectual elites insisted that religion was a psychological crutch, destined to disappear once humanity matured into scientific adulthood. The confident assumption was that education dissolves faith. Knowledge replaces revelation. Universities would complete what the Enlightenment began.

Instead, the opposite pattern is emerging.

Highly educated young men — those most exposed to the promises and limitations of modernity — are increasingly returning to Christianity.

This reversal is not irrational. It is diagnostic.

Because secular modernity, for all its technological power, has proven incapable of answering the most important questions. It can explain how the universe works, but not why it exists. It can extend life, but not assign it meaning. It can stimulate pleasure, but not justify sacrifice.

It produces comfort, but not purpose.

Human beings are not machines optimised for consumption. They are moral creatures, burdened with conscience, haunted by mortality, and drawn irresistibly toward questions of ultimate significance.

Modern secular culture attempts to suppress these questions through distraction. Endless entertainment. Endless scrolling. Endless novelty.

But distraction is not fulfillment.

It is anesthesia.

And anesthesia eventually wears off.

The young men now rediscovering faith are not fleeing knowledge. They are fleeing nihilism. They have seen what a purely materialist worldview offers: a universe without intention, a morality without foundation, and a life whose ultimate end is extinction.

This is not liberation. It is despair, disguised as sophistication.

The Christian worldview offers something radically different. It affirms that existence is not an accident, but an act of creation. That consciousness is not a glitch, but a gift. That morality is not a social construct, but a reflection of divine order.

Most importantly, it affirms that human life has inherent dignity—not because governments grant it, but because it originates in God.

This is why faith persists.

Because it corresponds to reality as human beings actually experience it.

The person who loves, sacrifices, suffers, and hopes does not experience himself as a temporary chemical reaction. He experiences himself as a soul.

The modern world tells him this experience is an illusion.

Christianity tells him it is the truth.

At the centre of this truth stands Jesus Christ — not merely as a historical figure, but as the intersection of the eternal and the temporal. His message was not political. It was ontological. He did not promise comfort. He promised redemption. This promise has outlived empires.

It survived the fall of Rome. It survived revolutions, persecutions, and centuries of intellectual assault. It persists not because it was imposed, but because it answers something permanent in human nature.

The modern secular world assumed it could replace faith with prosperity. But prosperity answers only material needs. It does not answer spiritual ones.

And so, slowly, quietly, the prodigals are returning. Not because they were forced. Because they were hungry. Hungry for meaning. Hungry for truth. Hungry for something that neither politics nor technology could provide.

They discovered what generations before them already knew: that human beings do not create ultimate meaning. They discover it. Or, more precisely, they rediscover it.

This revival will not look like the revivals of the past. It will not necessarily be institutional at first. It will be personal. Individual. Quiet. A young man opening a Bible for the first time. A student kneeling, awkwardly, unsure of the words, but certain of the need. A generation realizing that progress, without God, is merely motion without destination. The modern world offered them everything except the one thing they needed most.

Now, they are finding it again. Not in novelty.

But in truth. And truth, unlike fashion, does not expire.

http://realclearwire.com/articles/2026/02/17/surprising_revival_gen_z_men_and_highly_educated_lead_return_to_religion_1165235.html