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Trust in organised religion keeps sliding, yet ghosts, tarot and astrology refuse to fade, and at the same moment headlines are announcing a Gen Z revival. On paper that looks like a contradiction. Look closer and it turns out to be one of the clearest signals we have about what a whole generation is hungry for, and about what it no longer trusts to feed it.
The numbers behind the split
Start with the exodus. Gallup has tracked American church membership since the 1930s, and for most of that time it hovered around seven in ten adults. In its landmark membership report, Gallup found that figure had dropped to 47 percent by 2020, the first time it had ever fallen below half. The younger the cohort, the steeper the slide: only about a third of millennials belonged to a congregation, Gen Z adults were tracking at similar levels, and roughly a third of adult Gen Z reported no religious preference at all.
But walking away from a building is not the same as walking away from belief. A large Springtide Research Institute study of 13 to 25 year olds found that around seven in ten considered themselves at least slightly religious and nearly eight in ten at least slightly spiritual, yet a majority had no formal tie to any faith community. The British sociologist Grace Davie once summed up this pattern as “believing without belonging,” and the phrase fits young people today better than it fitted anyone in the 1990s.
Now look at what has not gone anywhere. A 2025 Pew Research Center report found that three in ten Americans turn to astrology, tarot or a fortune teller at least once a year, mostly for fun, a share that has held steady since 2017. Gallup’s most recent paranormal poll puts belief in ghosts at 39 percent, with between a quarter and three in ten Americans believing in telepathy, communication with the dead, astrology, reincarnation or witches. Here is the telling detail: Gallup notes that those numbers are largely where they were in 2001, even though church attendance has fallen sharply since then. The churches emptied. The ghosts stayed.
A revival in the same breath
If the story ended there, it would be a simple tale of decline. It does not. Writing for Christianity Today, a Gen Z journalist described how her generation now turns to podcasts and online voices for spiritual guidance, treating hosts and influencers almost like pastors because the pews feel so far away.
Meanwhile, Barna’s latest State of the Church research, summarised in a RELEVANT feature on what Gen Z believes, reports that 66 percent of American adults now say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus that still matters to them. That is a 12-point rise since 2021, and among Gen Z men the figure has climbed 15 points since 2019. Barna’s chief executive, David Kinnaman, called it the strongest sign of spiritual renewal his team had seen in more than a decade.
So which is it: a generation abandoning the sacred, or one returning to it? Both datasets are accurate. The contradiction is the finding.
Ghosts without churches
One of the most revealing pieces of research on this comes from the 2025 Baylor Religion Survey, a nationally representative poll of 1,812 Americans fielded by Gallup. Sociologist Ruiqian Li and colleagues looked at people who hold what they call “secular rationalism,” which includes trusting science and reason and believing you should interpret spiritual matters for yourself rather than defer to religious authorities.
As they explain in an article republished by Popular Science, among Americans who believe in God, those who also embrace secular rationalism were about twice as likely to lean toward magic, meaning ghosts, curses and talking to the dead, with 40 percent doing so. Among people with no belief in God and no religious attendance, the link disappeared. The researchers also suggest younger Americans, the age group that distrusts institutions most, are especially likely to hold both outlooks at once.
That flips the old assumption that science dissolves superstition. What it actually describes is a person who no longer lets any institution define the unseen for them, yet still senses that reality has more layers than a laboratory can measure. More than a century ago, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim observed that “the magician has a clientele and not a Church.” Magic needs no congregation, no clergy and no creed. You can pick it up without leaving anything, and set it down without a formal exit. For a generation that is wary of institutions, that lack of structure is not a weakness. It is the entire appeal.
Paris, Chartres and the paradox of renewal
Then came Paris. On 26 September 2026, according to the Associated Press report carried by PBS NewsHour, the Vatican estimated that 800,000 people turned out as Pope Leo XIV rode along the Champs-Élysées and celebrated an open-air Mass on the Place de la Concorde. That was around 200,000 more than had registered. Plenty of those present did not call themselves Catholic. One Parisian, who was not, told reporters the event reminded people “of what is really important in life.”
Leo admitted he was surprised by how many new converts France has seen. The numbers back him up, with a caveat. Adult baptisms in France have tripled since 2016, reaching about 13,000 this year, yet total baptisms have collapsed from 513,000 in 1980 to 186,000 in 2024. A country that has largely stopped baptising its babies can still fill its grandest square with four-fifths of a million people looking for something larger than themselves.
The traditionalist end of French Catholicism tells a similar story. The annual Pentecost walk from Paris to Chartres, roughly 100 kilometres over three days, drew a record of nearly 20,000 pilgrims in May 2026. The organisers’ own survey found the average participant was 22 years old, and a third were walking it for the first time. Institutional decline and a hunger for meaning are not opposing forces. They are two faces of the same longing.
Faith unbundled: the streaming model of belief
The most useful lens for all of this comes from Springtide, which coined the term “Faith Unbundled.” Its researchers compare it to music streaming. Services like Spotify broke the album apart, so you can keep the tracks you love and skip the rest. Young people now approach traditions the same way, perhaps borrowing meditation from Buddhism, contemplative prayer from Christianity, ancestor veneration from folk practice and a birth chart from astrology, then assembling a personal practice that no single institution owns.
Seen this way, the ghost numbers and the revival numbers stop looking contradictory. Both are products of the same unbundling. A tarot deck is one track. A personal commitment to Jesus is another. Standing in a crowd at a papal Mass once, without ever joining a parish, is a third. When faith stops being sold as a complete package, its pieces become portable, and the same person can say the Lord’s Prayer on Sunday and pull a card on Wednesday without feeling any tension at all.
This was visible years before the headlines caught up. A 2018 Pew analysis of New Age beliefs found that 62 percent of Americans held at least one of four such beliefs (psychics, reincarnation, astrology, or spiritual energy residing in objects like mountains and trees), and that Christians and the religiously unaffiliated were almost exactly as likely as each other to hold them.
The loneliness built into the playlist
The unbundled approach has real costs, and young people feel them. Barna and Gloo’s research found that 85 percent of young adults believe their generation spends too much time on screens, and nearly one in three say they always feel lonely, against just 4 percent of adults over 65.
A playlist has no congregation. A horoscope app will not sit with you at a funeral. Westmont College sociologist Felicia Wu Song, who studies technology and spiritual life, argues that constant connectivity wears away our capacity for presence, which is exactly the capacity that prayer, meditation and any sustained inner practice require. Kinnaman makes a related point from the Christian side: the new interest in Jesus is quiet and personal, and he doubts it will translate into church attendance the way earlier revivals did. The practices survive the unbundling. The community often does not come along with them.
Why the hunger persists anyway
Sceptics have predicted for generations that prosperity and technology would finally retire belief in spirits, and the prediction keeps failing. The Oxford archaeologist Chris Gosden, author of a sweeping history of magic, argues that magic is older than both religion and science and has lived alongside each of them for most of human history. On that reading, belief in hidden forces is not a placeholder waiting to be evicted by better data. It may simply be part of how human beings cope with a world they cannot fully control.
Gallup’s data hints at this too: openness to the paranormal turns out to be spread fairly evenly across age groups. The hunger is not a Gen Z invention. What is distinctive about this generation is where it goes looking, and how much it has been through. Barna researcher Ashley LaLonde points to a mental health crisis among the young, politics that keep letting people down, and economic insecurity that falls hardest on those just starting out. Her question is blunt: “When the world fails you, where else do you turn?” For many, the answer is God, or spirits, or the cards, or all three. Nearly four in ten Gen Z adults now expect a spiritual revival in America within the next year, more than any other generation.
What sets them apart is not the longing. It is the refusal to hand the answers over to institutions they do not trust. They want transcendence without gatekeepers, community without coercion, mystery without a membership form. Churches will not win them back with slicker branding. Any community that wants to reach them will have to be trustworthy first, a place where something real can be experienced before anyone is asked to sign anything.
What the split really reveals
Ghosting churches and summoning ghosts are not two separate stories. They are one story about a generation that will not choose between wonder and doubt, and is building a spirituality, however untidy, that keeps room for both. The crowd on the Place de la Concorde and the millions scrolling tarot videos are answering the same call: the need to touch something greater than the self. Whether that contact comes through the Eucharist or a candle and a card spread on a bedroom floor matters less than the simple fact that the reaching has not stopped.
The institutions have become optional. The hunger never was.
A practice worth trying
If any of this sounds like you, here is a small experiment that costs nothing and needs no institution. Once a week, sit for ten minutes with three questions. What am I really hungry for right now? Where have I been looking for it? What would it mean to seek it directly rather than through a stand-in? Write your answers down. The answers themselves matter less than the act of asking, with your own attention and on your own authority. That is the one skill the unbundled generation shares, and quietly, it may also be the oldest spiritual practice there is. If you want to take it further, our guide on how to hear your spirit guides when you feel nothing walks through building an honest, self-directed inner life without losing your footing.
