Truth Unites - Is Gen Z Turning Catholic? Analyzing a Fascinating Trend

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Gavin Ortlund explores why Gen Z is increasingly drawn to Catholicism, arguing that a deep cultural anxiety and longing for stability, belonging, and beauty are ultimately pointing people to the fulfillment found in the gospel.My new book: Why Christianity Makes Sense: A Book About Jesus, the Mysteries of the World, and the Longings in Your Heart: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Christianity-Makes-Sense-Mysteries/dp/0310182204/truthunitesbo-20Videos Mentioned: Why Gen Z Loves Church History (And What to do About it): https://youtu.be/boXE_EjXePsTruth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

There was an article in the New York Times recently that noticed a trend of conversions to Roman Catholicism among Jan Z. Similar articles out there, one in the Washington Post, and I hear about this a lot when I travel, not just Roman Catholicism, but interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, other high church traditions in and out of Protestantism. Now, in my experience, there's a huge temptation in responding to these trends to become very competitive, you know, Protestant versus Catholic. If you're losing, you're threatened and trying to debunk, if you're winning, you're triumphalist and saying, see, this is why we're right. and this kind of thing. It's like the New York Knicks playing the Chicago Bulls in the Eastern Conference Finals, we have to win this kind of energy. I don't find that helpful. I want to kind of redirect it in a sense toward a question that I find actually really helpful to think through right now, and that is, what does this reveal about the times in which we live? And to unpack that,

I want to hone in on one quote from a Roman Catholic Archbishop in this New York Times article explaining why people are converting. Quote, respondents pointed to a range of possible reasons, including the desire for community, social and political instability, outreach to young people and technological change. Now here's the quote from the Archbishop of St. Louis, in our age of uncertainty and in our age of great anxiety is a thirst and hunger for God and stability that faith brings to people's lives. Now I want to focus on two words there in the Archbishop's comment, anxiety and stability.

These two words give us a great window into our times. people are feeling deep anxiety and a desire and a nostalgia for stability. This is fascinating to think about. But let's define this word anxiety a little more. I don't think we're just talk. I don't think any of us mean just kind of a superficial, you know, a little bit of butterflies before you do public speaking type of anxiety. I think what we're dealing with right now is a more deep-seated and pervasive kind of anxiety. I'm curious what others think about this. Let me know what you think in comments. But I see at least three layers. First, epistemic instability, okay? People don't know what's true anymore. People are questioning everything. It feels like the assumptions you used to have have evaporated

and you're looking for something solid to say, how do I really know what is the truth? Second, social fragmentation. I talk about this all the time. Profound loneliness and lack of belonging. People feel alienated. People feel isolated. They're looking for a sense of belonging. And third, aesthetic starvation, people are longing for beauty. Modern life feels very thin and disenchanted. If I was preaching, I'd make a three-point sermon talking about boundaries, belonging, and beauty, just to get the alliteration. But these longings in the human heart give you a sense of the times we live in. Now, I just want to be really clear about this. I don't look down at that at all. I relate to this. I know these feelings. One reason I love Gen Z is I feel like I understand a little bit of the way they're looking at the world.

and it's not just Gen Z. All of us are living in an age of digital overload, institutional distrust, identity creation, which is exhausting, the pressure put on us to figure out who am I, and then loneliness, as I always talk about. I talk about all this more in this video, which you can see the thumb of on screen. But let's look at the second word real quick to see the solution. This is a good news video, actually, hopefully. Hopefully it leaves you with a sense of hope. People are aching for stability. It's a deep anxiety looking for a sense of solidity, right? It feels like everything is evaporating. I need a solid rock to stand on. That's what Western culture feels like. If you think of, you know, you're walking down the stairs and you suddenly lose your balance a little bit. And so you grab the railing to steady yourself. This is a little bit about what Western culture as a whole feels like. We've lost our balance. And we're looking for something stable. One way to capture this is the word nostalgia. This is a great metaphor, okay?

Imagine you're a freshman in college. Maybe you are, some of you. You've gone off during your first semester. You had to move a long way. You went from Southern California to somewhere in the Midwest for college, and you're lonely and homesick. And, you know, in high school, you are really well-networked and so forth. Now in college, it hasn't quite clicked yet, and you're just kind of missing home.

And one day you see an old video on your phone on your phone of being. at home with your friends and you remember that feeling of belonging that you had there when the world just felt normal. And in a way you can't quite articulate, you just realize something is missing. And you feel this profound nostalgia thinking, I remember what that felt like. I wish I could go back to that. All of us have moments in life like this. A college freshman is a common occasion, but there's other times as well. That's what Western culture in the modern era feels like as a whole. There's this deep pervasive sense of nostalgia. Something's missing.

I've lost something and I'm missing it now. And the simple point I want to make in this video is let's take this deep nostalgia very seriously. Let's take with full earnestness this sense of a deep anxiety and search for a stability. That longing in the human heart is not something to dismiss. It's not shallow. It's not embarrassing. It's not something to roll your eyes at. It's not something to bury and try to move away from and fill your life with business.

and distractions so you don't have to deal with it. This is actually a reminder of something we were created for. One of the reasons I love Christianity is how seriously it takes the longings in the human heart. The ache in your heart is not a deception, but a clue within a Christian framework. And that's the theme of my book, Why Christianity Makes Sense, which is coming out soon. I worked hard on that to make it fun to read. More on that there. But all this to say here for this video, I completely understand why in this environment people are intrigued. by Roman Catholicism. There's a lot of beauty in this tradition. There's a lot of things they do very well that especially appeal to the modern heart and this desire for rootedness and solidity and so

forth. But one question we all need to wrestle with, and this is true for every single one of our traditions, Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, whatever. In our search for stability, where are we ultimately placing our trust? It's very easy to look to a tradition to meet particular needs in the heart that Christ himself should meet. Differences of tradition matter. You know, they play a role in this. I'm not saying they have no importance. I put out a lot of videos on those topics.

But my deepest longing is for people right now to see Jesus for who he really is. That nostalgia in the human heart is ultimately found in the gospel. This is basically my message. I'm pretty simple, really. What I want to give my life to promoting is that the gospel meets those needs in the human heart. so much so that it feels as though it's enchanting, you know, my favorite metaphor is Lucy walking through the wardrobe in Tenarnia. That's what it's like to come to know Jesus. So, for example,

you know, trying to apply this right now in 2006. Take that epistemic anxiety we talked about, one of the three ingredients we talked about. Well, the gospel speaks to that. The gospel, in Romans 8, we have this wonderful promise that God's given us the spirit of adoption by whom we cry Abba Father, and then it says, Romans 816, one of my favorite verses, the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. In other words, it's saying, Paul's saying there, you have God the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as you trust in Jesus, as you walk with Jesus, testifying to your spirit, you are my child. And so there's this sense of sonship and assurance in your heart. That's an experience. That's a spiritual experience. It's as personal as falling in

love or listening to music or experiencing beauty. It's not something you can just give to someone else. It's deeply personal. And this is what the Holy Spirit does in your heart. What Jesus did objectively in history on the cross, providing salvation, the Holy Spirit comes and brings it into your heart and bears a witness of its application to your heart. This is true. This is a promise in scripture. Anybody can come to the Lord and say, Jesus, give me that experience. Holy Spirit speak to my heart, you know. If you really struggle with this, ask some other trusted Christian friends to come and lay hands on you and pray for you. Watch what the Holy Spirit will do through that. So let me just encourage someone out there with this. You know, if you feel this way, I know a lot of

people do, you're just anxious. And even apart from the denominational questions and tradition questions, and just looking for a deep experience of peace, you're anxious. The thing to do is come to Jesus himself. It almost feels like, you know, in the gospels where Jesus, everyone is sort of intimidated by Jesus, and he's pretty tough on people. But then when someone approaches him humbly and with faith, he responds to that with compassion. It's like, this is what we do. We pluck up all our courage, and we go straight to the throne, and we ask Jesus himself, give me that assurance in my heart. And he can do that, and he will be responsive. And what will happen in your heart is that feeling of like, I have a solid rock to stand on. And because that nostalgia is telling you

something real and the need in your heart, the nostalgia is talking to you about, can be met through Jesus. So, you know, if you want that, take some time to pray after this, after you watch this video, close out YouTube for a bit. Pray, ask, you know, Christianity comes down to being this simple. Go to Jesus, ask him to save you, ask him to seal it on your heart. He's the kind of person to say, okay, any response to that. Simple faith. Three conclusions, though, for kind of what do we do with all this. One is just to reflect upon, it's really an exciting time to be alive. And I don't, I do not want to waste my life. I want to deploy my life well here in 2006. It's encouraging to see the level of spiritual interest right now. This thirst is there. You know, there's this article

about a quiet revival and then recently discussion is coming out. Lots of articles discussing this. You can see one on screen, but there's lots. Basically, there were some errors in that particular study. So people are making a big deal of that. But honestly, I am still very persuaded. I don't know the details of that particular study. I have no doubt, though, that God is at work doing something special in our time, because everywhere I travel, everywhere I go in the States and elsewhere, I hear this from people. I get this sense of, like, college ministries at churches are growing and this kind of thing. Among young people, there is a spiritual hunger. I don't doubt that. I don't think that that's at stake in that one particular article because I see so many anecdotal suggestions of that and even other studies as well.

I don't know the details of that, but clearly God's at work. It's exciting. It's a time to pray for revival. And if nothing else, just say, what do we do about this to respond to this need? Second, in the Catholic Protestant conversation, we need more Protestants to speak up. I mean, I'm glad people are interested, but I do see a lot of people just maybe they feel this sense of rootedness, this longing for rootedness, and then they become Catholic without really hearing much about Protestantism. Many people have never been exposed to the John Owens and the Johann Gerhard's and the Herman Bobbinks of the world, and they just have no idea the riches of historic Protestantism. If someone, if you're a Catholic watching this video, I hope you could agree

with me that we want Protestantism to be understood on its best terms, because you wouldn't want someone to become Catholic because they misunderstood an alternative. And I have to say this, the representation of Protestantism, especially online, which is a big factor in all these things, it needs some help. There's some of us doing our best and there's other great Protestants, but we need more people kind of explaining what Protestantism actually is and also then challenging contemporary Protestants to go back to their own roots. And that's what I do in other videos here. Final thought for this video is personally, all of us in our own hearts need to feed our own hearts with the gospel in relation to these needs. If I may say, I think that

search for stability, that anxiety and that deep sense of being unmoored is probably in our own hearts more than we realize. This is always the humbling thing about doing cultural diagnosis, because you're never just throwing rocks at people over there. You're realizing, this is me. You know, culture is the glasses through which we see, not the landscape that we see. So there's always more baked in that we're just taking for granted that we don't even realize how modern and western we have become. And I'm especially thinking of my context in the United States, elsewhere as well. And in those very places where we are drawn into anxiety and lacking this sense of stability, we can find Jesus afresh. Let me give you a story that image with of how this feels.

This is my favorite image I talk about all the time. Mark Studdock in the novel, that hideous strength. He describes his life as the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places. I use that as an image of modernity all the time because Mark functions for Lewis as a personification of modernity in that novel, along with his wife. And both of them go through these conversions. They're very different. I have an academic article on this book showing how different they are, and it's fascinating to trace them out.

But I just want to show you Mark's experience when he comes into contact with goodness, what he calls the normal. And it becomes for him like a mountain. Think, again, the imagery of a solid rock to stand on. It's a mountain he can cling to. And notice how it feels. But there it was, solid, massive with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch or eat or fall in love with.

It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Kure Hardy and the thought that somewhere outside daylight was going on at that moment. You can read the rest of the novel to get that full experience, but I love this imagery, these great images of things like soap and sunlight and things like this. It's tangible. It's almost visceral to encounter God. This is what it will feel like for people to know Jesus in 2006. It's like you're looking all around and there's mist and everything feels like it's unstable.

You're wondering, where's a solid rock? And then you encounter the gospel. And you know your sins are forgiven because Jesus died for you. And the Holy Spirit seals it on your heart. And you have hope. And that's what it feels like. It feels like a solid mountain or Mark's encounter of sunshine, like the only other emotions I can use to describe what feels like to walk in step with the gospel is that the ending of a movie or novel when the good guys

win and you feel this happiness and relief or after a long night when the sun rises and you guys, oh, it's going to be okay again. That's what the gospel does to the heart. That nostalgia in the human heart is directing us to that. That's what Jesus does in our time. So we need to keep talking about, you know, the Catholic Protestant stuff, but ultimately, and what I really, what drives everything for me is I want people to encounter the gospel like that, like lots of Marx-studics and 2006. Boy, short as this was, it went longer than I thought. More to come on all this, but thanks for watching this one. Let's keep these conversations going as well.