'One of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heart-throbs.' (Trainspotting)
This article was first published on 16 April 2025.
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Philosophy, claimed Étienne Gilson, always buries its undertakers. Gilson was himself a philosopher, so perhaps he had an interest in believing this. But there might be something in it: as the complaints pile up, about cultural stagnation and loss of meaning, Britain’s young people are on a renewed quest for higher things.
One of the forms this seems to be taking, at least for some, is a turn toward God. According to a new study a “Quiet Revival” is afoot in British Christianity, with young people leading the way: reportedly, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024: a startling increase. And yet it may also be true that England’s Christian heritage is as moribund as ever — at least in an institutional sense. For this reported church attendance is mainly growing in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, while the established, national Church of England continues to languish.
This isn’t the first indicator that some kind of religious backswing is underway among the young. A poll in January, for example, revealed that Gen Zs are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheists. The trend reaches beyond England as well, with the French journalist Solène Tadié recently pointing to a revival of traditional Catholicism in Europe, again especially among the young. Last year, too, Rod Dreher documented a similar pattern of Christian revival across the West, especially among young people, setting this in the wider context of a general, youthful turn toward spirituality.
Dreher argues that the governing feature of those churches that are thriving is their orientation toward the numinous, whether expressed through adherence to ancient high-church liturgy, or through intense, charismatic spiritual communion. But why would this be happening at all? Why especially young people, and why the mystical edge? I wonder if this trend is less about a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, and more about how sharply this contrasts with the generation that raised them: so-called “Gen X”, born roughly 1965 to 1980.
I belong, just about, to this demographic. It’s an open question for me whether Gen X exists at all or just comprises those Boomers born too late to enjoy the fun phase of smashing history, heritage, and the future. Either way, by the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in; and yet, growing up in an unusually peaceful and prosperous era, we combined this sense of post-cultural anomie with far too much time to think.
[su_pullquote]”By the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in.”[/su_pullquote]
The result was a pervasive sense of nihilism as a kind of moral duty, and profound unshakeable truth. It’s difficult to convey in these virulently ideological times, but back in the Nineties Nirvana’s anthem to existential boredom felt fiercely real in its raw but morally empty energy: “Here we are now, entertain us.” The same restless, angry alienation energizes the work of writer Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting (1993) was for a while the definitive edgy zeitgeist text for younger Gen X: so much so, in fact, that Trainspotting’s opening monologue made its way onto t-shirts, posters, and other merch, all spitting in the face of what it meant to “Choose life”.
For Welsh’s heroin-addicted anti-hero Renton, “life” is empty of meaning and purpose. It’s mere mechanical, dull consumerist tedium grinding toward a loveless, pointless, neglected end: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”
Renton declares: “I chose not to choose life.” And the 1996 movie adaptation, starring Ewan McGregor, enthroned Renton as one of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heartthrobs: as enthrallingly self-destructive a cultural icon as Kurt Cobain.
But what happens, then, when nihilists have kids? Raising kids requires innumerable choices, all of which tacitly concede a vision of the good. How does this square with a cultural outlook that denies any such thing? Describing his own predicament as a Gen X parent, the novelist Ewan Morrison — a friend and contemporary of Irvine Welsh — captured this paradox in a recent talk when he recalled seeing a young woman in the Nineties wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, over a visibly pregnant belly.
What does it mean to disavow futurity even as you’re gestating it? And how do you go about raising the resulting kids? The object of philosophy and religion has classically been eudaimonia: human flourishing. But by the end of the 20th century, pace Étienne Gilson, even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”Suggested reading” author=”Brad Evans”]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2024/04/zombie-knives-a-metaphor-for-britain/[/su_unherd_related]
In Trainspotting, the only parents are the addicts Lesley and Sick Boy, whose neglected baby dies while they are high on heroin. But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy, when it came to pursuing eudaimonia for their own children. Very simply, much of the circle was squared by pragmatists: parents who embraced a vague humanism, or New Atheism, while teaching their kids to say please and thank you and answering questions about Christmas and Easter with a shrug.
And yet at a deeper level the ambivalence remains, between the need to model the good for your kids and the relativist’s aversion to any such definitive moral stance. In turn, this produced a distinctive approach to child-rearing that the philosopher Agnes Callard characterizes as “acceptance parenting”. Acceptance parents, Callard argues, disavow any obligation to provide a substantive account of the good for their kids. Instead, children are left to determine what “happiness” means for themselves.
As the children of Gen X reach adulthood, we can thus ask: what kind of adults does such an upbringing produce? In What Are Children For?, published last year, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer some indication of how it feels to grow up under “acceptance parenting”. Wiseman recounts quizzing her own mother about whether there was anything at all she could choose to do that would disappoint her mother. Her mother demurred. Wiseman found this less supportive than incomprehensible: “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”
It’s not difficult to see how a generation that sang “oh well, whatever, nevermind” and pinned Welsh’s “Choose Life” monologue to their student bedroom walls might balk at defining eudaimonia for their kids. Who are they, after all, to say what the good life looks like? But this reluctance to impose values, Wiseman gently suggests, can result less in an enabling freedom, than a moral vacuum: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”Suggested reading” author=”Lias Saoudi “]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2024/04/why-we-need-more-kurt-cobains/[/su_unherd_related]
Is it really so strange, then, that a generation raised in this void might, in some cases, turn to religious faith in search of clearer guidance? When the world’s faith traditions offer cumulative millennia of writing and practice on how to live well, it stands to reason that some young people would opt not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to fill the void.
And this, in turn, sheds light on why such an exploration might take literally any form other than the mainstream Anglican Church: in its conventional form, Anglicanism functions as a continuation of “acceptance parenting” by religious means. There are, of course, a great many deeply devout Anglicans; but by virtue of its historic role, the Church of England walks a precarious institutional tightrope between politics and faith, political and spiritual England. And this invites a public image less as a spiritual body, than as the representative of whatever remains of British institutional Christianity that hasn’t been subsumed by the welfare state and mainstream secular liberalism.
In fulfilling its duty as far as possible to offer spiritual welcome to the whole national community, our established Church risks appearing to stand for nothing much, or at best to embody the Christian equivalent of the moral vacuum Wiseman describes. Against this, young people weary of the effort to define their own values and happiness ex nihilo, and eager for guidance from somewhere — anywhere — might be forgiven for concluding that such direction is not to be found in a church whose leaders shrug at turning over their sacred buildings to silent discos or helter-skelters. Confronted by what looks overwhelmingly like a mass abdication of moral authority by parents and religious institutions, then, perhaps the last form of youthful revolt available is against nothingness itself: a rejection of relativism, and embrace of doctrine and mystery.
We can perhaps draw a few inferences from this. Firstly, taken at the broadest level, this presages an increasingly faith-inflected world as this generation matures — not just within the Christian Church but also across the fast-growing “spiritual but not religious” cohort. Secondly, as regards Christianity in particular, it suggests that predictions of the coming end of established, institutional Christianity in Britain, at least in the form it’s taken for the last century or two, may well turn out to be accurate. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is dying out in Britain.
If anything, what’s on the wane now is nihilism, physicalism, and the reductive “nothing-butness” characteristic of the “Nevermind” era. By contrast, Christianity appears to be growing stranger, more countercultural, and more resistant to corralling in mainstream political institutions. This is a faith whose God rose from the dead; a generation of relativists will not finish it off.
Just when you thought that generation couldn’t get anymore boring! They’re not drinking, smoking, doing drugs or having sex, and now they’re turning into a bunch of God botherers!
Well, I’m at my mate’s house for Crimbo. One of his Gen Z kids is brutally hungover after a work booze up and the other is making espresso martinis for the elders. We might be ok. Merry Christmas!
That does restore my faith somewhat.
Admittedly the young lads at work often rock up on a Monday morning looking fairly dishevelled so like most things I read online I often wonder how overstated these so called trends really are.
If they really were as dull as they’re portrayed there’s going to be a mass midlife crisis in anout 15 years!
Might be because progressive state propaganda is warning young men away from women. Clumsy advances have the potential to carry a whole slew of negative consequences, especially from women who have been trained to see all men as potential r*pists.
If secularism is turning against men, it is only natural that they’ll turn to a religion which accommodates them.
You and I were fortunate that we grew up in a time that men were held in good faith. I’d hate to be a teenager in these trying times.
Gorgeously written essay!
If we step back, I wonder if the Gen X relativism was really relativism? Who here noticed the religiosity of “woke,” taking the knee, purity tests, confession of imagined sins, apologies for eating the fruit of a poisonous tree?
Perhaps the younger generations are not rebelling against relativism but hypocrisy.
(PS: I would be careful about overstating the resurrection of religion or even spirituality in context where there is mass immigration – Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion in the world, but it is a Third World product; South Americans in the UK are Catholics, etc.)
That said, Happy Christmas
You are right about the religious element to the woke. It seems to me at least this is helped along by social media where the virtuous of the woke crew have become celebrities of the divine new faith. And the young can easily join in to “belong” or simply to conform, or if they’re motivated enough, become another disciple.
Woke has no place for redemption.
Well I think we can explain the No Future t-shirt. It came out of the 1970s UK and it meant ‘no jobs in this town’, and a comment on the backwards looking culture of that time.
But the future comes of course, for mother and baby alike. Young people now are in a very similar position to kids in the 70s: everyone is telling them that it was better in the past. There’s no future in that.
So, as Adam Curtis said, we need new stories; ones that make sense.
The problem both Gen X and their zoomer children have is that there just are not that many of them. So their impact on society usually remains limited. The sheer number of boomers has always prevented Gen X from really leaving their mark. Just as the Boomers’ influence finally begins to wane, Millennials have emerged as the most populous generation in the West, outnumbering both Gen X and Gen Z. On top of that a relatively large portion of zoomers also have a non-Christian background. At least in many European countries. That said, I do think the postmodern era is coming to an end.
I wonder if there isn’t a territory between religiosity and nihilism? one inhabited by those for whom the transcendental isn’t a priority, yet who get on with satisfying, useful lives?
I personally have planted my flag in that territory after mature consideration. A much greater number don’t give it that much, or any, thought. Of course, middle of the road positions don’t arouse interest among commentators, as the social media experience shows. But they exist for all that.
I think you’ve perfectly described the traditional constituency of the Church of England.
Might the problem be the search for meaning where there is none? Religion provides meaning and has had many centuries to develop a canon that is readily available and easily internalized.
Accepting there is no meaning in life requires learning to cope, which, to my mind, is different from creating our own meaning which is the response of most people when they face the void. And such coping is quite challenging and difficult, especially if we care to be moral, which, I believe, most humans care to be.
Returning to church is an easy solution to the problem created by most atheists when they reject god without accepting that doing so creates a void to be coped with rather than filled.
Religion makes life more pleasant and fun. Atheism makes it more difficult and frustrating. But whoever said life was supposed to be all skittles and beer?
Atheists don’t ‘reject god(s)’, they simply don’t believe in their existence. There will always be religion as it provides much needed structure to the lives of many as well as a means of coping, as you rightly say, with our ephemeral existence. I’m an atheist but still enjoy a good sung mass as much as my neighbour, a devout believer. It provides a connection with the numinous and ‘performances’ in which I have participated in some of the great cathedrals of the world have on occasion been transcendental, but without the absurdity of an omnipotent, omniscient god figurehead.
Why haven’t you commented before, on the many articles that involve these very matters? (Unless you’ve only just subscribed?) We need more intelligent and thoughtful commenters, prepared to share the experience of having lived through the past few decades and how that translates into coming to terms with the sheer absurdity of existence, rather than seeking the comfort blankets that religion offers.
I imagine that the religious advocates will always outnumber the non-religious ones simply because for most atheists their thought processes and conclusions are very personal and difficult to share. The logic is easy enough to lay out, but how the absence of a deity colours their outlook on life, death and everything is harder to share.
Religious advocates have a lot of pre-prepared ammunition to fire off. 🙂
I agree about the beauty of many examples of religious architecture, music or artefacts. However, I think the prevalence of these over their atheistically-inspired equivalents is simply due to the prevalence of the religious over the non-religious throughout recorded history.
It is a small but crucial sub-set of humanity that seems to generate the inspiration of these things, whether religiously inspired or otherwise. However, it seems undeniable that mass religion had a very useful role in getting the finance and labour together to build a cathedral, for example.
I think you’ve nicely summed up the position, and it explains where religion fits in to human life, and why it has been necessary to construct it.
I would make a distinction between theism and religion as well, the former being a personal belief (or a longing to believe) in a god, a creator or first cause of the Universe. Possibly one sparked by an intense individual experience of the transcendent. I have had no such personal experiences, but I can accept that others have had and that they may have been life-changing.
The latter (religion) being a deliberate construct, usually by a group of individuals who assist or are successors to a charismatic prophet figure and over decades, centuries and sometimes millennia they and their successors weave a complex theology around the set of initial principles bequeathed by the founder that usually results in the establishment of a professional priesthood that embeds itself in the society that hosts it.
What is unfortunate is when the personal theistic/spiritual belief and/or longing battens on to an organised religion, maybe because the believer can’t handle the immensity of their experience and the difficulty of the questions it opens up, and looks to a religion to provide the structure and guidance that enables them to sit back, buy some answers off the shelf – ‘and let others do the driving.’
In most cases of course religious believers are members of that particular religion because they were born into it. As religious communities in Britain have been shrinking for decades though, as this article asserts, many people are growing up in a spiritual vacuum or ‘free market’ and are simply choosing the belief system that pleases them at the time, having maybe started with atheism/agnosticism and become bored, unsatisfied or just plain frightened of the lack of comfort it offers.
As Dr Rees says, atheists don’t usually reject a particular god or religion because they start from a point of not believing. However, some believers do reject their church and its patron deity and so they become atheists (or agnostics maybe).
“But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy”
Why oh why do all these self proclaimed thinkers get the impression they can use the name Nietzsche as a catch all term for Nihilism and decadence?
Nietzsche make no claim for Nihilism, he just identified it’s inevitability in a world that was diverging from the traditional sense of religiosity and spirituality.
Supposed Gen Z parents would have done a lot better for having read Nietzsche truly and thoroughly, than having read much of anything else.
Religion is as good a way as any of controlling the masses but lets not confuse it with having anything to do with god.
Your assumption is that religion is imposed by sinister, self-interested cabal(s) upon the dim, unperceptive masses. To be true, the cabal(s) are startling in their incompetence. Resistance to uniformity is the norm in the West where the states don’t enforce sanctions on religious non-conformity. Your assumption says nothing about the source of religion, only of government.
One of the best articles by MH that I can remember. It paints a crystal clear picture of the spiritual dilemmas currently plaguing us. But we’ve had to face them before, and fortunately, we (still) have available to us a body of literature, both religious and secular, that can help us do so. The nihilist argument, so fashionable in the 90s, was made even more persuasively by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in the 1930s. I read him when I was in my twenties and the experience inoculated me more effectively than anything else could have against nihilism, even though I was undefended by any religious faith, and predisposed to think of myself as a “superfluous man”.
Probably without intending to, Celine made plain the true cost to the individual of the nihilist worldview, and it is extremely high. It is so high that only a very few people can bear to pay it for any length of time, and a damn good thing too.
The UK, Europe, Canada, NZ and Australia all have an official state religion: Net Zero. It has all the hallmarks of a religion, including impending catastrophe, righteous behaviour, self sacrifice, the prospect of redemption, holy books and prophets, burning (ok, cancelling) heretics and plenty of nihilism.
“even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.”
Late to the party, but I have a vision of “what flourishing should look like.” It won’t be easy, but it will be fulfilling: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Mary Harrington should write about it. Consult the epilogue for a good place to start.
I think a large part of the backlash against religion in the West has been the never ending line of scandals the various churches have had and tried very hard to cover up. People saw it for what it is, a mechanism to control the flock. And of course the absurd wealth of The Catholic Church while it offers the opportunity for the poor to donate to its coffers also rubs up the wrong way. I’m not sure the reason people had Trainspotting posters up was nihilism, more identifying with the mundane nature of the realities of safe consumer life with that being the goal, earn more buy more stuff. It is reminiscent of the counter culture that happened in the USA in the 60s when the young movements rebelled against the white picket fence cookie cutter home safety culture of the time, and the more adventurous became dirtbag climbers. And of course lots of people simply loved the film and the comedy of its prose.
The nihilism is from everything being presumptive, dismissive, and hiding behind ambiguities, even science and reason-as-mind-God atheism. If the world continues its refusal as well as its inability to counter thoroughgoing skepticism, psychologically as well as intellectually, it has no future. The beatniks are still winning.