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Generation Z’s Attitudes about Religion and COVID-19
MELISSA DECKMAN AND STELLA M. ROUSE
Generation Z, which is defined as those Americans born after 1996, makes up more than 20 percent of the U.S. population (Frey 2020). While Gen Z has been spared the worse physical health impacts stemming from COVID-19, as older Americans are far more likely to die or suffer severe complications from getting the coronavirus (Maragakis 2020), Generation Z has incurred several disproportionately negative effects of the pandemic. Gen Z has suffered greater job loss, compared with older Americans as they make up a higher proportion of workers employed in the most hard-hit sectors of the economy, especially young workers of color (Gould and Kassa 2020). Members of Generation Z are also more likely than other generations to report that their mental health has deteriorated over the past year (American Psychological Association 2020).
Given the cross-cutting factors of COVID-19 that have affected Generation Z, it is important to explore how this cohort feels about the strict stay-at-home measures adopted by many state governments around the nation last spring. Although less likely to die from COVID-19, Gen Zers and their slightly older counterparts, Millennials, spread the virus at greater rates than older Americans, largely because they are disproportionately employed in essential service industry jobs (Renner 2020). Support for strict lockdown measures may hinge, then, on Gen Z’s willingness to engage in collective social action for the greater good. One driver of selfless and helpful behaviors is religion, as surveys have consistently shown that highly religious people across the world are more likely to engage in helping and caring behaviors, compared to those who are less religious (Pelham and Crabtree 2008).
In this chapter, we consider how religion is shaping attitudes about COVID-19 among this nascent generation. First, using a nationally representative survey of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four conducted in late May 2020, we paint a religious portrait of Gen Z Americans during the pandemic, sharing descriptive data about their religious identification and frequency of religious attendance. We consider their religious behaviors by race and ethnicity as well, given that Gen Z is also the most racially diverse generation (Wang 2018). Second, we ask whether the coronavirus pandemic has strengthened their religious views and the extent to which Gen Z members have turned to prayer as a way to bring an end to the pandemic. Lastly, we consider how religion shapes their views regarding shelter-in-place laws. We also conduct multivariate analyses to examine how attitudes about and behaviors in response to COVID-19 are influenced by religion, while controlling for other factors.
We find that the largest religious affiliation among Generation Z is not being religiously affiliated, especially among white and Asian Gen Z Americans. Furthermore, a plurality across all racial and ethnic Gen Z groups state that they rarely or never attend church services. We find no evidence that religious faith among Generation Z has become stronger or that this cohort is turning more frequently to prayer during this pandemic. While a strong majority of Gen Zers supports shelter-in-place measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, there are differences across racial and ethnic groups. White Gen Z Americans are less likely to support these measures, compared to Black, Latino, and Asian Gen Z Americans.
Our multivariate analyses reveal that religious factors, such as religious affiliation, church attendance, and identifying as evangelical affect strength of faith and frequency of prayer among Generation Z. In particular, African Americans and women express praying more often for the end of the pandemic than other racial/ethnic or gender groups. Gen Z conservatives display both an increase in religious faith as a result of COVID-19 and also have a greater tendency toward praying more frequently for the end of the pandemic. Republican and conservative Gen Zers are less likely to support shelter-in-place measures, finding them to be an undue burden on people and the economy. Our results help to illuminate how religion, race/ethnicity, and generation interact to better understand opinions about this once-in-a-lifetime global health crisis.
The Religiosity of Gen Z
One of the largest trends in American religion is the rapid growth of the religiously unaffiliated (Campbell, Layman, and Green 2020), with older Americans being far more likely to identify with a particular religion than Millennials, the youngest full adult cohort (those born between 1980 and 1996). Indeed, Millennials are more than three times as likely than senior citizens aged sixty-five or older to indicate that they are religiously unaffiliated (Cox and Jones 2017). Given the relative youth of Generation Z, much less is known about their religious preferences. In our survey of Gen Z Americans, we asked respondents about both their religious affiliation and how often they attend religious services, while also considering the racial and ethnic dimensions of their religiosity.
We break down our descriptive data by whether respondents are white, African American, Latino, or Asian American for several reasons.1 First, compared with white Americans and Asian Americans, African Americans and Latinos in the general population are more likely to profess a religious affiliation, attend church, and indicate that religion is very important to their lives (Pew Research Center 2018; Putnam and Campbell 2010). Second, African Americans (Hunt and Hunt 2001; Taylor et al. 1996) and Latinos (Espinosa, Elizonda, and Miranda 2005) often have distinct theological emphases in their faith traditions that have important political implications (Gershon, Pantoja, and Taylor 2016; McDaniel 2009). While white Americans are religiously diverse, holding conservative Christian theological views leads them to be less tolerant and less egalitarian in their views overall. Specifically, McKenzie and Rouse (2013) find that whites who are religiously conservative are significantly less likely to be interested in helping the poor, compared to nonwhites. Religion and race often interact in unique ways with respect to policy attitudes, which leads us to consider how race and ethnicity shape religious behavior overall among Gen Z, the most racially and ethnically diverse cohort in the nation’s history.
As Figure A13.1 in the appendix demonstrates, the largest religious affiliation, by far, is religiously unaffiliated: close to 40 percent of Generation Z does not identify with a religion.2 Roughly 10 percent of Gen Zers are white Catholics, and an additional 12 percent are white Protestant, either evangelical (5 percent) or mainline Protestant (7 percent).3 About 4 percent of respondents are Black Protestants, and 3 percent identify as Black Catholics. Among Gen Z Latinos, higher percentages are Catholic than Protestant, by almost a two-to-one margin (6.4 percent to 3.3 percent, respectively). Asian Americans who are Catholic make up 3 percent of the sample, followed by 1.3 percent of Asian Protestants. Roughly 5 percent of Gen Z Americans identify as Mormon, while smaller percentages of Gen Z Americans are made up of other Christians (such as the Orthodox), Jews, or adherents to other world religions, such as Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus. About 2 percent identify as something else, such as being Wiccan. Compared with other national surveys that consider religious identification among Gen Z, our survey has slightly more Mormons and Black Catholics and slightly fewer white evangelicals, but the rest of the categories closely align with other studies.4
Figure 13.1 considers the ethnic and racial makeup of religious adherents grouped in one of four categories—Protestants, Catholics, religiously unaffiliated, and other—which reveals some interesting trends. A clear plurality of Gen Z Americans who are white or Asian are religiously unaffiliated. Both African Americans and Latinos among Gen Z are far more likely to identify with a religious group than their white and Asian counterparts. For Gen Z Latinos, Catholicism is still the more frequent religious affiliation—though one in five identify as Protestant. Notably, our study finds that almost one in five African American Gen Zers identify as Catholic, compared with 27 percent who identify as Black Protestant. Despite the historic role that the Black church has played in the political lives of many African Americans, younger Black Americans are also following national trends of being more likely to disaffiliate with a religious tradition than to identify themselves as religious. The same appears true for Latino Gen Z Americans as well.
We also consider how often Gen Z Americans attend church (see Figure A13.2). Given the size of the unaffiliated population, the most frequent category of church attendance among all racial groups is rarely or never, with Asian American Gen Zers recording the highest levels of nonattendance (53 percent), followed by whites (43 percent). Around 31 percent of both African American and Latino Gen Zers report attending church on a weekly basis or more, although African American Gen Zers are more likely to report attending church monthly than all other groups.
A decline in church attendance and growth in religious disaffiliation among Gen Z may be linked to a lack of faith in institutions found more broadly among younger generations. Millennials, for instance, are far less likely to identify with a political party or to engage in traditional forms of politics, such as voting or contacting public officials (Gilman and Stokes 2014), which Rouse and Ross (2018) argue may signal a desire for alternatives to mainstream political institutions. A PRRI (2016) study analyzing the growth of religious disaffiliation in the United States finds that for many Millennials, family dynamics, such as divorce or growing up in a mixed-faith household or with secular parents, lead younger people to disaffiliate with religious institutions. The PRRI report also details that the treatment of LGBT Americans by many conservative religious traditions is linked to the decision to religiously disaffiliate for some younger Americans, as is the clergy-sex-abuse scandal among some former Catholics. However, most disaffiliated Americans say that they left their childhood religion simply because they stopped believing in its religious teachings. These disaffiliation trends within Gen Z Americans, then, are an extension of similar patterns among Millennials (Deckman 2020). However, it is important to note that more Gen Z Americans acknowledge some tie with religion than not—and religious affiliation is higher among African American and Latino Gen Zers.
Figure 13.1 Major Religious Traditions among Gen Z, by Race/Ethnicity (Percentages) (Source: 2020 Gen Z survey.)
How Has COVID-19 Shaped the Religious Behavior of Gen Z Americans?
We asked Gen Z Americans whether their religious faith has become stronger or weaker during the pandemic; respondents were also given the option of saying that they are not religious. Studies show that during extreme crises, such as pandemics or natural disasters, individuals often turn to their religious faith as a coping mechanism in times of uncertainty and anxiety (Ano and Vasconelles 2005; Bentzen 2019). Initial work shows that the pandemic has increased religiosity among Catholics in Colombia (Meza 2020) and among many Americans, particularly Black Protestants (Gecewicz 2020). Figure 13.2 shows the impact of COVID-19 on religious faith based on race/ethnicity and religious affiliation among Generation Z. We have removed those Gen Zers who are not religious (27 percent of the sample) or who indicated they were unsure how their religious faith was impacted by COVID (8 percent of the sample).
Figure 13.2 Impact of COVID on Religious Faith among Gen Z, by Race/Ethnicity (Percentages) (Source: 2020 Gen Z survey.)
Among Gen Zers who profess a religious faith, a slight majority (50.3 percent) indicated that COVID had not changed their religion much. Asian American Gen Zers are the least likely to say that the pandemic has made their religious faith stronger—just 26.1 percent. At the opposite end, 47.1 percent of African American Gen Zers say that their religious faith has gotten stronger as a result of the pandemic. The same is true for 37.1 percent of Gen Z Latinos and 40 percent of Gen Zers who are white. At the same time, relatively few Gen Z Americans who are religious in some way indicate that their faith has diminished or gotten weaker due to the COVID pandemic.
Many individuals may also be turning to prayer specifically as a way to cope with the pandemic. For instance, Bentzen (2020) found internationally that as the seriousness of the pandemic first emerged in March 2020, Google recorded the highest number of searches for prayer in its history. We also asked Gen Z Americans the extent to which they have found themselves praying for an end of the coronavirus to understand whether their own personal religious behaviors have been impacted (see Figure 13.3).
A plurality of both whites and Asian American Gen Zers indicate that they have not turned at all to prayer in response to the pandemic. Solid majorities of African American and Latino Gen Z respondents, however, indicate that they prayed for an end of the COVID pandemic either to some or to a great extent; 36 percent of African American Gen Zers report praying for an end to the pandemic to a great extent. Of course, other work from Pew shows that only a minority of American teenagers pray on a regular basis—indeed, 39 percent report never praying while just 27 percent of teenagers, themselves members of Gen Z, report praying daily (Pew Research Center 2020a). Our data, then, show that at least for younger Americans, there is no evidence of a surge in private religious behavior, such as prayer, even in the midst of a pandemic.
Figure 13.3 Extent to which Gen Z Prays for an End to COVID-19, by Race/Ethnicity (Percentages) (Source: 2020 Gen Z survey.)
Shelter-in-Place Laws and Gen Z
In our final descriptive analysis, we ask Gen Z Americans about their attitudes on shelter-in-place laws—namely, whether they believe that strict shelter-in-place laws are worth it to protect people and limit the spread of the coronavirus or whether those measures are placing unnecessary burdens on people and the economy and are causing more harm than good. At the time of our survey in May 2020, much political debate had ensued about whether such laws in some states were too restrictive, including limitations on gatherings at religious institutions.
While our question asked about Gen Z’s attitudes overall on such restrictions—and not specifically about locking down houses of worship—we wanted to see how race/ethnicity and religion shapes those views, if at all. We find that a strong majority of Gen Z Americans—62 percent—believe that the shelter-in-place laws are worth it, compared with just 23 percent who believe such laws are too burdensome on people and the economy. That question came initially from a Kaiser Family Foundation Survey (2020), which found in April 2020 that 80 percent of Americans overall thought the laws are worth it compared with 19 percent who did not. If we remove those respondents who are unsure about which alternative is closer to their views, we find that 72.6 percent of Gen Zers support the laws while 27.4 percent say they are not worth it, so overall it appears that Generation Z is perhaps less supportive of those measures than Americans more generally (data not reported). White Gen Z Americans report being the least likely to think that such laws are worth it (just 58 percent), while Asian American Gen Zers are far less conflicted about those policies (78 percent support the laws).
We also consider how church attendance shapes support for shelter-in-place laws among Gen Z. On the one hand, regular church attenders may be less than thrilled by such strict shelter-in-place measures than those who do not attend regularly because such measures limit access to formal worship in person. On the other hand, regular church attendance may denote a greater ethic of care among respondents, leading them to be more supportive of shelter-in-place laws. For example, Gallup polls conducted in more than 140 countries showed that respondents who were highly religious were more likely to have donated money to charity, volunteered time to an organization, or helped a stranger who needed help (Pelham and Crabtree 2008).
Based on our initial results, weekly Gen Z churchgoers are not less supportive of shelter-in-place measures than their counterparts. Notably, weekly attenders share more in common with Gen Z Americans who never attend church or perhaps attend church several times a year in that more than 60 percent support strict shelter-in-place laws. That such a solid majority of weekly attenders back those laws shows potentially that greater religiosity may translate to communal attitudes about responses to the pandemic. These findings are also in line with surveys of other Americans, who have largely been supportive of requiring houses of worship to follow the same guidelines as businesses, schools, or other organizations when it comes to COVID-related restrictions (Pew Research Center 2020b). Our initial findings may also be linked to race and ethnicity, given that African Americans and Latinos attend church at higher levels and are also more supportive of policies to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 (Rouse 2020).
Multivariate Analysis
To further explore the effects of religion on attitudes about COVID-19 among Generation Z, we estimate three regression models that capture the effects of generation on religious faith, prayer, and support for sheltering-in-place measures, respectively, in the presence of other potentially confounding variables. First, we include three religious measures as independent variables: whether respondents are religiously affiliated (coded 1) or not (coded 0), how often they attend religious services (higher values equal more frequent attendance), and whether they consider themselves as born-again or evangelical (coded 1) or not (coded 0). In addition, we control for several common individual factors that may also affect faith, prayer, and opinions about the efficacy of sheltering in place. These include race/ethnicity (Black, Latino, and other, with white as the reference category), gender (coded 1 for cis women; 0, otherwise), party (Republican or independent, with Democrat as the reference category), ideology (7-point scale from extreme liberal to extreme conservative), and family income. Finally, we control for education. However, since a large portion of Generation Z is not old enough to have completed most of their education, we utilize “educational goal,” a measure that captures a respondent’s plan or hopes for educational achievement (high school to professional degree).
The results of the regression models for all three dependent variables—religious faith, praying, and support for shelter-in-place measures—are presented in the appendix in Table A13.1. We find that members of Generation Z who are religiously unaffiliated are significantly less likely (p < 0.01) to say that their religious faith has gotten stronger during the pandemic or that they have found themselves praying to a greater extent (p < 0.001) for COVID-19 to come to an end. Conversely, Gen Zers who say they attend religious services more frequently are significantly more likely to say that their religious faith has increased (p < 0.001) and that they pray more often (p < 0.001) for the pandemic to end. These findings are in line with survey data from Pew Research Center in April 2020 that showed greater religiosity during COVID-19 among respondents who attend church more frequently (Gecewicz 2020). Also, Gen Z respondents who identify as being born-again or evangelical are significantly more likely to say their faith has gotten stronger during the COVID-19 outbreak (p < 0.001), as well as state that they have prayed more often for an end to the pandemic (p < 0.001).
A few of our dispositional factors influence attitudes about faith, prayer, and support for sheltering-in-place measures. Gen Z African Americans express praying more often to bring an end to the pandemic than Gen Z white Americans (p < 0.05), and non–African American/non-Latino minorities (labeled as “other and who identify as Asian Americans, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, Native American, or multiracial”) are more likely to say shelter-in-place measures are worth it to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 (p < 0.05). We also find that women are more likely to say that they are praying more often for an end to the pandemic. Previous research has shown that women are socialized to be more compassionate (Greenlee 2014) and to have greater concern for others (Lizotte 2020); women are also more religious than men (Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2013).
Partisanship is significant in two of our models, while ideology matters in all three models; these two factors sometimes affect our dependent variables in opposite directions. For instance, Gen Z Republicans are less likely to say that their faith has gotten stronger during the pandemic (p < 0.05). While at first blush this finding seems counterintuitive, those who are Republican among this cohort may already have high levels of faith that will not be impacted by the pandemic. For instance, 42 percent of Gen Z Republicans report attending church weekly or more compared with just 21 percent of Gen Z independents and 23 percent of Gen Z Democrats. By contrast, members of Generation Z who are more conservative are more likely to state that their faith has gotten stronger during the pandemic (p < 0.05). While this finding runs counter to the results for young Republicans, partisanship and ideology are not always synonymous; most people do not think of parties in ideological terms, and parties do not always reflect an individual’s belief systems (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012).
Ideology is even more complicated by how political beliefs interact with religious beliefs, particularly for different racial and ethnic groups (McKenzie and Rouse 2013). For example, in our survey, only 10.8 percent of African American Gen Z respondents identify as Republican, but 42.9 percent place themselves on the right side of the ideological scale (i.e., more conservative).5 Similarly, 16.5 percent of Latino Gen Z respondents call themselves Republican, but 35.4 percent identify as conservative. By contrast, white Gen Z respondents have greater congruence between their partisanship (30 percent) and their ideology (36.9 percent identify as conservative). To explore further the effects of ideology on religious faith across groups, we interacted this variable with race and ethnicity in our model. None of the interaction terms yielded significant effects. However, in a logit regression model, we cannot fully establish statistical inferences by simply relying on the interaction terms (Norton et al. 2004). Therefore, as an additional step, we computed predicted probabilities of the different combinations of the interaction term.6 These results are illustrated in the online appendix Figure A13.4 as pairwise comparisons of marginal effects for the dependent variable outcome of saying religious faith has gotten stronger.7 In short, these findings confirm that except on a few values of the interaction term, neither ideology nor race/ethnicity consistently drive changes in religious faith among Generation Z. For example, the pairwise comparisons reveal that a conservative non–African American is 19 percent more likely to say their religious faith has gotten stronger during COVID, compared to a liberal African American. Similarly, a conservative non–African American is 18 percent more likely to acknowledge a strengthening of their religious faith during COVID compared to a moderate African American. There was not a statistically significant difference in religious faith between African Americans and non–African Americans with similar ideological beliefs or between African Americans of varying ideological leanings. In the pairwise comparisons for Latinos, we find that a conservative non-Latino is 18 percent more likely to acknowledge a strengthening of their faith during COVID compared to a moderate Latino. Furthermore, a conservative Latino is 16 percent less likely to say their religious faith has gotten stronger during COVID in comparison to a conservative non-Latino. There were no statistically significant differences between non-Latinos and Latinos of similar ideological beliefs.
Turning to the second model, partisanship is not a significant factor in predicting greater frequency of prayer during the pandemic. However, Gen Zers who are more conservative report praying more often (p < 0.001) for an end to the pandemic. Since many religious adherents tend to be ideologically conservative, our findings that greater conservatism is linked to stronger religiosity and more prayer are not very surprising.
Both Gen Z Republicans (p < 0.001) and Gen Z independents (p < 0.05) are less likely to agree that shelter-in-place measures are worth it to allay the spread of the coronavirus. Recent research has found Gen Z Republicans to be less supportive of COVID-19 mitigation efforts (Deckman et al. 2020), which makes sense given that criticism about stringent lockdown measures has most often come from Republican leaders. In contrast to how ideology affects strength of faith and frequency of prayer during the pandemic, conservative respondents are less likely to say that shelter-in-place measures are worth it (p < 0.001), indicating that these Gen Zers believe that such measures place an unnecessary burden on people and are causing more harm than good. As we noted in the introduction, Gen Zers are disproportionately employed in essential service industry jobs (Renner 2020) while at the same time becoming less sick or less likely to be hospitalized from COVID-19 (Maragakis 2020). These factors may contribute to less support among conservative Gen Zers’ attitudes about shelter-in-place measures. Finally, we find that Gen Zers with a higher household income are more likely to support shelter-in-place measures (p < 0.05). This finding likely indicates that those with greater economic means believe they are better equipped to absorb restrictive COVID-19 measures that inevitably result in economic hardship for some segments of the population.
Conclusion
There is an old adage that there are no atheists in foxholes. While a pandemic may not be the same thing as a war, the data show that Gen Z is not becoming more religious as a result of this once-in-a century global health crisis. The religious disaffiliation among younger Americans, first witnessed in large numbers among the Millennial generation, continues among Gen Z Americans. Yet religion still matters to Generation Z, as a majority of this cohort affiliates with a religious tradition; a plurality also attends church on a regular basis—particularly African American and Latino Gen Zers. Religious Generation Z respondents view faith to be an important coping mechanism in dealing with the uncertainty that comes with this massive and frightening global health crisis. This tendency is particularly pronounced among born-again Christians. However, for Gen Zers who are not at all religious, there appears to be little movement toward religious activity even in the wake of the uncertainty generated by this pandemic. Finally, with respect to shelter-in-place laws, we find no apparent effect of religion on such attitudes. Instead, partisanship, ideology, and family income matter more in explaining variances in support for such policies among Gen Z.
While young people initially received some mixed messages about their perceived risks of getting sick (Courage 2020), overall, this cohort seems to approve of shelter-in-place measures, perhaps demonstrating that they value the importance of collective social action for the greater good. Religion, then, has some impact on the behaviors of Gen Z during the pandemic but only among those Gen Zers who are religiously inclined to begin with. Religion, overall, has relatively limited explanatory value for understanding how this generation is coping with a crisis that is likely to have significant long-term effects on their economic and social well-being.
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Material referencing an appendix in this chapter can be found online available here https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/epidemic_among_my_people.