Churches & Religious Organizations NAICS 813110

Jun 5, 2025 - Gen Z Men Turn To Faith

• Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) men are now more likely to attend church than Gen Z women, according to The New York Times. Among young Christians, men are staying in the church but many women are leaving. Younger generations are more spiritually curious, according to Barna research group, which reports that most Gen Z teens are interested in learning more about Jesus, with younger cohorts leading the way in the growth of new commitments.
• Americans’ religious preferences have generally held steady in the past five years, according to research organization Gallup. The stability comes after a sharp increase over the prior two decades in the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation and concurrent decreases in Protestant and Catholic identification. About 45% of Americans identified as Protestant or nondenominational Christian in 2024, 21% as Catholic, and 10% as another religion, with 22% not identifying with any religion. Those figures are each within one percentage point of their 2018-2020 levels.

• Some religious leaders experimenting with AI, according to the New York Times. Interest in AI among religious organizations is increasing demand for AI tools from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons. Experiments with AI are similar to efforts by prior generations to take advantage of technology like radio, television, and the internet, according to the New York Times. AI is being used to translate livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time for international audiences. Chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture have been compared to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.
• Small church communities are increasingly threatened by decreasing membership and the greater popularity of ‘megachurches’, according to the authors of The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? The authors point out that only 10% of America’s faith communities currently have more than 250 people at weekly services, yet around 70% of churchgoers attend such churches. The authors also note that once vibrant churches are slowly closing their doors. About 3,000 Protestant churches were officially opened in 2019 while 4,5000 closed. About 4,000 Protestant churches were officially opened in 2014 while 3,700 closed.