Who Do Teenagers Turn To When They Doubt Their Religion?
(ANALYSIS) What does the future of faith look like?
That’s a question I get asked all the time by folks who are interested in what’s just over the horizon when it comes to American religion.
Often that’s motivated by a desire to see if there’s a religious revival right around the corner or maybe the idea that faith is just changing in its conception and expression for the next generation.
It’s actually not an easy question to answer for a very practical reason — it’s very difficult to actually do a survey of teenagers in the United States. For lots of ethical and legal reasons almost every survey of American religion deals only with adults, that is, only those who are at least 18 years old. Which certainly gives us a glimpse of the future but just a partial one.
But now I have an opportunity (thanks to the Fuller Youth Institute) to do a deep dive into the spiritual and religious lives of Generation Alpha. They conducted a survey of nearly 3,000 13-17 year olds in the middle of 2025 that asked all kinds of nuanced questions about their faith, their doubts and their relationships.
The folks at Fuller have written a lengthy research report about this that you can access from this link, but then I partnered with them to do my own exploration into the data and present some of the results to readers of this newsletter.
I wanted to focus on just a small handful of questions that I think offer a bit of unique insight into how teenagers are dealing with their doubts about the existential questions in life and how relationships play a really interesting role in helping Gen Alpha navigate some of their struggles.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.