Generation Z is leading a silent return to values and patterns of behavior that many thought had been overcome. So says Narciso Michavila, president of the consulting firm GAD3, after presenting the results of a survey of 10,000 young people registered in the events organized on the occasion of the Pope's trip to Spain.
Their conclusions point to a phenomenon broader than religiosity itself: a reencounter with the analogical, the communitarian and the spiritual that crosses cultures and confessions.
«It is not exclusive to Catholicism, it is not exclusive to religion,» Michavila told the media. «Generation Z, those who were born in the first decade of the 21st century, in many behaviors are returning to the values of their grandparents.» To illustrate this, he resorted to an everyday image: «This morning running through the Retiro, before the opening of the Book Fair, I said: 10 years ago we thought that books were going to die, and yet we are reading books on paper as never before in history».
Tolerance
The demographer was careful to qualify what has changed and what hasn't. «The Spanish generation of young people is not that they are more religious,» he said. «The biggest difference with respect to their elders is that they are much more tolerant. Whether they believe or not, they tolerate much more.».
Where Michavila does see a substantial change is in the way young believers relate to the faith. Unlike previous generations, whose religiosity was based on moral compliance, today's young people approach Catholicism from a different position: «For today's young people, all of them, even if they come from Catholic families and have Catholic roots, are approaching Christianity, in the Spanish case, Catholicism, as converts. They are surrounded by young people who are converting, who are discovering the message of Jesus Christ as converts».
The contrast with the religiosity of her grandmothers could not be more marked. «Unlike their grandmothers, who could be above all a scale of values and principles and commandments, and therefore the first thing was moral behavior, and from there everything else followed,» described Michavila, the current generation reverses the order: first the personal encounter with the message, then, if anything, the moral consequences.
Cell phones and the new pulpits
Technology plays a paradoxical role in this rediscovery. «We are in the digital era; they are receiving the messages and spreading them, among other things, thanks to algorithms,» said the president of GAD3, «The new pulpit in the church is the cell phone. However, the same screen that carries the message also generates boredom: »at the same time they are also very tired of the infinite scroll«.
Michavila frames this spiritual search in a broader disenchantment with the promises of modernity. «There are already a number of current conquests that are taken for granted, be it Europe, be it democracy, be it equality, be it the emancipation of women, be it controversy, since in technology we don't even count: they are already taken for granted.» Assumed these conquests, what they miss is something else. «They see that many of these proposals are not bringing them the happiness they are promising them, and many of them are looking for spirituality again, in approaching the church».
A global phenomenon
The phenomenon is not exclusively Catholic. «We are seeing it in the Orthodox Church, we are seeing it in many Protestant moments,» he said. But the Catholic Church, in his opinion, starts from a structural advantage over other confessions: «It is offering something that all these have a much harder time with, especially all the Protestant families: it offers a unique message in the whole planet, a moral message from some holy fathers, which has a moral behavior and also a connection with the tradition that the postmodern world has left behind.»
Michavila said he would publish more data in the coming days. For the moment, his words outline the profile of a generation that, far from the image of religious indifference that preceded it, looks to ancient sources for answers that the present does not provide.
