Megan Basham

First, obviously, it represents a major jump in a very short period of time.

But it also means that young men now surpass young women on this measure of religiosity for the first time in roughly 25 years of Gallup tracking it.

This confirms some other polling data that we've seen.

Barna Group also found a couple of years ago that millennials and Gen Z Christians were attending church more often than older generations.

But when Barna drilled down on those numbers, it found that the change was primarily coming from men.

and primarily concentrated in various iterations of Christianity.

That said, there was a survey from YouGov last year that also found this same surge in religiosity among young men.

It was widely hailed, but then it was found to have some pretty significant errors, and it had to be retracted.

So that's part of why this Gallup poll is drawing so many eyes, because it's sort of settling what's been an open debate.

So the researchers who are looking at this basically say that we could be seeing several cultural forces that are converging.

One explanation involves the growing political divide between young men and young women, which is becoming increasingly stark.

Surveys show that young women have been moving sharply toward progressive politics in recent years, while young men are drifting somewhat slower, but definitely rightward.

And religion in the United States still tends to correlate with conservative cultural views.

Political scientist Ryan Burge, who studies these kinds of religious trends, he notes that younger Catholics, particularly men, are significantly more likely to identify as conservative than older generations.

As older liberal priests retire,

the younger generation replacing them tends to be much more conservative theologically, and that usually means they will also be more conservative politically.

Yeah, there has been some major debate about that, and I think it is probably still best not to overstate what we're seeing, because even those researchers who are very clear that they do see this shift, they also say that it's not enough to call it a major resurgence.

And for one reason, the broader picture still shows that young Americans right now are the least religious generation in modern history.

And there are very large shares that still identify as religiously unaffiliated.

And then you also have some analysts arguing that the new gender gap may be partly caused by declining religiosity among women.