(Photo: VinceFleming via Unsplash.)
We all want our children and the other young people in our churches to be happy, safe, and connected to both God and their friends in this world. But recent research from the US Christian research agency Barna highlights the tension between the two. It found that teenage Christians are twice as likely to feel they don’t belong in the culture than non-Christians. But it also showed how Christian adults (parents, youth groups leaders, church ministers) can help those young Christians treat that tension not as an obstacle to their faith but as an opportunity to grow.
Barna has been researching commitment levels amongst teenage Christians in the USA. In Feb 2026 they surveyed 1,500 teenagers in the USA who call themselves Christian, and assessed their level of commitment against six areas of Christian religious engagement. Although they didn’t set out to study secularity, their results highlight how contemporary secularity affects Christian teens. Contemporary secularity is atheistic. It tends to harden young people against believing that Christ is Lord. It seeks to persuade young people that there’s no objective, rational basis for Christian faith. It tries to redefine ‘faith’ from confidence in what a real person (Christ) really did for them (die and rise) in real history to being merely opinion, preference, or wish-fulfilment. It tries to persuade young people to believe that this world is all that exists – there is no God, no supernatural realm at all, no heaven or hell. Therefore there is no supernatural saviour. We have to fix everything ourselves.
That kind of atheism, by the way, is both exhausting and demeaning. It implies that humans aren’t special. We’re just tiny, tiny, tiny specks in a vast, vast universe that doesn’t give a hoot about us. No wonder there’s a ‘vibe shift’ back towards a new openness to religion and spirituality. (1)
But getting back to the Barna article: it recorded that “highly engaged” young Christians are aware of the fact that they don’t belong in this world. “44 percent say they feel real tension between their faith and what their friends or culture expect of them, compared to 27 percent of the average teen.” They’re right. Christians are in the world but not of it, John 17:16. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Phil. 3:20; we’re foreigners, exiles on earth: 1 Pet. 2:11; Heb. 11:13. We don’t have the same perspectives or values as non-Christians, therefore we can expect tension with the prevailing culture.
But the article also showed how these teens benefited from ministries that help them recognise the difference between Christianity and the surrounding culture. Of faithful teens, 72% reported that their youth group “challenges them to think deeply about theology and scripture.” But this challenge did not happen through some kind of intense indoctrination. On the contrary, “the same percent” reported that their youth groups let them “be honest about their questions or doubts.” The best kind of youth ministries are places where “[t]eens are processing their tensions and doubts with leaders who give them room to do it.”
In other words, effective youth and young people’s ministries:
- Recognise the difference between Christian identity and identification with the world;
- Call young people to similarly recognise the difference;
- Call young people to count the cost of that commitment; and
- Give them time and space to wrestle with it.
In fact, the whole article was arguing against a misunderstanding of what it means for young people to experience God’s “peace that transcends all understanding,” Phil. 4:7. The article commented on how most people interpret that verse as a “promise… that a life of faith brings calm and certainty, regardless of circumstance.” That’s not wrong. But the article was drawing our attention to the need to strive for this peace, mainly through rejecting the alternative, false peace of the world.
Contemporary secularity seeks peace through being freed from religious morality, especially Christian morality, so that we can satisfy our desires however we please. Christians seek peace with God through Christ through forgiveness for those desires and the ungodly, damaging behaviours that spring from them. We need to help our young people understand, and wrestle with, these two different kinds of peace.
That means there’s one kind of youth ministry we can’t run: one that majors on building a happy social community and expects young people to, through that community, drift into being Christian. They won’t. They’ll end up loving the peace of this world more than the peace of Christ. And so they’ll follow the currents of this world and drift out of Christianity.
If we want our young people to vigorously follow Christ, we have to help them develop the strength to swim against the tide. We have to help them strive for God’s peace.
[Note: (1) The two books which best describe the religious dimensions of this shift are Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites and Justin Brierley’s The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God with its associated podcast.]
