By Kate Eubanks
Religious leaders are seeking to engage young people in a social landscape shaped by unprecedented diversity, declining institutional trust and an increasingly digital world. These shifts were at the center of a recent Religious and Civic Leader Gathering in which Religion and Public Life Center director Todd Ferguson hosted sociologist Josh Packard.
Packard cautioned against relying too heavily on broad generational labels such as Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Young people are remarkably diverse, not only in race and ethnicity, but also in their religious beliefs and practices. Rather than assuming that a generation shares a single experience, he encouraged religious leaders to pay attention to the particular people and communities they serve.
Attentiveness is especially important in what Packard describes as an increasingly "low-trust" world. Young people move fluidly between digital and in-person spaces, and religious formation is no longer solely in the hands of religious institutions or leaders. They can turn to online communities and increasingly to AI LLM tools to answer questions about meaning, morality and belief.
For Packard, this changing environment makes relationships more important, not less. He emphasized the formative power of being genuinely heard. When an adult sits down with a young person, listens carefully and remembers what they have shared, something significant happens. Trust shifts from institutions toward relationships.
For religious leaders, the challenge may be less about developing the right message for an entire generation and more about cultivating the relationships, cultural awareness and sustained presence that allow young people to feel heard, known and connected.
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