In brief
- Records show that religious affiliation has been in decline for decades.
- Gen Z men and women are the first to display a significant divide in their religious preferences.
It’s not news that young Australians are less religious than their parents and grandparents. Census data has shown a steady decline in religious affiliation for decades, particularly among Christians, who remain Australia’s largest faith group.
Yet over the past few years there have been reports that seemed to point in the opposite direction. As I wrote about religious revival in countries as diverse as Japan, Thailand, China, India, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States, a common theme emerged. Some young people appeared to be returning to religion.
More surprising still, in many places the trend seemed increasingly driven by young men rather than young women.
To figure out what was happening in Australia, I crunched the numbers. While Australia is continuing to secularise overall, beneath that trend, gen Z appears to be the first generation where men are more likely than women to identify with a religion.
That divide is closely tied to political ideology and may reflect wider gendered political polarisation.
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The research
Using Australian Election Study (AES) data collected between 1987 and 2025, I examined religious affiliation across six generations:
- the war generation (born during the 1920s)
- builders (born 1930–1945)
- baby boomers (1946–1960)
- generation X (1961–1979)
- millennials or gen Y (1980–1994)
- and generation Z (born after 1994)
Across these cohorts, I analysed responses from 27,478 Australians.
In this analysis, I focus primarily on religious affiliation: whether respondents identify with a religion at all.
While church attendance tells us about participation in organised religion, affiliation captures something broader about identity, belonging and self-understanding.
Religious affiliation is linked to age
The overall pattern was exactly as expected: religious affiliation declines sharply across generations. Older Australians remain significantly more likely than younger Australians to identify with a religion.
The gender pattern showed for every generation from the war generation through to millennials, women are more likely than men to report a religious affiliation.
I then zoomed in on the two youngest generations to see how the gender gap in religious affiliation has evolved over time.
Millennials (gen Y) largely follow the familiar pattern seen in older generations. Both men and women have become less religious over time, but women consistently remain ahead. In the 2025 Australian Election Study, 46.2% of gen Y women reported a religious affiliation compared with 40.3% of gen Y men.
Gen Z tells a different story.
In the 2025 survey, 55.7% of gen Z men reported a religious affiliation, compared with 43.2% of gen Z women.
And this is more than just a one-off quirk. While religious affiliation among gen Y men remained relatively stable between 2019 and 2025 (41.0% to 40.3%), affiliation among gen Z men rose from 35.3% in 2019 to 49.1% in 2022 and 55.7% in 2025.
The pattern survives after accounting for other influences. It’s also still present when political ideology, parental birthplace, marital status and place of residence are controlled for.
The gen Z sample is smaller than those for older generations, meaning the estimates are less precise. Even so, the result remains statistically significant and points to a markedly different religious landscape among the youngest cohort of Australian voters.
Gender, politics, or both?
The obvious next question is: why? I wanted to know whether the emerging gender gap was really about gender, or whether it reflected deeper political differences between young men and women.
To explore this, I estimated a second model that incorporated gender, generation and political ideology together. Here, the reference group was right-leaning gen Z men, allowing me to compare every other gender-generation-ideology combination against arguably the most religious segment of the youngest generation.
The results suggest political identity plays an important role in shaping the new religious divide. Religious affiliation was highest among older Australians on the political right, particularly women from the war and builder generations.
At the other end of the spectrum, the least religious groups were found among younger Australians on the political left. Left-identifying gen Z women were the least likely to be religious. Left-identifying gen Y men and women also displayed comparatively low levels of religiosity.
This finding echoes a pattern scholars have increasingly documented across many democracies. Young women are becoming more progressive while young men are drifting in a more conservative direction. The growing gender gap in religion may be part of the same broader realignment.
One other finding that was particularly striking was that women remained more religious among older generations regardless of political beliefs.
Yet among gen Z, the gap appears to be concentrated among those on the political left.
In other words, the story is not simply that gen Z women are less religious than gen Z men. It is that left-leaning gen Z women appear especially likely to reject religious affiliation, while right-leaning gen Z men remain comparatively attached to it.
Why might this be happening?
I suspect the answer has less to do with church attendance and more to do with identity.
Religion may increasingly function as a source of belonging, meaning and community, particularly for young men. In a world characterised by economic insecurity, social isolation and uncertainty about traditional masculine roles, religion can offer purpose, structure and a sense of place.
Research suggests religion may even help buffer the psychological stress associated with feeling disconnected from conventional expectations of masculinity. Religion offers not only beliefs, but a framework for understanding oneself.
The online world may be amplifying this trend. Social media has made religion more visible, accessible and culturally relevant in ways that do not necessarily require institutional participation.
Influencers, podcasts, self-help figures and online communities increasingly blend spirituality, personal development and cultural commentary. For some young men, religion may therefore serve as a social identity before it becomes a religious practice.
For many young women, however, the trend appears to move in the opposite direction. Gen Z women are more progressive and more likely to embrace feminist values than previous generations.
So while Australia is not experiencing a religious revival in the conventional sense, religion appears to be becoming increasingly tied to the same gendered political divide reshaping many other aspects of social life.
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