As America approaches its semiquincentennial, a surprising trend offers profound hope for the nation’s renewal: young Americans are returning to church. If you are like me and have noticed week by week more younger attendees and far fewer gray heads in your house of worship, this is anecdotal confirmation that change is afoot.

Recent data from the Barna Group reveals that Millennials and Gen Z are leading a resurgence in church attendance, with younger generations attending nearly two weekends per month on average in 2025—up significantly from just over one in 2020. Young men in particular are driving this shift, with higher weekly attendance rates than women for the first time in decades. This marks a historic generational reversal, as younger adults outpace older cohorts in frequency of worship.

This resurgence comes not from nostalgia or social pressure, but from a deep hunger for meaning, community, and moral coherence amid digital-age disorientation. Social media promised connection and self-expression, yet it has typically fostered anxiety, loneliness, and disconnection. A 2025 Pew Research Center report finds that nearly half (48%) of U.S. teens now say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age—a sharp rise from previous years—with many trying to cut back on screen time. Scientific studies continue to link heavy digital use to emotional distress and diminished well-being among youth.

Young people are discovering that constant digital connectivity cannot answer life’s perennial questions: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What kind of life is worth living? Faith traditions provide answers by placing individuals within a larger moral and metaphysical order, affirming that meaning is discovered, not invented; freedom is the capacity to choose the good; and dignity rests on enduring foundations. Churches form communities bound by shared worship, practices, and hope—countering online fragmentation with genuine communion.

Where does higher education fit into this? Arriving at timeless answers to life’s biggest questions has never been simply a matter of taking things on faith. That is why faith has always been complemented by liberal education. Liberal not in the political sense, a true liberal arts education liberates and frees one to think independently by immersing him in humanity’s great conversation through philosophy, literature, history, mathematics, and science. By engaging Homer, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Tocqueville, students realize their questions—about love and death, freedom and fate, justice and tyranny—are universal, not solitary burdens. This transforms isolated selves into heirs of a shared inheritance.

Liberal learning is communal. Shared inquiry fosters argument, attentive listening, and a joint quest for the truth. In an age of curated feeds and performative outrage, shared inquiry cultivates virtue—disagreeing without enmity and forming friendships rooted in the pursuit of the true, good, and beautiful. As Aristotle observed, the highest friendships emerge from shared love of the good and endure because they reflect reality. This is no fanciful hope: in over 25 years of teaching at liberal arts universities, I’ve seen countless friendships forged and lives transformed through what happens in and outside of my classrooms.

This convergence of faith and liberal education is vital for personal flourishing and the American republic’s future. The Founders recognized that freedom requires virtue. John Adams warned that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Alexis de Tocqueville praised America’s habits—formed in churches, schools, and voluntary associations—that enabled self-government. He noted how groups of Americans, often bound by religious beliefs, built churches, schools, hospitals, and more to serve the common good. Just as we have been distressed to witness the erosion of those ties that bind, we should be encouraged to see those ties reknit. More than that, we ought to do everything in our power to hasten the pace and strengthen this great reawakening.

Higher education bears a unique responsibility. When universities prioritize credentialing over formation, they yield skilled but civically fragile graduates—unmoored from purpose and unpracticed in self-restraint. Reforming higher education means reclaiming its anthropological aim: shaping whole persons through curricula oriented toward truth, dialogue over indoctrination, and wisdom over information. Authentic liberal arts institutions and faith communities can partner together, cultivating citizens grounded in reason and reverence, discipline and wonder—citizens who are equipped to deliberate, sacrifice, and pursue the common good.

Young Americans’ return to faith is no retreat from the challenge to forge their future, but a corrective to the peculiar modern insistence on divorcing the sacred from the secular. As we mark our nation’s 250th anniversary in July, this rediscovery of discovered meaning and communal inquiry signals renewal. America’s enduring freedom depends not merely on innovation or prosperity, but on citizens who are formed by faith, reason, and our shared human tradition. In a fractured era, such formation is the most hopeful harbinger of a republic revitalized.