I have spent much of my adult life on or near college campuses. As a student, employee, part of a church started as an outreach to students, and simply living in a college town, I have had a front-row seat to how student life and behaviors have changed. I have also observed timeless aspects of college students’ lives.
This has also allowed me to witness the efforts of numerous constituencies to win the hearts and minds of young people to particular causes, products and movements.
Even with shifting patterns in college enrollment, marketing to impressionable young minds is big business.
It’s also big religion.
Most of my experience with higher education has been with Christian institutions or evangelical student ministries within public colleges and universities. I’ve known scores of people whose vocation is to “win souls for the Lord.”
Since entering college over thirty years ago, I have heard one common refrain among these folks: “God is doing something in this generation I have never seen before.” I suspect this phenomenon takes on various iterations across Christian traditions and denominations. My experience with it, though, has been primarily with the “Passion” movement, which has roots in my home state of Texas and gained popularity across the southern United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Led by Louie Giglio, the “Big Bang” of the movement took place outside Memphis in 2000, when over 40,000 students from around the country gathered for worship and prayer. The event was named “One Day” and featured prominent reformed and conservative preachers. One Day is viewed by many as a seminal event in the modern worship music industry. It also sparked Passion Conferences, which attract over 10,000 students yearly to venues across the South and Southwest United States.
A similar movement, led by people loosely associated with Passion, is currently gaining momentum.
In 2023, thousands of students gathered at Auburn University for a worship event that resulted in over 200 baptisms at a nearby lake. The gathering has sparked similar “Unite” events at other campuses, all marked by emotional worship and hundreds of baptisms at each event.
Unlike the Passion movement, Unite is mainly led by women and doesn’t seem tethered to the Calvinist theology that marked the early days of Passion. But it carries a similar mythical origin story, which is that its events are somehow “spontaneous” and not the result of a concerted effort by evangelical ministries to spark a movement.
The myth implies and bolsters the belief that the movement is directly from God, and it is unique to this particular generation. Unite has been featured on Fox News and other outlets as proof that a Christian revival is occurring among young people.
Recent Barna research has found an increase in Christian religious commitment among all adults, primarily driven by Gen Z, which Barna defines as the generation born between 1999 and 2015. According to the Barna study, the increase is fueled by men. PRRI research has reached similar conclusions.
Whether this data is a blip on the screen or a sign of something more significant is yet to be seen. But what we do know to be true is that if there is an uptick in Christian commitment among young people, it is coming during a time when they are also more socially aware and active than previous generations.
Unite—like the Passion and Jesus People movements before it—has emerged during politically charged times, but it largely steers clear of social issues. It focuses instead on sin, souls, heaven and hell, which is a recipe for short-term success.
But the young people who come out of the baptismal waters at these events are the same young people who walk into the gatherings with historically high acceptance rates for LGBTQ+ inclusion.
They were teenagers when Trayvon Martin was murdered and young adults when George Floyd was murdered. They believe systemic racism exists and know it must be named before it can be eliminated.
They grew up with (or as) Dreamers, swim in multicultural waters, and refuse to accept a world of homogeneity. They may not yet be familiar with all the nuances of geopolitical affairs, but they are adamantly opposed to oppression and marginalization in any form.
I am a born skeptic, so I tend to see these revival movements as an engineered attempt by evangelical leaders to establish their mini-empires by shaping pliable young minds. But I am also a true believer in the good news of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to spark not just repentance, but revolution.
So I am curious to see whether this latest moment is simply a consolidation of conservative, evangelical influence or if it will have the unintended consequence of flipping over the tables its leaders have been comfortable sitting at for too long.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
