According to new research, few if any of today’s Aussie youth feel a need for God and most are getting along fine without him. The Spirit of Generation Y project, which surveyed 1272 people born between 1976 and 1990, explored the Y Generation’s worldviews and values, sense of meaning and purpose, ways of finding peace and happiness, involvement in religions and spiritualities, and influences on their outlook and lifestyle. Overall, researchers found that less than half of Australia’s Generation Y believed in God, a third was unsure and one in five did not believe in any god at all.

While many youth have followed their parents away from church attendance, researchers thought they’d see a large increase in alternative, eastern and ‘new-age’ spiritualities by Generation Y. While there was an increase, it wasn’t as high as expected. Instead, 31 per-cent of Generation Y can be classified as humanists, rejecting the idea of a God altogether (although some participants in the survey did believe in a ‘higher being’).

These findings echo similar research done in the UK. There, authors of the Making Sense of Generation Y project, based on interviews with 15 to 25 year olds who had little or no connection with the Christian faith, were shocked to find that under 25's had no desire to find a transcendent alternative to their lives. The UK researchers were expecting to find that even if young people had little knowledge of the Christian faith they would at least have other spiritual or religious yearnings. In actuality, the British kids interviewed weren’t feeling at all disenchanted or ‘lost in a meaningless world’. Instead they found the world meaningful as it was, found happiness primarily through family and friends, and had little sense of sin or fear of death. (Although they were afraid of growing old.)

So, what are we to make of such reports? Could this supposed lack of spiritual yearning be a by-product of the seeming ‘immortality’ felt in youth? Could it be the result of a generation that’s never faced a world war, a Great Depression or even a recession; a generation handed enough employment and relative wealth to keep it occupied by life’s earthly pleasures? Could it be because Boomer and Generation Xer parents have largely left today’s youth fending for themselves when it comes to spiritual matters?

Possibly.

It may also be that Generation Y hasn’t got time for God. As Rebecca Huntley notes in her book The World According to Y, as both kids and teens Yers were pushed to be busy, successful and always doing something—whether it was after-school music tutorials or sports—and this frantic sense of always needing to be busy, travelling, socialising, buying, changing and learning has continued into their adult years. ‘All this,’ Huntley notes, ‘leaves Yers with little time for deeper thinking, an essential element for working out the bigger picture [and] exploring issues of meaning and purpose…’

Still, many teens and twenty-somethings are jumping off the treadmill, putting down the XBox console and taking a few breaths to consider spiritual matters. You will find thriving youth and young adult groups in hundreds of churches across Australia. Many are discovering early that frantic living and endless consumption will not fill the God-shaped hole within. Unfortunately, some Yers will wander down destructive paths for answers to their emptiness—like Don Stewart-Whyte, the 25 year old convert to radical Islam and alleged participant in this week’s foiled terrorism plan in the UK.

Some members of Generation Y wont feel a need for God until their idealic worlds of opportunity and plenty are confronted with crisis and loss, or until sufficient time is allowed to ponder why this world should have things like beauty, colour and joy in the first place. (As GK Chesterton said, the worst moment for an atheist is when he feels profoundly grateful yet has no one to thank.)

And until that moment comes, the offer of the Almighty will be the same: ‘You will find me when you seek me with all of your heart’ (Jeremiah 29:13).