For These Young Men in the Bay Area, Religion Is Gaining Ground

Stephen Staten, a member of the group since 2017, said he’s seen a shift too, thinking back to 20 years ago when he said going to church was not as popular among men.

“I’m not really sure why, but it just became a thing where if you’re into religion, it’s not really a masculine thing, or it’s kind of like a weak thing,” Staten said. A recent poll from Gallup signaled that attitudes on religion among young men may be shifting.

The poll found that 42% of men under 30 said religion was “very important” in their lives in 2024-25, a 14% jump from 2022-23.

The sharp increase represented a high point for men in that age group over the last quarter century.

Over that same period, Gallup found that the share of women under 30 who said religion is “very important” stayed relatively flat, at 29%.

A religious ‘vibe shift,’ not a revival

Ryan Burge, a religion and politics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said the Gallup poll points to what he calls a “vibe shift,” as the mood about religion among young men appears to be growing more positive.

That shift is happening against the backdrop of a growing openness among some to sharing about their faith on social media, with subcultures like “theo bros” and influencers like Braden Peters, also known as Clavicular, praising Catholicism.

But on other measures of how religious a person is – like how often they go to church or whether they identify with a particular religion – he said the best evidence still shows declining interest among men under 30.

“So it’s really like the vibes toward religion have gotten a lot more positive, while the actual behaviors of religion haven’t changed that much,” he said.

At the same time, Burge noted there has been a real shift in who is going to church. For decades, women have been more religious than men, especially Christian women.

“The data seems to indicate that the gender gap…is probably closed among Gen Z, and that a young Gen Z man is probably as religious as a Gen Z woman of the same age,” Burge said.

But, he noted, the shift isn’t because young men are returning to church: “It’s that women are leaving faster.”

Karthik Bala, a 29-year-old former atheist and recent Catholic convert who lives in Cupertino, said the church’s structure could be a factor that deters young women from Catholicism, acknowledging that some women believe the denomination is patriarchal and oppressive.

“It would make sense to me that women would try to find alternative forms of spirituality and men have less of those problems with the church,” he said.

Young people belonging to Gen Z are, overall, more socially and politically progressive than older generations, but young women are growing more politically liberal than young men.

Jessica Grace, a 23-year-old nondenominational Christian, attends the University of San Francisco, where the majority of her friends are Catholic.

Grace said she appreciates and admires her peers’ faith, but disagrees with some Catholic practices, like limiting roles in the clergy to men.

“My pastor that I speak to, my closest pastor that I mentor from, she is a woman,” Grace said.

“If it’s an anointing, if it’s a calling that a person does have, regardless of gender, it should be followed.”

A surge in Catholic converts

In recent years, Catholic dioceses across the country have reported a surge in adults joining the church, a group known as converts.

In the Bay Area, the Archdiocese of San Francisco saw about 700 converts this year, up 6% from 2025, and a doubling of converts since 2021. The Diocese of San Jose reported an 8% rise in converts, from 600 in 2025 to 650 this year.

“Growing up, I thought religion would be dead by the time I was 30,” Bala, the recent Catholic convert from Cupertino, said. “I think there [were] a lot of implicit values and cultures and way of life that kind of carried millennials and all the generations before them.”

Bala attends Mass around the Bay Area at least four times a week, sometimes driving an hour to San Francisco.

“After baptism, I feel this supernatural help or grace, and I’m a super chaotic person,” Bala said. “I just feel so much peace and hope and strength imparted to me and that was something that I kind of got in bursts in all my other spiritual seekings.”

Growing up in a Hindu family, Bala said he always felt a disconnect, and lived his life as an atheist until 2019.

“I became very open to the idea that it’s not just atoms, that there is like some kind of God that can at least hear our prayers,” he said.

The renewed interest in Catholicism comes after decades of decline. Since the 1950s, church attendance for U.S. Catholics has been on a downward slide. And some have openly questioned their ties to the church amid the clergy sexual abuse scandal.

In the Bay Area this year, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland and the Archdiocese of San Francisco have been ordered to pay millions of dollars to settle claims of child sexual abuse by clergy.

The settlements have been celebrated by representatives of survivors as steps toward justice and accountability, while the deepening financial strain on dioceses has led to the church closures.

Father Michael Liliedahl, a priest at St. Stephen’s in San Francisco, which primarily serves the Catholic community at San Francisco State University, said a change in culture and demographics in the Bay Area has also contributed to church closings. He said that when St. Stephen’s was built in 1950, it was originally a school, and families who attended the school raised money to build a church.

“You had a lot of Irish and Italian first-generation immigrants who attended Mass and attended church at a higher percentage than a lot of people do now, and so we built the churches to satisfy that demographic in that population,” Liliedahl said. “And part of it is, San Francisco is such an expensive place to raise a family that we don’t have as many families as we did that many years ago.”

‘What is all this for?’

Converts noted that everyone’s journey to faith is deeply personal, with some asking age-old questions about life and others struggling with realities that felt very specific to 2026.

Tyler Sharp, a 22-year-old recent graduate of San Francisco State, converted to Catholicism in 2025 and attends St. Stephen’s. “I wanted to search for answers,” Sharp said. “And I think one of the biggest questions of humanity is, ‘Why are we here? Is there meaning in life?’”

Stephen Staten, the youth group member at St. Dominic’s in San Francisco, suggested the shifting feelings about religion could be, in part, a reaction to the 2000s, when he said it was considered cool and edgy to be an atheist, particularly online.

“People were seeing culturally in the West, people had an idea that was extremely relativistic and people didn’t really have a sense of meaning,” Staten said.

Bala echoed that, pointing to a strange mix of broad individual freedom and deep uncertainty felt by those in his generation that’s leading some back to religion.

“There is…a natural longing to just be like, ‘What are we doing here?’” Bala said. “What is all this for?”

In the midst of that uncertainty, Sharp, who first attended Catholic Mass in his sophomore year at San Francisco State, said the stability of faith is one of the things he values most.

“Many things in life can come and go. Your family, your friends, your relationships, your career, your sports, your school,” Sharp said. “They’re all temporary in some sense. But God is not temporary.”