Young, British and searching: rethinking secularization through Gen Z
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Generation Z’ is a generational cohort more likely to choose ‘no religion’ as their preferred self-designation and to seek out their own personal approach to spirituality beyond institutional religion. This article analyses the findings of the British sample of a cross-national survey of 4,889 young people (18-29) from eight countries. It explores the religious identity and ethical views of British young people, including how their views align or diverge from doctrinal or cultural expectations of the three most prominent faith traditions in Britain: Catholicism, Anglicanism and Islam. The study reveals the complexity of young Britons’ navigation of faith and spirituality, and indicates that linear secularization narratives do not adequately reflect the reality of changing attitudes towards institutional religion. We argue that more nuanced interpretive frameworks that include the reality of human agency can better account for the diversity of belief and unbelief among Generation Z.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".