And who might blame them? Spiritual spaces offer calm, beauty, communal singing, incense, candles and coloured light scattered through stained glass. Meanwhile, Lamorna says, “Our world looks uglier and uglier. We’re always looking at our phones.”

Galvanised by Gaza

I’m surprised by how many people, across religions, tell me that the ongoing genocide, as described by Amnesty International, in Gaza is a factor that led them towards faith. Faima, a young Muslim journalist, told me that she started wearing the hijab after 2023, and felt closer to both Islam and to hijabi Palestinians. She found community in morning prayer and a Muslim run club.

Meanwhile, Halima, a 36-year-old charity director, tells me that Gaza and the UK’s role in the war have changed people’s relationship with faith in her own Muslim community: “I think people are seeing how morally bankrupt the UK is, and faith enables them to uphold values and morals.”

Conversations about religion and its connections to the land clearly play a role. Emma, who recently converted to Catholicism, tells me that she was galvanised by both the hypocrisy of Western leaders and the land on which this violence took place. She says: “Something about the situation made the story of Jesus feel so immediate, near and present. The values he stood for were being decimated in the land that he stood in. In October 2024, I walked into a Catholic Church for the first time and converted almost instantly.”

Some of the young Jewish people I speak to say that it felt particularly important to carve out their own unique relationships to Judaism during this period. Ella, a 28-year-old who grew up secular and had family in Israel, felt that the nation was her primary connection to her Jewish identity. “When the genocide was underway, that was definitely a bigger prompt for me to be like, look, I need to find a way to connect with my Jewish heritage that isn’t anything to do with the occupation and the genocide. I thought, ‘let me re-meet this faith’”.

Shortly after, Ella started attending retreats with the Jewish land justice group Miknaf Ha’aretz, which helped her reconnect with the Hebrew language. “It was like a really powerful experience for me to be in a space where there was Hebrew singing,” she says, having previously felt that she might leave the Hebrew language behind. “I was like, oh, I can have this language, and it has nothing to do with occupying a people – it can exist in a different way.”

Historical moment for religion

Like all generations, we respond to what came before. Young millennials grew up in the heyday of what has since been dubbed “New Atheism”. During this period, figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens framed religion – often specifically Islam – as antithetical to science and tied to violence. Although they framed their arguments as rational, level-headed and objective, it feels clear that their ideology was shaped by the political context of the war on terror, and was also a form of dogma in itself. It makes sense that those who lean towards the left would grow up to question this.