I may have to give my students extra credit just for being born. They’re all “Gen Z” (personally, I’m not a fan of lumping people into these cohorts), and polls are showing some heartening trends.
A new poll demonstrates that younger Americans are decidedly more progressive, less religious, and more likely to describe themselves as LGBTQ than other generations.
In fact, Generation Z adults in the survey were more likely to identify as part of the LGBTQ community than to say they were Republicans.
Now that is hope for the future! I would love to live in a world where gay people outnumber Republicans, while aware that LGBTQ+ people can also be conservative. I would say that Republicans ought to be dreading the future, except that they already do — it’s their nature — but also, Democrats need to wake up and smell the coffee too. They Dems haven’t been doing a great job of securing progressive bona fides.
On political ideology, the poll found that Gen Z voters were more progressive than all other generations, with 43 percent describing themselves as liberal, 28 percent as moderate and 28 percent as conservative — versus 31 percent of adults overall who said they are liberal, 34 percent moderate and 33 percent conservative.
On which party they supported, a plurality of Gen Z’ers said they were either independent or unsure of what party they supported, with 43 percent expressing one of those two views — a higher rate of those combined options than any other generation besides Millennials, among whom 44 percent said the same.
Other good news:
Gen Z voters also expressed less religiosity than Americans overall in the survey. According to the report, 33 percent of Gen Z respondents said they were religiously unaffiliated, versus 27 percent of adults overall. Only Millennials expressed less affiliation with religion than Gen Z’ers, with 36 percent of that generation defining themselves that way.
Hey, atheists: same thing I said about Democrats. If you ignore progressive values, this demographic change won’t help you.
Conservatives, at least, don’t understand what’s going on. Here’s that notorious twit, Tim Pool, making a prediction that conservative Christians will win out, because they “have babies.”
There are a few obvious problems with his reasoning.
- This is a poll reporting an ongoing demographic shift. Since conservatives and Xians have always been enthusiastically fertile, where did all these gay godless GenZs come from? If millennials and GenX spawned all these GenZs, why didn’t their dedication to reproduction produce a generation just like them that swamps out all those LGBTQ+ weirdos already?
- LGBTQ+ is not a uniform sterile mass. LGBTQ+ people have children all the time. They are diverse, they have diverse ideas and desires about childrearing, most of them have all the biological equipment needed. That they are more deliberate and thoughtful about it doesn’t mean they won’t reproduce.
- All people respond in complex ways to their environment. There are signals bouncing around all over in our culture that affect our decisions, and one of those signals is that conservative Christians are simply terrible, ugly, hateful people who make their children miserable. If you want to encourage a more viable ideology, that’s what you have to change. The Tim Pools of the world are only making it worse for Christians by being so repulsive.
I think I’ll just rest easy, knowing the kids are mostly all right.