Crisis averted! Ken Ham knows why evangelicals ‘lost Gen Z’

YouTube offered me a Ken Ham short video the other day, which demonstrates that I have completely confused its algorithm. In it, the serial grifter and ur-liar-for-Jesus offers his thoughts about why evangelicals “lost Gen Z.” Let’s go over his video and see if he’s right. Then let’s see where the blame really rests.

A quick introduction to Ken Ham and Creationism

Ken Ham leads a Young-Earth Creationist group called Answers in Genesis. As the label implies, he erroneously believes that his god conjured everything in the universe into existence about six thousand years ago. (I’m sure that was quite a surprise to the civilizations around back then.) Other kinds of Creationism exist, some of which come much closer to the Earth’s real age of 4.5 billion years and the universe’s real age of 10-20 billion years, but here we speak only of Young-Earth Creationism.

Creationism is a relatively new doctrinal stance that arose in the 1970s-1980s thanks to an American law professor named Phillip E. Johnson. It had the marvelous good fortune of gaining popular awareness at a time when American evangelicals were undergoing a massive shift into the hardline fundamentalist-fused culture warriors we know today. The newly-politicized and tribalism-addled group happily absorbed Creationism along the way. By the late 1990s, Creationism was a required belief for them.

(Related: Back when evangelicals loved the ACLU.)

Often, Young-Earth Creationists call their belief system “intelligent design.” In this way, they pretend it’s not just another name for Young-Earth Creationism. In the 1990s and 2000s, this dishonesty was absolutely key to their disingenuous attempts to sneak their beliefs into public schools. I will not be granting them this pious fraud.

Ham and his associates also erroneously believe that Christians who don’t accept Creationism are Jesusing all wrong.

He thinks this because of a very childish interpretation of the Bible called literalism. That means they erroneously think that everything in the Bible literally happened the way the Bible’s writers describe it. Their entire faith system depends on this belief being 100% true. So they get very fretful when other Christians have differing interpretations of the Bible. They think that such inconsistency “undermines” a Christian’s beliefs.

As far as I know, they have conducted no research into that assumption. In fact, they haven’t conducted much original research at all since their early years—because their field researchers kept realizing that Creationism was impossible and deconverting from the belief.

Ken Ham insists this is “the FIRST Post-Christian Generation,” y’all!

And now we arrive at Ken Ham’s first error. It occurs in his video’s title.

Ken Ham calls this video “The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z.”

But this isn’t the first post-Christian generation. Ken Ham attributes this idea to Barna Group, which has also referred to Gen Z that way.

Researchers began calling America “post-Christian” back in 2013. That puts us very solidly into Millennial territory, since they were born between 1981-1996. The oldest Gen Z people (born between 1997-2012) in 2013 would have been roughly 15. Folks that young aren’t generally pushing the religion needle one way or the other.

Rather, Millennials began—and are still—turning America post-Christian, not Gen Z. That’s the generation that evangelicals panicked about in the 2010s.

Gen Z simply continues the trend of increasing secularity in America.

But okay, Ken Ham. How exactly did you lot manage to lose an entire upcoming generation of adults?

Ken Ham has lost Gen Z, everyone! (Has he looked under the sofa?)

Moving on, Ken Ham tells us in the video:

But now we have the second world view dominating because we have allowed generations of kids to be indoctrinated in an education system that has thrown God out, the Bible out, prayer out, Creation[ism] out. They teach you all came about by natural processes. There is no supernatural, there is no God.

Sorry to say this, but the majority of pastors have endorsed that system, told parents that’s fine, but don’t worry about what they’re being taught. Just come along, we’ll tell them about Jesus. And you see now we’re seeing generations who have a different foundation and a whole different worldview. And Generation Z in particular is called by George Barna, Christian researcher, “the first post-Christian generation” in this nation.

“The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z,” Ken Ham. Uploaded 5/20/23.

Ken Ham himself posted this video to his own channel. That fact forces me to conclude that he is actually proud of this 36-second burst of poor reasoning and dishonesty.

Christians often accuse others of exactly what they themselves do (or want to do). This time the trope is egregiously easy to see.

So is Ham’s self-interest. Gosh, the products he happens to sell could fix this awful problem! Who could have seen that coming?

Why Ken Ham is fretting about Gen Z

Ken Ham sounds very, very upset that he may no longer indoctrinate children to believe his quirky, dishonest, error-packed li’l take on the Bible. By indoctrination, of course, he means dogmatic claims shoved at people—in this case, children—who must accept them without questions or reservation. He wants to indoctrinate children, so he assumes that schools do the same. His is good, though. Theirs is ickie and evil.

But which children does he mean?

Surely not children attending his flavor of Christianity’s religious schools or being insularly-homeschooled by fellow Creationists. Those children are already being indoctrinated with his beliefs. He can’t be upset about losing them.

No, he’s upset that he can no longer indoctrinate the children attending public, taxpayer-funded schools in America. Those schools are off-limits to people like him. Those children are beyond his reach.

Unless a teacher wishes to present Creationism in the context of why it isn’t at all real science, or in the context of a religious belief alongside others, then that’s the only way children in public schools will learn about his beliefs in that setting. In other words, Creationism won’t be presented the way Ken Ham wants it presented: in science classes as an indoctrination meant to completely undermine the backbone of science, the scientific method, and the basic concepts it helped humans understand, like the Theory of Evolution.

No, if Ken Ham wants to indoctrinate those children, then he must get the explicit permission of their parents. And American law, which protects Americans’ right to freedom of religion, has placed strict rules around when and where such indoctrination may occur in a public-school context.

Alas, Ken Ham doesn’t think that his desired indoctrination will take if he can’t use public schools to push it at children. Unless children are surrounded by it 24/7, it won’t overcome what children are learning in public schools. More to the point, it won’t overcome the worldview they are absorbing.

Ken Ham’s god isn’t anywhere near strong enough to defeat a worldview that simply doesn’t lend itself to accepting the claims Ken Ham likes to make.

The ‘biblical worldview’ that’s almost extinct

You might notice that Ken Ham quoted George Barna in assessing Gen Z as ‘lost’ to evangelicals. George Barna started Barna Group many years ago (though he eventually left it to pursue a solo career). Barna Group is a for-profit survey house that sells analyses of its research and polls to worried evangelical parents and leaders. Barna Group workers’ jobs involve creating analyses that will open evangelical wallets.

And nothing worries evangelicals and opens their wallets quite like predicting imminent disaster.

Indeed, George Barna must be having quite a heyday. For years now, he has been crying in the wilderness about the extinction of the ‘biblical worldview.’

If you’re wondering what “biblical” means in this context, it’s simply a Christianese adjective that indicates that its noun is something the judging Christian likes.

Usually, you’ll only see this adjective in evangelical writing, where it modifies any number of nouns:

• Biblical marriage. That’s opposite-sex, hetero-only, woman-subjugating marriage between one man and one woman who follow evangelicals’ weird, regressive gender-role expectations.
• Biblical parenting. That’s the creepy, punishment-oriented, dysfunctional-authoritarian parenting style that evangelicals think is the only way to set children up for lifelong faith.
• Biblical dating. Think “Duggar-style courtship” and you won’t be far off the mark.

Evangelicals love sneering at other flavors of Christianity as sub-par, even though there is no way whatsoever to say that any one flavor is more authentically Christian than any other. The word biblical is how they do their sneering: by implying that other takes aren’t based on the Bible like theirs is.

So a biblical worldview simply means the worldview of a hardline evangelical like Ken Ham or George Barna.

Why Ken Ham and George Barna think that their biblical worldview is going extinct

According to George Barna and his onetime business organization, that worldview is going “extinct!” In 2018, they found that only 4% of Gen Z had a biblical worldview. Then, in 2020, they found that only 2% of Millennials had one.

By 2023, Barna was alarmed to find that the percentage of Americans generally who had a biblical worldview had declined from 6% in March 2020 to 4%. Meanwhile, from 2020 to 2023, he found that the percentage of Americans calling themselves “born again” had likewise declined from 19% to 13%.

I’m not sure if Barna took into account the huge number of senior-citizen evangelicals who have refused to vaccinate or take safety precautions due to the COVID pandemic. Though we know about the evangelical leaders who FAFO, and some websites keep track of a few of the antivaxxers who have likewise died in service to their own willful ignorance, it’s hard to say just how many of those “born again,” biblical-worldview-holding evangelicals have died and brought down Barna’s numbers.

Either way, Barna certainly thinks that his worldview is going “extinct.” By extension, so does Ken Ham. In Ham’s case, he’s also very certain that public education is to blame. Of course, Creationists have never conducted any research regarding this assertion. But he’s still very certain of it, and certainty—even if it’s completely misplaced—carries a lot of weight with literalists.

(Related: “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind” — this dissertation will tell you immediately why Creationists aren’t real big on science.)

That worldview is what is most important to evangelicals

In the context of indoctrinating children, evangelicals like Ken Ham are well aware that their god is nearly helpless up against a mismatched worldview. If children cannot be taught or forced to adopt a worldview amenable to Ken Ham’s flavor of Christianity, then they’ll think for the rest of their lives that his claims are whackadoodle-squared.

We see exactly that same problem in missionary efforts. Some years ago, a then-missionary to Thailand wrote of how she learned this lesson:

I remember our first year on the field literally thinking, “No one is ever, ever going to come to faith in Christ, no matter how many years I spend here.”

I thought this because for the first time in my life, I was face-to-face with the realities that the story of Jesus was so completely other to the people I was living among. Buddhism and the East had painted such a vastly different framework than the one I was used to that I was at a loss as to how to even begin to communicate the gospel effectively.

And so, the Amy-Carmichael-Wanna-Be [a famous Irish missionary] that I was, I dug in and started learning the language. I began the long, slow process of building relationships with the nationals, and I ended up spending lots of time talking about the weather and the children in kitchens. And while over time, I became comfortable with helping cook the meal, I saw very little movement of my local friends towards faith.

“Rice Christians and Fake Conversions,” Laura Parker, 1/28/13

Unfortunately for Ken Ham and his like-minded pals, they have a much worse problem than that missionary. Their worldview is very much on the outer fringes of Christianity. So they’re not just fighting reality itself, but every more-sensible flavor of their own religion. Even if a child has a generally-Christian worldview, that’s not enough to make Creationist claims sound plausible.

The demographic time bomb exploded years ago for Creationists

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that one of the main witnesses for the plaintiffs in the landmark Creationism-based Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District lawsuit in 2005 was a Christian, Dr. Kenneth Miller. Miller, a biology professor, had, in fact, written many peer-reviewed biology articles and even a popular biology textbook.

For years prior to this lawsuit’s filing, Creationists had been champing at the bit for exactly such an opportunity. They’d been sneaking their indoctrination materials into public schools for years in hopes of provoking it. Finally, parents and science teachers in one small, out of the way town got sick of their antics and filed suit against their district’s school board—which was led by and packed with Creationists and their sycophants.

The judge in that case, John E. Jones III, was likewise a Christian—and a Dubya appointee. So Creationists were doubly sure that they’d successfully win the right to push their religious materials into public science classrooms.

They brought their A+ game to this fight, insofar as they could, I suppose.

And they got completely BTFO. They lost. They not only lost, but they lost in the most humiliating ways possible. Not only did Creationism get exposed as purely religious in nature, not only was the Dover school board leader caught red-handed lying to a federal judge, not only were their own witnesses—the ones who didn’t just withdraw from the trial, I mean—exposed as clown-shoes incompetents, but Dover-area voters also immediately replaced the Dover school board with people who understood and accepted real science.

(If you like definitive legal smackdowns or even just want to learn every single way that Creationism is not science but instead absolutely positively simply Christian indoctrination aimed at grooming children to hold a Creationism-friendly worldview, Jones’ opinion paper cannot be missed. It’s one of my favorite reads, a GOAT winner.)

And Gen Z had a front-row seat to watch it happen

Evangelicals’ decline started right around this same time. From 2006, their roller coaster only went downhill.

I really feel like that’s when the pendulum began to swing back to sanity regarding Christians trying to infiltrate public schoolrooms. People began taking those attempts a lot more seriously after that. Sure, Creationists still tried to get into public schools, and they still do try. But they’re tightly constrained compared to how things were before 2005.

I’m bringing up this trial almost 20 years later for a reason. The aftereffects of it cannot be overestimated.

Remember, Gen Z was getting born during the Dover period as well (they were born between 1997-2012). Parents with Gen Z kids were direct witnesses of this evangelical overreach. And the youngest kids in Dover classrooms in 2005 were Gen Z.

The real surprise is that even 4% of Gen Z kids have a biblical worldview, not that so few do. I doubt that percentage will rise.

Ken Ham has no clue in the world how to deal with that demographic time bomb, either

Nowadays, Ken Ham preaches to his choir in his little safe space. I don’t think he makes many new converts to his flavor of Christianity. Instead, he’s stuck in that safe space with a dwindling number of believers. I’m sure it’s very cozy, at least. But it’s going to get less comfortable as the years pass.

The problem Ken Ham is having is that his worldview doesn’t come naturally to anyone. It has to be coached extensively into people who don’t know any better. So generally, that coaching must begin very early. It must also be reinforced constantly and from all sides. Children must be absolutely shrink-wrapped to maintain it.

Even so, the moment such a child ventures out into the real world, their false worldview always risks toppling in the face of reality. There simply does not exist a way for the Ken Hams of the world to shrink-wrap a child so well that reality cannot ever penetrate those layers of indoctrination.

Not anymore, anyway. At one time, I’m sure it was a lot easier to build those bubbles.

As Ken Ham himself has admitted, evangelicals have already lost Gen Z. But let’s be clear here: they lost Gen Z because Gen X and older Millennials refused to allow their children to be indoctrinated with a Creationism-friendly worldview. He demonizes schools for this refusal, but really he’s missed a few steps here!

That said, I’m sure he wishes with all his heart that he could indoctrinate those children without their parents knowing, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Now younger Millennials are poised to start having their own children. Those children will be part of Gen Alpha (born between 2013-2025) and whatever we call the next age cohort. It seems very likely that they will also generally refuse to allow their children to learn fake science to make Ken Ham happy.

His roller coaster may be reaching the end of the ride. But the future for children has never been brighter as a result.