By Ben Valentine
Something is stirring in our culture today. I noticed it while waiting for my coffee recently on Greenwich Ave. Everyone around me was staring into their screens, physically present but mentally elsewhere (I’ll be honest, I was looking at my phone too!). Yet beneath this facade of connectivity, a different kind of connection is quietly resurging.
As a people, we’re hungry for something ancient and unchanging. The statistics tell a remarkable story: The Wall Street Journal reported that Bible sales in America surged by 22% compared to the previous year. In Britain, the increase reached 87% between 2019 and 2024. But numbers alone don’t capture the significance behind this trend.
The very generation we’ve been told is lost to faith, Gen Z, is leading a spiritual renaissance. These digital natives, raised in the most secular environment in human history, are turning to ancient wisdom with surprising passion. Premier Christianity magazine revealed that 21% of Gen Z adults reported increasing their Bible reading last year. Online, hashtags like #Bibletok and #ChristianGirl have garnered billions of views on TikTok, with young creators sharing scripture passages and reflections on their spiritual journeys.
Bible sales are surging to record heights. One edition designed for younger readers, the Good News Bible: The Youth Edition, has nearly doubled in sales since 2021. This isn’t merely about books collecting dust on shelves. Young people aren’t just buying Bibles; they’re engaging with them, finding in these ancient texts answers to thoroughly modern questions.
Even in hyper-secular Silicon Valley, churches and various gatherings are filling up, and there’s a massive hunger to explore Christianity. Vanity Fair and The Atlantic have written about this trend. For example, Peter Thiel, one of tech’s most influential figures, openly discusses his faith. The ACTS 17 Collective, named after Paul’s engagement with the intellectual elite of Athens, connects believers throughout the tech industry who have discovered that code can’t answer the soul’s deepest questions.
Why now? In an age of unprecedented technological advancement and material abundance, why this return to spiritual exploration?
Because the emptiness is deafening. As one writer observed, beneath Silicon Valley’s material affluence lies “deep loneliness” and “spiritual poverty.” The architects of our digital age are confronting the limitations of their creations. They’ve built systems that can process unfathomable amounts of information but cannot generate meaning.
Many of us are climbing ladders that lead nowhere. This realization resonates particularly in communities like Greenwich, where external success often masks internal questioning. Our beautiful homes and impressive careers can’t answer the fundamental questions that have defined humanity throughout history: Why am I here? What gives my life meaning? What happens when I die?
But God isn’t surprised; He designed this hunger into our DNA. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart. As philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.” Our spiritual hunger isn’t accidental but essential to our design.
And something is happening. The narrative of inevitable secularization is being challenged by the lived experience of a generation raised in digital immersion yet hungry for spiritual depth. Many are discovering Jesus, finding out that Jesus addresses our deepest longings in ways that our technological and material solutions just can’t do.
Christians believe that the story of Jesus is real, personal, and that it changes everything. The Gospel (meaning “Good News”) isn’t merely a set of propositions to believe or rules to follow; it’s an invitation into a relationship with the living God who created us for communion with Himself.
In our achievement-oriented corner of Connecticut, this message lands with particular power. We don’t need another self-improvement plan or productivity hack. We need a fundamentally different story about what constitutes the good life.
The kingdom Jesus proclaimed offers this alternative. The spiritual hunger evident across many parts of our culture isn’t something to be dismissed. It’s a healthy recognition of our design, a signpost pointing us toward our Creator. As Augustine discovered in his own spiritual journey: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
At Trinity, we aspire to create spaces where this hunger can be acknowledged and addressed, where faith and reason aren’t adversaries but allies in the pursuit of truth, where doubt is seen not as failure but as a doorway to deeper conviction.
In Greenwich today, may we recognize our spiritual hunger not as a problem to be solved but as an invitation to be embraced, an invitation to discover something that truly satisfies, the bread that nourishes our deepest selves, the life for which we were created.
Ben Valentine is the Senior Pastor of Trinity Church in Greenwich. Discover more at www.trinitychurch.life
