Gen Z's Lack of Rites of Passage May Be a Bigger Spiritual Problem Than We Realize

On May 7, Christianity Today ran a Q&A with Douglas McKelvey titled "Gen Z's Lack of Rites of Passage," centered on the idea that young adults are navigating enormous transitions without enough cultural or spiritual markers to tell them what those transitions mean. That observation lands because it names a real void in modern life.

A lot of younger adults live in a strange suspended state.

They are told they are free, but often feel uninitiated. They are given choices, but not always meaning. They can transition legally, sexually, geographically, digitally, and professionally — and still feel unsure what any of those crossings actually signify.

This is one reason modern adulthood can feel shapeless.

Historically, rites of passage helped communities name transitions that mattered. Not every old tradition was healthy, but the basic instinct was wise: when a person crosses into a new stage of life, they need more than personal emotion. They need witness, language, blessing, memory, and communal recognition. Otherwise, adulthood arrives privately, vaguely, and often anxiously.

That is where the CT conversation becomes spiritually important.

Modern Christianity has often focused on doctrine, leadership, marriage, and morality, while underestimating how much formation depends on marked transitions. Baptism is one such rite, of course. But many churches have not developed meaningful ways of helping people cross other thresholds: leaving home, entering vocation, embracing singleness, grieving the loss of one life stage and stepping into another.

As a result, many younger adults are left to improvise significance on their own.

The culture offers substitutes: achievement as initiation sexual experience as initiation visibility as initiation aesthetic reinvention as initiation trauma as initiation

But these rarely tell a person who they are in a way that holds.

That is why rites of passage matter. Not because Christians should romanticize tradition, but because human beings need meaningful thresholds. We need moments when a community says: "This crossing is real. You are not imagining it. And you do not walk into it alone."

In a world of blurred stages and prolonged adolescence, that kind of recognition is not decorative. It is stabilizing.

This also helps explain why many younger adults are drawn toward older liturgical forms, more formal traditions, and faith practices with recognizable gravity. They are not always craving nostalgia. Sometimes they are craving boundaries that bless, weight that steadies, and rituals that remind them life is not just a sequence of private decisions.

The church should be unusually good at this.

It should know how to mark beginning and ending, promise and vocation, suffering and change. It should know how to prepare people to step into adulthood not merely with independence, but with consecration. Yet many communities have outsourced this work to graduation parties, social media posts, or nothing at all.

That leaves people spiritually under-marked.

And when people are under-marked, they often remain under-formed.