The New Atheists’ influence peaked in the years 2006 and 2007 on the heels of three major tragedies: the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean; and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans. Their younger Gen X and Millennial admirers, raised on self-esteem and expressive individualism, looked on this landscape and asked, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” They demanded to know how a supposedly good God could allow evil. Nearly 20 years this question remains common, and it’s why I wrote the short, accessible 2025 book Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil?.

Apologetics is a dynamic discipline, though, because while some questions remain perennial, others re-emerge seasonally. I’ve sensed that Gen Z doesn’t wrestle with the so-called problem of evil in the same way. In my book’s answer I hinted at this shift. Yes, many still want to know why God didn’t prevent 6 million Jews from dying in the Holocaust. But many others, especially in younger generations, fixate on why so many Nazis got away with it. They demand justice and don’t understand a God who won’t deliver it on their timeline and terms.

Jared Dodson, himself in Gen Z and teaching Gen Z undergraduates, sees the same dynamics playing out in his classroom at Bushnell University. When these students look at David and Bathsheba, they’re less concerned about her unjust suffering and more concerned with what they regard as God’s unjust forgiveness of David. Reading this account, I thought back to C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity where he corrects his earlier comment that chastity is the hardest part of Christianity for skeptics. It is, in fact, forgiveness that most angrily offends Christianity’s critics.

Why this recent change in perspective among Gen Z? I recently had lunch with a Gen Z member of my church. I asked why more Gen Z men have been engaging in religious questions, even attending church. He returned to COVID-19 as his generation’s coming-of-age moment. For many in his generation, 2020 was the first presidential election when they could vote. Suddenly serious about the world as they were robbed by the pandemic and subsequent shutdowns of school years, sports seasons, orientations, and graduations, they looked online for guidance. This is, after all, the first generation who grew up on social media. Forced even more online for school, they couldn’t avoid the cascade of bad news. From Ukraine to Gaza to Iran, they encountered the world as a violent, unjust place. They’ve watched at least three attempts on President Trump’s life. Ever since they entered school they’ve conducted regular rehearsals for school shootings. Many have come to expect violence as sometimes necessary to deal with opponents. Dodson writes:

This confluence of eroding trust, a sense of powerlessness, exposure to intense suffering of others, and desensitization to political violence leaves Gen Z looking for judgment—and justice. My students know all too well that bad things happen to good people. They want to know when bad people will get what they deserve.

Reacting to the digital display of violence, many in Gen Z started looking for answers in Christianity and the church. But not everyone liked the answers they got from older believers and even the Bible. I had to read Dodson a few times to understand his point—I just couldn’t believe it at first. Apparently, his students don’t flinch at the “ban” in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 (“you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction”) or the severe, shared punishment against the tribe of Benjamin in Judges 20 after Levite’s concubine was raped in Judges 19.

It’s not that these same students nod along because they understand the holiness and justice of God. Or because they grasp the suffering of Christ as a propitiating sacrifice in Romans 3:25-26. It’s that they’re furious over a God who passes over some sins in forgiveness.

Earlier this week I recorded an interview with two Christian leaders in the UK. One of them mentioned an influx of young men at her church. She indicated some surprise and gratefulness. But then she noted that in conversation, she realized they don’t always attend for the right reasons, or even good ones. Sometimes they assume Christianity aligns with them against left-wing wokeness. They’re seeking just retribution against their cultural enemies.

Within Gen Z, we’re seeing twin forces on left and right that accept violence as necessary, even sometimes good—at least when it’s aimed at the other side. However it’s coded in our political dichotomy, this is another sign of Christianity’s decline in the West. For the sake of our society, and for Gen Z, we need the God who identified himself with every part of Exodus 34:6–7

The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Until we see ourselves as what’s primarily wrong with the world, and God’s forgiveness as our only hope, we can’t heal—together.