Religious education is out of step with the needs of today's catechumen. The Truth remains the truth from generation to generation, but each age presents challenges that the Church must respond to.
Religious education, to give the most essential definition, is the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and all that follows from that encounter, namely, revelation by Sacred tradition. Fair enough. But:
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What if the people we are proclaiming to aren’t neophytes from an undiscovered country that have never heard of Jesus Christ?
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What if the people we’re educating are formed by a world that once knew Christ thoroughly, and has forgotten Him? We are catechizing in a post-Christian world.
Even if the young people in our religious education class are church-going kids, they know that opting out of belief is a tried and well-trod path available to them after they leave their parents’ home.
A groundbreaking 2016 PEW survey indicated that 42% of our young people will disaffiliate by the time they graduate from college. Clearly, our religious education is not working to keep people in the pews. What we need is a new approach—or perhaps an old approach. We need an approach that addresses the questions and concerns of this skeptical generation. We must be like St. Paul on the Areopagus, speaking to the Greeks in concepts they understand.
These are the five critical gaps in religious education and how we might bridge them:
- The perceived conflict between faith and science
- Teaching the whay, not the why
- Addressing the tough questions head-on
- The absence of beauty and the transcendent
- Digital formation is an afterthought
1. The Perceived Conflict Between Faith and Science
In the same PEW survey cited above, participants were asked as to why they were disaffiliating. One of the leading reasons given was the perceived conflict between faith and science:
“About half of current religious “nones” who were raised in a religion (49%) indicate that a lack of belief led them to move away from religion. This includes many respondents who mention “science” as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings, including one who said “I’m a scientist now, and I don’t believe in miracles.” Others reference “common sense,” “logic” or a “lack of evidence”—or simply say they do not believe in God.”
This message has been reinforced by social media channels, online forums, and traditional media, such as the 2014 television reboot series Cosmos, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson. The idea that science in some way disproves God or makes religion unnecessary has been absorbed by Millennials, Gen-Z, and Gen Alpha for decades now, even if most of them have never actually engaged with the supposed “science” that has done the disproving. It’s an easy exit that makes young people feel responsible and adult in their choice to abandon religion when the real reason might be something more basic.
The task, then, of the religious educator, is to cut down the assumptions of scientism that have become a kind of faith for them. For starters, show them that science cannot disprove God based on the constraints of its own methodology. Science seeks to explain the natural world on the basis of observable evidence. But if God is supernatural, He cannot be measured or proven or disproven as science seeks to prove things. The God this New Atheism attacks is one no serious Christian has ever believed in (i.e., that He is a man up in the sky with a big white beard who judges mankind arbitrarily). What Christians have always believed is that we can reason to the idea of God as the first cause of the universe, who must exist outside the universe.
Once that assumption has been challenged, you show them all the ways science lends credibility to the faith's claims. From the peer-reviewed studies of near-death experiences to the evidence of Christ’s resurrection from the Shroud of Turin, from cosmological arguments to inexplicable Marian miracles, there is more scientific evidence for our faith than ever before. This approach will show the false dichotomy between faith and science for what it is and open the hearts and minds of young people to everything else that follows.
2. Teaching the What, Not the Why
There is much to learn about our Faith. It is tempting to think that we must cover every major doctrine to prepare the young people in our charge for life in the Church. But the reality is, the Christian life is a lifelong journey, and catechesis will be an ongoing project for most people. The important task at the early stage is to give catechumens the “why” as well as the “what” of our faith. If we can make a compelling argument as to why God created us, why he allows suffering, why the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection were necessary for our Salvation, and why the Church, the human desire to know will take over once the person is convinced. I have fond memories of memorizing the answers from the Baltimore Catechism. But fortunately for me, it didn’t end there. My CCD teacher would lead us in discussions about why the answer was true. A thing is known according to the mode of the knower, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us, and so we shouldn’t teach the faith as a set of dogmas to be memorized in the early stages; it is a story to set our hearts on fire and convince our minds of its truth.
3. Addressing The Tough Questions Head-On
Even if a young person is totally convinced of faith, tough questions will still come up. It’s part of growing up. Thankfully for us, God has given us great teachers to wrestle with life’s most difficult questions. The Catholic Intellectual tradition is rich. We can make recourse to the Church Fathers, to St. Augustine, to St. Thomas Aquinas, to the Popes, and countless others when difficult objections arise.
Carlo Crivelli's Portrait of Saint Thomas Aquinas / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The problem is that your average catechist doesn’t have this wealth of knowledge readily accessible in their mind. They are volunteers, usually without a theology degree, doing the best they know how. So when a kid asks a tough question like:
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How can there be three persons in one God?
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Why does the Church teach against gay marriage?
It is tempting for the catechist to avoid engaging with such questions. An excuse like “It’s a mystery,” “That’s not part of the lesson today,” or “Ask a priest about that” is deployed, and the class goes on unbothered. But the damage is done. If a young person senses a hint of phoniness or that we’re trying to pull the wool over their eyes, they’re out. It would be far better to simply say “I don’t know, let me research that and get back to you” than to be dismissive. It’s extra work for you as the catechist to research these things, but we are blessed with an abundance of resources to help those of us without theology degrees answer these questions. There’s Catholic Answers and your very own Magis Center for long-form articles on these topics, or Catholic AI tools like MagisAI to help you get started. The bottom line is that we have to address the hard questions and accompany our catechumens on their intellectual journey.
4. The Absence of Beauty and the Transcendent
If Truth is a person, we cannot simply come to know the truth: we have to love the truth. And there is no surer way to fall in love with Jesus than to encounter His beauty. The beauty of His word in scripture, the beauty of His bride, the Church, the beauty of the lives of the saints; all of it is there to bring us closer to Him. The Church teaches us that the transcendentals are convertible, so when we speak of Beauty, or Truth, or Goodness, or Being, we are really speaking about the same thing. The only difference is in how the human mind perceives them.
And yet, an encounter with beauty is one most often neglected in religious formation. Truth is the proper end of religious education, but if you want it to stick, an encounter with beauty encourages the catechumen to fall in love with the truth rather than merely assent to it. The Church has such a rich heritage to draw from. Try beginning class reading The Prologue of the Gospel of John, not as a passage to “get,” but as the beautiful canticle it is, poetically describing God’s love for us. End class meditating on Psalm 42 while listening aloud to Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus. Take time to allow students to gaze upon Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew or Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin. There will be no lesson outcomes or measurable results for this. But it will do more good for the students than we know.
Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
5. Digital Formation is an Afterthought
Before anyone thinks I’m calling for directors of religious education to become social media influencers, let me explain what I mean by digital formation. Our young people experience the world in a categorically different way than previous generations. They were given smartphones early in their development and now experience and interpret reality through this little black box. I feel confident in expressing my opinion that this was a catastrophic mistake for human flourishing, but that’s another story. The question now is, how can we shape their souls in the few hours a week we have with them when algorithms are shaping their souls for hours a day? To start, we can’t be ambivalent or agnostic about technology and its use. We must recognize the ways in which it’s transformed their human experience. It isn’t just a matter of screentime. The deeper problem is the way it forms the imagination, our sense of what is true, our attention, and our capacity to wonder. A student who spends years marinating in algorithmically optimized content for outrage, comparison, and addiction to endless novelty is not a blank slate ready to receive the Gospel with fresh ears. The capacity for silence and prayer itself is likely diminished, which understandably correlates with the rise of prayer apps and digital content.
It isn’t helpful to tell these young people to stop spending so much time on their phones or get rid of them entirely. What is helpful is to show them the digital environment for what it is—a space designed by someone else with their own priorities, their own logic, and a set of values that sometimes aids the Christian life, sometimes inhibits it. Like Plato, if we can show them “the cave” in which they find themselves, at least they can be better aware of the necessity of grace and virtue while interacting in the digital space.
Bridging the Gap
These are the major gaps modern religious educators need to keep in mind.
If we are serious about bridging the gap, we cannot ignore one of its primary causes: the widespread assumption that faith lacks intellectual credibility. Any meaningful renewal of religious education must meet that objection head-on.
This is where programs like the Magis Center’s faith and science curricula prove especially valuable. Rather than avoiding difficult questions, they engage them directly—offering philosophical arguments, scientific evidence, and historical reasoning for God’s existence and the truth of Christianity.
In doing so, they model a crucial shift: not presenting the faith as something to be passively received, but as something that can withstand scrutiny. It is a small but necessary step toward forming catechumens who are not only informed but convinced.
We are up against a lot, but we always have been. Smartphones and armchair atheists are certainly less intimidating than the coliseum and crucifixions. All God asks is that we do our best. We cannot judge ourselves by how many of our students become daily communicants due to our work with them. God has his own plan. If we trust in Him and cooperate with His salvific will, we cannot fail.
