Most members of Gen Z believe that multiple, contradictory moral truths can be correct at the same time, and that accepting competing views of truth is a sign of maturity, according to survey data highlighted in a new Daily Wire piece by Naomi Anderson, co-founder of the faith-based outreach group Verity Collective.
Anderson’s article, titled “Gen Z And The Search For Objective Truth In A Subjective Age,” opens with man-on-the-street interviews her team conducted with young adults about what truth means. One young woman told them she found the question unexpectedly difficult because “what is right and what is true can depend on the person.” Another respondent said truth is “whatever you believe it is in your own opinion.”
Anderson writes that none of the young people she spoke with sounded angry and that their answers seemed sincere — an attempt, she suggests, to make sense of a foundational question using the tools they know best: feelings, personal experience, relationships, and what they have absorbed in classrooms or online.
What the survey data shows
Those street-level responses track with national polling, according to Anderson. She cites the American Worldview Inventory 2025, which found that 61 percent of Gen Z respondents agreed that multiple conflicting moral truths can all be correct simultaneously. In the same survey, 67 percent said accepting different views of truth is a mark of maturity, and 42 percent described truth as a social construction rather than an absolute reality independent of culture.
A separate 2024 edition of the American Worldview Inventory, Anderson notes, found that 66 percent of Gen Z considered it morally acceptable to do anything they desire as long as it harms no one. That figure compares with 55 percent of Millennials, 40 percent of Gen X, and 29 percent of Boomers.
Anderson acknowledges that the building blocks of this worldview — experience, education, relationships, and emotion — are genuinely important. Her argument is that they shape how a person understands truth without actually creating it. “These things may affect how we understand truth, but they do not create it,” she writes.
Why the author says the stakes are concrete
The piece pushes back on the idea that debates over truth and morality are abstract intellectual exercises. Gen Z is already voting and will help decide future elections, Anderson writes, and its members are entering courtrooms as jurors and witnesses, moving into classrooms, hospitals, and government offices, and taking on roles where judgments about right and wrong carry real consequences for other people.
She poses a series of questions aimed at that reality: if right and wrong are determined entirely by personal opinion, what basis remains for calling anything objectively wrong? What standard applies when two people’s moral convictions collide directly? And what prevents justice from becoming simply the preference of whoever holds the most power?
Facts still matter, Anderson concedes, and courtrooms must establish them through evidence. But she argues that facts alone cannot explain why justice matters, why guilt should carry consequences, why the innocent deserve protection, or why human life has value. “Once morality enters a courtroom, a classroom, a hospital, or a voting booth, it is no longer merely personal,” she writes.
The inconsistency argument
Anderson also points to what she describes as a contradiction in how young people actually live. Gen Z may describe morality as subjective, she observes, yet its members are often outspoken — particularly on social media — about cruelty, discrimination, and injustice. Holding those convictions consistently becomes harder, she adds, when the situations involve people they follow online, people they care about, or views they hold strongly.
Her conclusion: every time someone labels an act truly unjust, they are implicitly treating justice as more than a feeling. People may disagree about how to define it, but the force of their own moral outrage, she argues, reveals that they do not live as though morality were entirely relative.
A dissenting voice in the interviews
Not every response Anderson collected fit the pattern. One young man she interviewed described truth as “a reflection of objective reality” that exists apart from any individual or collective perspective. “It just exists outside of all those things. It’s kind of like how God does also,” he said.
That answer, Anderson writes, recognizes something she believes the broader culture increasingly resists: that truth does not become true because enough people agree with it. It stands independent of feelings, preferences, and group consensus, even if no one perceives it perfectly.
The same respondent characterized his generation as experiencing “a lot of higher highs and lower lows,” with some peers capable of meaningful conversation and others struggling to connect at all. Asked what drives that gap, he blamed social media: “We’re exposed to these tactics of division at a younger age before we’re actually able to develop our own opinions.”
Anderson treats that observation as significant. Young people, she writes, are encountering forceful claims about identity, morality, relationships, and faith before they have developed the ability to evaluate them. When personal feelings are treated as the highest authority, she argues, the people and platforms that shape those feelings accumulate enormous influence.
The religious framework
The closing portion of the article lays out an explicitly Christian answer to the question it raises. Anderson writes that from a Christian perspective, the moral compass should be the Word of God rather than feelings, experiences, political loyalties, or whatever a given culture approves. She quotes Psalm 119:105 — “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path” — and Hebrews 13:8, which describes Jesus Christ as “the same yesterday and today and forever.”
Cultures, governments, and opinions have shifted over thousands of years, she writes, while the truth proclaimed in Scripture has remained constant. She cites John 14:6, in which Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” as evidence that Christ presented Himself as truth itself rather than as one option among many.
Anderson closes by returning to the practical stakes. The question of truth, she writes, is not confined to what individuals believe privately — it shapes the kind of society people build and what they are willing to call right or wrong when the decisions get difficult.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/gen-z-and-the-search-for-objective-truth-in-a-subjective-age