In post-apartheid South Africa, where class divides remain entrenched and youth unemployment persists at staggering levels, religious practice among young people offers a revealing window into economic inequality. The contemporary Sunday ritual among urban youth is increasingly bifurcated: some attend church services, often in charismatic or Pentecostal congregations, while others spend their Sundays at artisanal brunch spots, sipping lattes and curating Instagram-worthy lifestyles. This seemingly mundane choice, church or brunch, signals far more than a spiritual inclination or a culinary preference. It reveals a deep interplay between class, culture, and identity. This article explores youth church attendance as a classed practice, employing the theoretical lenses of Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and postcolonial thinkers like Achille Mbembe and Jean Comaroff.
Bourdieu: Habitus, Distinction, and Symbolic Capital
Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus helps us understand how churchgoing and brunching function as embodied practices rooted in class. For working-class youth, particularly those navigating precarity, attending church is not merely a religious act but a continuation of family tradition, community belonging, and a source of symbolic capital. Religious devotion can be converted into respectability, moral authority, and even informal economic networks. Conversely, middle-class and upwardly mobile youth, often with access to higher education and global cultural flows, may cultivate a secular or “spiritual-but-not-religious” identity, signaling their distinction through the consumption of brunch, wellness culture, and lifestyle branding.
Habitus structures taste: those who brunch instead of attend church may not consciously reject religion but rather embody a different cultural script. The aesthetics of brunch, its curated plates, minimalist decor, and digital shareability function as a symbolic economy that aligns with bourgeois values of individualism, cosmopolitanism, and leisure. Church, by contrast, is often associated with obligation, sacrifice, and collective morality. In this way, Bourdieu’s framework allows us to read Sunday rituals as a performance of class distinction, where both groups assert their legitimacy and aspirations through socially legible acts.
Marx: Reframing the “Opium” of Religion
Karl Marx’s famous dictum that religion is the “opium of the people” has often been interpreted as a dismissal of religious belief. However, in the 21st-century context, particularly in the global South, Marx’s insight can be reframed to capture how religion functions as both palliative and productive. For economically marginalized youth, churches provide not just spiritual solace but material support: food parcels, job referrals, emotional labour, and networks of mutual aid. In neoliberal societies where the state has withdrawn from social welfare, religion fills a vacuum, mediating suffering and providing tools for survival.
However, this religious economy is not free from critique. Pentecostal and charismatic churches often peddle prosperity theology, promising divine riches in exchange for tithes, attendance, and moral conformity. In this system, faith becomes commodified, and the church mirrors the capitalist marketplace. Here, religion is not merely opium but a kind of spiritual investment portfolio: one sows to reap, believes to achieve, and tithes to thrive. Thus, Marx’s critique still resonates but must be updated to acknowledge the dynamic agency of religious actors and the complex economic circuits in which faith is entangled.
Durkheim: The Social Glue of Religion
While Marx emphasizes the alienating function of religion, Emile Durkheim foregrounds its integrative power. For Durkheim, religion is a “social glue” that binds individuals to collective moral orders. This perspective is particularly instructive when analyzing the role of the church in working-class communities. For many young people navigating fractured families, crime-ridden neighbourhoods, and unstable job markets, the church offers not only spiritual refuge but a sense of belonging and purpose. Youth ministries, gospel choirs, and cell groups become sites of identity formation, mentorship, and emotional safety.
The affective community forged in church spaces often contrasts sharply with the atomization experienced by more affluent youth, who may find sociality through curated brunches or virtual networks. While brunch offers the illusion of community, it is often transient and transactional, rooted in aesthetics rather than ethics. Church, by contrast, operates as a moral economy, emphasizing duty, care, and responsibility. Through this lens, religion continues to fulfil Durkheim’s function of sustaining social cohesion, especially where other institutions have failed.
Mbembe and Comaroff: Religious Economies and the Postcolonial State
Achille Mbembe and Jean Comaroff offer postcolonial critiques that help contextualize the rise of charismatic Christianity among youth in post-apartheid and postcolonial societies. For Mbembe, the postcolony is a space where the state is often absent or predatory, and religious institutions step in to provide order and meaning. Jean and John Comaroff’s concept of “religious economies” examines how faith-based institutions become sites of capital accumulation, both spiritual and material. In this context, the church is not merely a sacred space but a market, a corporation, and a political actor.
This lens helps explain why many working-class youth see church attendance as an investment. It offers opportunities to develop public speaking skills, social leadership, and entrepreneurial networks. Pastors often function as life coaches and motivational speakers, blending theology with neoliberal self-help. At the same time, churches can reproduce class hierarchies, rewarding conformity and consumption under the guise of divine favour. For brunching youth, who may already inhabit spaces of capital and privilege, these religious economies may appear redundant or even exploitative, further deepening the class divide.
Brunch Culture: Secular Salvation?
The rise of brunch culture among middle-class youth can also be read as a form of secular salvation. In a world of hustle, anxiety, and digital fatigue, brunch offers a ritual of leisure, indulgence, and self-care. It serves as a counterbalance to the week’s labour, a reward for productivity, and a site of social validation. However, unlike church, brunch rarely cultivates a collective ethic. It is a ritual of consumption, not conviction.
While church-goers may be criticized for blind faith or complicity in patriarchal systems, brunch-goers are not exempt from critique. Their secular rituals often rest on the invisibilized labour of waitstaff, cooks, and cleaners, and their curated lifestyles rely on extractive digital economies. Both brunch and church, then, are embedded in broader structures of inequality, though they manifest differently.
Conclusion: Class, Choice, and the Politics of Sunday
To ask why some youth go to church while others go to brunch is to ask a deeper question about the political economy of belonging. These Sunday rituals, though seemingly innocuous, index broader patterns of inequality, taste, and aspiration. They reflect how class shapes not just access to resources but also cultural scripts, moral worldviews, and collective dreams.
Through Bourdieu, we see how these choices are structured by habitus and deployed as symbolic capital. Through Marx, we understand how religion mediates suffering in the age of economic abandonment. Durkheim reminds us of the enduring social power of religion, while Mbembe and Comaroff show us how religious economies flourish where the state falters. In this landscape, neither church nor brunch is neutral. Both are loaded with meanings, desires, and contradictions. To understand youth culture today, we must attend not just to what is preached from the pulpit or plated on the brunch table, but to the worlds of inequality, hope, and hustle that these spaces both reveal and reproduce.
