I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the alleged trend of young people going back to church, and whether there’s any substance to these claims.
America’s nonreligious population – the “nones” – grew rapidly in the first two decades of the millennium. But in the last five years or so, that previously red-hot growth seems to have slowed down, if not plateaued. Religious apologists have pounced on this, claiming that atheism has reached its limit and that Gen Zers are about to turn back to God in a massive, spontaneous religious revival. One published survey, the so-called Quiet Revival, claims that it’s already happening.
Is there any reason to believe this? You can probably guess.
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After years of declining church attendance, aging and dwindling congregations, and a widespread falling away from faith, revival has come to the West. Faith is cool and countercultural again. More young people are rediscovering God, and they’re flocking back to church in droves. There’s going to be a new Great Awakening very soon.
At least, that’s what religious apologists want us to believe. They’ve written no end of stories insisting on it. For example, there’s this triumphal headline from the alt-right, anti-feminist magazine Evie, “God Is Back And Gen Z Is Leading The Revival”.
There’s plenty of room to debate why the growth of the nones might have leveled off. Are there natural limits—a core of American religiosity that can’t be overcome? Are there broader economic or cultural trends pushing people back to church—as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic, or people in search of a safety net? Was the New Atheist movement the catalyst, and now that it’s faded from prominence, the growth of the nones is stalling?
If you asked me to guess, I go with: the core of American religiosity is rooted in ignorance. You have more kids in education, you have better access to information, and you have more kids moving to cities to make the big bucks, then obviously as they encounter reality, religion falls away.
Except in America education is being gutted, the information you have access to is being poisoned more than ever before, and fewer people can afford to move to (or remain in) a city. The rich prefer the peasants stupid and god-fearing, and the rich’s influence on society, and in particular on American society, has never accelerated like it has in the past decade or two.
This is why the suggestion that young people are turning back to religious faith doesn’t immediately sound my bullshit alarm – it’s all too credible given the demonstrable decline in the average intelligence of the typical American, demonstrated by their choice of government.
Addendum: finally! Religious nutjobs come up with a claim I don’t immediately dismiss as bogus.
@sonofrojblake
Except it’s not only an American trend, also in NL, which I always thought was a solidly atheist country, there’s a resurgence of young people heading for religion (see for example, in Dutch: https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2026/paasdoop-jongeren-bekeren-tiktok-geloof-religie~v2968814/ )
(Of course, also in NL we have our popular blonded idiot politicians, so there are some parallels…)
Faith was never cool and counterfactual, and it is not so now.
To rediscover God, one must have once been goddish, and to flock back to church implies they were originally goddish and churchy. Else they would be discovering.
Now, if young people were taught to be goddish and churchy, to say they are re-churching and re-faithing is to ignore their youthful inculcation into that mode of failure. Poor inference.
I doubt it. I doubt that there is any consistent revival of interest in religion. But it may be informative to look at other times when religiousness within a society increased. What has happened historically?
There have been three “Great Awakenings” which have occured recently within the Christian religions, and one debated fourth. These events coincided with an increase in religious attendance and by the theory that attendance at religious events means an acceptance of those religious beliefs, and increase in religious belief within a population. Note that I do not automatically assume that being part of a religious organization means that a person is necessarily religious or shares all the beliefs of that organization.
In all three “Great Awakenings” which are acknowledged by scholars the awakenings we accompanied by a desire to reform society to make it more equitable, or to remove apparent evils of society. For example, the Second Great Awakening included abolishing slavery, promoting temperance laws, and increasing the rights of women to own property and vote. The Third Great Awakening continued to push for these ideas.
The next commonality of these three Great Awakenings was fractionalization. As these happened, the religions split. Smaller sects were formed, and some new religions were founded, like the Church of the Latter Day Saints, or the Christian Scientists. In every case, the individual connection to divinity was made more personal. God was not some far-away, non-interventionist, watch-maker, God would intervene to help the pious and harm the sinners.
The third, which I find particularly interesting, is that these Great Awakenings appear to also coincide with greater swaths of a population being educated, learning to read and write. The second Great Awakening happened with the generation after public schools were founded for all white male citizens of the US. The Third Great Awakening seems to coincide with the expanded schooling for woman and black children. I really don’t know if there is any connection, but it is quite possible that as literacy expanded, each population of first-generation literate individuals were A) looked on as leaders and influencers, and B) passed their own personal beliefs about a deity onto others. There is potentially a lot of room for research about this connection.
For what it’s worth, it is probably worth remembering that most surviving past religions were founded by reformers. The lesson from the New Testament was that Jesus was a reformer. So was Muhammad. So was Siddhartha/Buddha. Religions which grow larger than a 200-300 person cult tend to have reformations of current societal ills in mind. Even Confucianism is a religion of reform (and manners). I know of no scholars which do this, but the formation of Protestantism could be considered a “Great Awakening”. Martin Luther, with his ninety-five thesis’, has a lot in common with a Chautauqua preacher.
The contested “Forth Great Awakening” happened within my lifetime, in the 1960’s to 1980’s. But it does not share many of the characteristics of the previous three. It is marked, according to those scholars who think it occurred, in a rise of Evangelicalism but not a corresponding interest in reform. On the contrary, the modern evangelical movement seems to be interested in reversing the societal reforms of the previous Great Awakenings. The only thing it shares with the previous Great Awakenings is to make the connection with God even closer. Jesus rides shotgun. The ultimate effect of this is for church’s to not talk about God’s belief in any details at all, but only in vague generalities so that everyone in a congregation can assign their own interpretation to suit their personal view of God. But because everyone has this personal connection to God, everyone in the congregation will feel their views are correct. God believes what they do, and if God believes it, it must be right.
So what is happening now? Church’s (not religion) can provide useful benefits to a community. They can even be the center of a community. If people need help, one place they may turn is to a church. This doesn’t mean these people believe in that religion, although the churches will claim they do. These people will profess to believe in it, even though they may only have a cursory knowledge of it (“two” versus “Second” Corinthians springs to mind). These people will believe that confessing that they don’t believe in the religion of the church they are attending may get them kicked out. They have an interest in claiming to believe in that religion. That may be all which is occurring now. People need help, the church can help, so they attend church. Religious belief is irrelevant (as usual), and cannot be accurately measured.
The only way to truly measure religious belief would be to remove all the possible confounding factors. Which means building a society where churches are not needed to provide food, shelter, clothing, or even recreation to people, and see who still attends. If the needs of society are fulfilled by other means then, and only then, can we take a true measure of the number of people who believe in a religion.
Or maybe we won’t need religion because we’ll be close enough to paradise here, on the only world we have.
On the other hand, the reports of a slowing down of people declaring themselves to have have no religion may be a temporary anomaly in the data.
That’s a really good point. Humans want community, and churches offer that.
I’d go so far as to say that the main failing of atheism as a movement (rather than simply a lack of belief) is that it has failed to come up with anything that functions as well as a church in bringing people together.
A bit like the non-buggering-kittens movement.
It’s all about not buggering kittens, much as atheism is about not being goddist.
(Why one would need to make a movement about not buggering kittens is left unspoken)
Similar claims have been made in the UK, they are almost certainly not true: Bible Society retracts false Quiet Revival claims
See also: Has there been a Christian revival among young adults in the U.K.? Recent surveys may be misleading
It’s important to remember that we are in the midst of an extremely well-funded international propaganda campaign being mounted by a whole constellation of right-wing / “traditionalist” factions and organisations, and most of them have absolutely no compunction about lying with statistics.
And this campaign has been going on, in various forms, at least since that whole “Jesus freak”/”Born-Again” Christian hype-movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s (at least that’s when I first became aware of it). I also remember my dad’s Catholic church making laughably-cringey-awkward attempts to make their Mass “hip” and “folky” (which he hated, and which I never heard anyone say they liked).
I very much doubt that there has been a new surge in actual religious belief, and churches who are saying that the secular turn that societies have taken is reversing, seem to be indulging in wishful thinking.
As flex@5 says, though, there may indeed be, in America, more people expressing religiosity. We know that societies in which there is more suffering–lower Gini coefficient, one might say–people turn to religion more to make themselves hope that things can be better, either before or after death.
Lots of suffering people in America right now, and about to be many more soon.
For US Christianity, “quiet revival” is a bit of an oxymoron. Anything like a revival happening within their ranks would be “shouted from the housetops” 24/7 till everyone got sick of hearing about it (and shouting about it).
I think what’s happening these days is more of a quiet re-establishment of old-school religious authoritarianism, a quiet silencing of liberal or non-Christian dissenting voices, a quiet ongoing campaign to re-establish control over public discourse; one county, library or school at a time.