Are We Actually Experiencing a Christian Revival? |
Have you heard the good news? God is back, and He’s speaking to Gen Z. In Greenwich Village, 20-somethings fill the pews of St. Joseph’s Church in search of spiritual truth, or a date, or both. Christian student clubs at Ohio State University say attendance has doubled. “We’re seeing baptisms on college campuses” along with “a hunger for reverence” and “a return to Christianity,” Evie magazine gloated. Lifeway, a Christian nonprofit, credits young adults with a rise in Bible sales. Some Orthodox parishes are reporting a flood of young men, or “Orthobros.” Earlier in April, St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Parish in the Chicago suburbs said converts had risen by 124 percent since last year. The Archdiocese of Boston has welcomed almost 700 new Catholics since 2022, including many of them young people, leaders tell CBS News. On Easter, members of V1 Church, a large charismatic congregation, packed Times Square to celebrate the risen Christ. In videos, the crowd looks diverse and youthful.
If a revival is underway, as many claim, it would defy conventional understandings of religious identity and the future of Christianity. In one story, America is becoming more secular as Christian traditions lose their young. Research has shown that millennials are less religious than their forebears, and Gen Z is less religious still. Now, headlines say otherwise. Young adults are rediscovering church and the value of faith in an unsettled world. Among them are young men who want families and masculine role models.
But there is no empirical evidence for a sustained Christian revival in the United States — among members of Gen Z or anyone else. True revival would be hard to miss, says Ryan Burge, a demographer and the author of The Nones and The Vanishing Church. In 2024, about a quarter of Americans said they attended church every week. Even a 3 percent rise in that figure could constitute a “modest revival” with around “12 million new people going to church that weren’t a year ago,” Burge explains. That isn’t happening, and adults in their 20s aren’t more observant than millennials.
Instead, the American church has, for some, become a proxy for a broader political project. So far, the most triumphant tales of revival are coming from the right: Evie is funded by Peter Thiel, a far-right billionaire with an Antichrist fixation. Lifeway is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which forbids women from becoming pastors. The founder of V1 Church, Mike Signorelli, says he met with Donald Trump during Holy Week, and MAGA influencers spread videos of his Times Square service online. His “stand” in New York City, that pit of godless villainy, “shows real revival is possible,” one influencer claimed. Last September, Elon Musk, formerly an atheist, shared a message from Erika Kirk urging Americans to “go to church,” and in June, J.D. Vance will publish a memoir about his conversion to Catholicism. Jordan Peterson, the U.S.-based culture warrior, owns a suit jacket covered with Orthodox-style iconography.
The right owns the White House, but it hasn’t won the church yet. Church attendance is up in some places, earning trend pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Orthobro phenomenon is real, if small, and it is driven by right-wing politics. But not all converts are reactionaries, and a surge in one........