In the early 2020s, secularization stopped: After rising for 15 years, the nonreligious share of the American population suddenly stopped growing. Ever since, there’s been a vigorous debate over whether this plateau is a precursor to religious revival or just a leveling off preceding a further fall from faith.
The revivalists tend to have vivid anecdotes — Bible sales climbing, young American men storming the doors of Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholic baptisms surging in France. The no-revivalists tend to have deflating data. No, Gen Z isn’t more religious than the millennials. No, evangelical churchgoing didn’t surge after Charlie Kirk’s murder. Yes, church attendance is ticking up in some traditions, but it might just be churches regaining people who stopped going during the pandemic.
With Easter looming, let’s throw out some recent examples of conflicting revival-related evidence. First, new data showing that in 2025 the nonreligious share of the American population declined yet again, with the atheist-agnostic share back down to the levels of 2014. (A point for the revivalists!) Second, a retraction of a much-cited study in Britain that purported to show a Christian revival among younger people in England and Wales. (A point for the no-revivalists!) Third, a story by my colleagues tracking a big rise in conversions to Roman Catholicism across many American dioceses. Fourth, a Pew Research Center survey showing that Catholicism loses far more lapsed Catholics than it gains in converts.
Putting the last two Catholic trends together helps explain a key reason this debate is so unsettled: It’s entirely possible for a faith to experience revival and decline simultaneously.
That’s because conversion is a different thing, sociologically and personally, than what you might call the ordinary transmission of an established faith.
Not a completely different thing, to be sure: People can have conversion experiences inside their inherited religions, with evangelical Christianity in particular encouraging a conversion mentality (being “saved,” getting “born again”) among its younger adherents.
But most of the time, what determines whether a big religion is growing or shrinking is not the convert mentality. It’s how many kids its adherents are having, and whether it feels like a default for those kids to remain with the faith in adulthood. So a certain sense of normalcy is helpful for that kind of religious growth — a feeling that life is basically stable, that your religious worldview is compatible with your practical ambitions, that God is in his heaven and all is right with America.
Conversion from outside a faith, on the other hand, often proceeds from a sense of cultural abnormalcy — a feeling of dislocation, rupture, crisis.
And some people’s impulse to seek after God in new terrain, to leap or swim into a new tradition, can grow stronger during exactly the sort of unstable cultural moments that make other people less likely to stick with an inherited and loosely held religious commitment.
In such a moment, it’s entirely possible to have a spirit of revival or intensified belief among the restless and spiritually curious — yet also a continued decline in religious practice among cradle believers. (And as birthrates drop, a decline in the number of people born into a religion, period.)
This combination seems to fit with the broader spirit of the digital age, in which custom and inheritance are ever-weaker forces, and agency and intentionality determine whether people do the kinds of things (make friends, start families, go to church) their ancestors would have done more automatically.
It would also fit the class polarization we’re seeing in organized religion, where going to church is increasingly associated with higher education levels, with ambition and upward mobility, while secularization is often strongest among the downwardly mobile and disaffected, people who aren’t choosing atheism but are simply drifting away from church.
How exactly these trends interact numerically is uncertain. But it may be that we will look back on the later 2020s as a period of elite revival, in which religion becomes more influential on college campuses or in upper-middle-class culture without preventing a continued decline in Catholic, Methodist or Baptist numbers overall.
The optimist would say that this trade-off could be worth it — because “from an institutional health perspective,” as one social media post put it, “younger enthusiastic people are preferable to older people or the disaffected ‘one foot out of the door’ folks.”
True enthusiasm is definitely preferable to dull religious habit. Ultimately, though, the test of that enthusiasm is whether it can shape the world beyond the enclaves of maximum agency and zeal.
Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the agentic.” Christianity is not supposed to be primarily a faith for educated strivers. And any revival that doesn’t give the drifting or disaffected a surer reason for belief, that doesn’t lift up the lowly or reach the poor in spirit, would be a revival unworthy of the name.
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