On Christianity’s Comeback, The Editors Told You So

Plus, Bezos sets new course at Washington Post opinion

A church in downtown Boston, February 26, 2025, offers a welcome to “people of all faith, and doubters!” Photo: The Editors.

For some time here we’ve been predicting and noting signs of a religious revival or great awakening. See, for example, “Vice President J.D. Vance Could Spark a Religious Revival,” July 15, 2024, and “Joe Lieberman on Faith’s Answers to America’s Political Crisis,” December 25, 2024, and the second item in this post from February 11, 2025, “Silicon Valley’s Christian Revival.”

In a recent video discussion of the issue with

Mark Oppenheimer

, who is a professor of the practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, I said, “If you look at the trend lines of church attendance or belief in God in America, you know, so there's a downward slope probably having to do with modernity, but there's also a lot of ups and downs and, and the downward slope of, recently has been so dramatic, I think partly because of the COVID effect on church attendance, that just kind of this thermostatic effect would seem to be that we're surely due for an awakening.”

Oppenheimer said, “let’s say we’re in like month one or year one of like, what’s going to be a 10 or 20 year awakening. … What would you look for? Like what, what would be the, the stuff of it?”

I replied, in part, “look, I mean, there’s these Pew and Gallup polls are pretty robust in terms of like large sample sizes and asking the same question over time. Like there’s good longitudinal trends on those polls. Yeah. And so I think you have to see some of those numbers on questions like, do you believe in God? Have you attended a religious service in person today? in the last month yourself. And there’s another question that, how important is religion in your life, I think. And, you know, so those questions, they need to start trending up instead of down. And the church attendance one has started trending up. And it took a huge hit during the pandemic. So we’re still not above, I think, 2019 levels. But I think having a positive slope instead of a negative slope in those trend lines is one very clear trend. And then, you know, you could talk about levels, but you also could talk about rates of change. And so that's the sort of social science answer.”

An update is in order. Today the Pew Research Center released its giant “2023-24 Religious Landscape Study.”