The “Religious Revival” Is a Fiction

Just count the people. Plus: swimming, Owen Wilson, Richard Russo.

You know the old saying that if you have three examples of something, it’s enough for a New York Times Styles Section piece? If three guacamole kiosks open up in New York City, Styles will proclaim a tsunami of guacamole excitement. Similar reasoning leads to endless stories about how, this time, America is really falling in love with soccer (usually times to the World Cup) and how, finally, polyamory is going mainstream. Three examples = a story.

I think we are seeing something at work with the recent articles about a supposed “religious awakening.” There is definitely a trend of articles about this supposed trend (or at least I think there is a trend of articles about this trend—maybe there are only three articles, and I am the Styles section). Here is Substacker

Ira Stoll

on religious awakening; here is Axios reporting that “Christianity is starting to make a comeback in the U.S. and other western countries, led by young people”; here is The Daily Caller on a “fourth great awakening”; and, hot off the WordPresses, here’s The Free Press on “how Catholicism Got Cool.”

As somebody who has been on this beat for a quarter century now (it’s fun to write that), I am not persuaded. The best of these articles, like Madeleine Kearns’s in The Free Press, pile up a persuasive number of anecdotes, and leave readers feeling that there is something there. To wit:

Earlier this year, The Pillar reported a surge in the numbers of aspiring Catholics registering to join the church at Easter. The Diocese of Lansing in Michigan reported a 30 percent spike from the previous year, 633 converts, which is the highest they’ve seen in over a decade. Father Ryan Kaup, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Catholic center, baptized 20 students alone—“the highest we’ve ever had”—and gave rites of initiation to an additional 50 who were coming into the church from other Christian denominations.

And now, of course, we have an American pope, Leo XIV, who church leaders hope will turbocharge the country’s Catholic boom.

America is not alone. The Catholic boom is also happening in France—which saw a 45 percent increase in the number of adult baptisms this year—and in England—where, due to a surge in Mass attendance, Catholics are on track to outnumber Anglicans for the first time since the Church of England was born.

But here is the problem with this and many other articles on religion’s comeback: even proof of thousands of adult baptisms or converts is, numerically speaking, practically meaningless. Because the church in question, Catholic or otherwise, may still be shrinking. That figure in France—it’s about 10,000 adult baptisms. And about 7,000 adolescent baptisms. That’s not nothing. But France is a country of almost 70 million people, where the Catholic Church—the ancestral faith of almost all white people in France—is in steep decline. From a 2023 article:

Just 29 percent of French people aged 18-59 said they were Catholic in a 2019-20 survey by statistics authority Insee.

That was a steep plunge from the 85-percent rate in 1962 and France's centuries-old status as "the eldest daughter of the Church".

Even among nominal believers, just eight percent regularly attend mass and only 67 percent of children born to Catholic families stick to the faith.

Illustrating the depth of the decline, just 88 priests are expected to be ordained in France this year.

Now, I’ll allow that maybe things have turned around in the last year or two—but I don’t think so. Even 50,000 new, committed Catholics a year for the next ten years would only begin to make a dent, demographically, especially as elderly, more Catholic Frenchmen and -women die off, and babies (few of them, in a country with low fertility) are born into overwhelmingly secular families.

When you dig into these articles, about the U.S. or other countries, what you find, buried deep down, is the real claim: that the steep religious decline of the last 75 years is leveling off. To quote one of the articles The Free Press cites, “This European revival comes as new figures show that a 20-year decline in Christian identification appears to be ‘leveling off’ in the United States.” (Here is Pew on the leveling-off thesis.)

But as anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics knows, a decline “leveling off” does not equal “growth.” If the declines ended, and church and synagogue attendance stabilized across the Western world, they would be stabilizing at a very low point indeed.

Are there specific churches or parishes or campus ministries or synagogues that have a lot of growth? Surely, yes. But cherry-picking the success stories, as the Catholic Church shutters and merges parishes across the US and Europe, is not really an honest accounting.

What’s amazing is that nobody seems to ask for real numbers that would mean something. If I were writing about a Catholic resurgence, I’d want to know about whether any new parishes are being opened, whether vocations to the priesthood are up (and how much), whether donations to church coffers are up, and whether the number of people in Mass on a given week were up.

Some of these numbers can easily be gotten from the church hierarchy, others would take a Ph.D. dissertation or a good survey. And as it happens there is a Pew survey on this—and matters are dismal for Catholics. To quote a March article reporting on the survey:

A recent study by the Pew Research Center on religion in the US shows that the precipitous decline in the Catholic share of the population that was experienced in the early 2000s through to the early 2010s has more or less levelled off over the last decade.

However, that seemingly “good news” is offset by the fact that the proportion of Hispanic Catholics, often seen as a bulwark for maintaining Catholic numbers in the US, has reduced far more than was expected.

In 2014, Catholics made up 21 per cent of the US population. In 2023-24, Catholics still make up 19 per cent of the population. But while the percentage of the White, Black and Asian adults in the United States who identify as Catholic has remained relatively steady since 2007, the percentage of Hispanic adults who identify as Catholic has steeply declined.

The 2023-24 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study found that between 2007 and 2023-24 the percentage of White adults in the United States who identify as Catholic has gone from 22 to 17 per cent [my bolding], the percentage of Black adults from 5 to 4 per cent, and the percentage of Asian adults from 17 to 14 per cent. But the percentage of Hispanic adults who identify as Catholic has fallen from 58 to 42 per cent.

Does that sound like a revival to you?

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