American Religious Revival???

Holy Week was traditionally when newspapers and magazines tended to highlight religious news coverage. For obvious reasons coverage of religiious news has grown in recent years and has become increasingly year round. Still, Holy Week does tend to bring out some particularly thoughtful pieces. Among them, this year are two that I found especially interesting. Both appeared on the Tuesday of Holy Week (March 31).

In The Atlantic, staff writer Luis Parrales published "The Real Religious 'Renewal' Happening in Gen Z" [https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/03/christian-revival-generation-z/686612/].

Parrales sets the scene by describing a weekly Sunday evening "Young Adults" session at the Dominican Friars' St. Joseph's Church in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Weekly, some 150 young people, primarily ages 21-35, mostly young professionals attend these discussions, which appear as part of an apparent revival of religious interest among younger Americans. This Easter, according to Parrales, nearly 90 people are set to join the Catholic Church at St. Joseph's, another 70 at Old St. Patrick's Cathedral Basilica nearby, some 50 at Harvard's Catholic Center, about another 50 at Arizona State, 40 at the University of Michigan. Moreover, the numbers of those to be initiated into the Church at Easter seem to be up in many other parishes as well, as is Mass attendance - as is devotional life (e.g., Eucharistic adoration and contemplative forms of prayer like the Rosary). Certainly something is happening.

To counter the obvious optimism that these trends may invite, the author offers some sobering demographics. "Members of Gen Z are less likely than people in other generations to profess belief in God without doubts, for example, according to the 2024 General Social Survey. Gen Zers are also the least likely to attend religious services regularly and the most likely to never attend them. Many weren’t brought up religious, and many of those who were have left the faith. Only 28 percent of adults born in the 2000s to highly religious families remain highly religious, according to Pew. And despite the claim that Gen Z men are leading a resurgence in traditional Christianity, they in fact are simply leaving the Church at a slower rate than women are."

The worst statistic of all: "For every Catholic convert, for example, roughly eight Catholics leave the faith." And classic American revivals like the 18th and 19th century Great Awakenings emerged "in multiple places" and galvanized "a statistically significant portion of the population." On the other hand, "some of history's most consequential periods of religious renewal have been led by particular people in particular places, often not as representatives of a new common culture but as a committed counterculture."

Two things can be true at the same time. Christendom is not coming back - at least not anytime soon. Nor can the Christian cultural hegemony that characterized the U.S. from the Second Great Awakening more or less through the 1950s be expected to revive. On the other hand, the good news is still being preached and increasingly being heard by those disposed to do so. "Most Gen Zers may not have questions about Christianity or faith, but those who do are seeking answers."

The broader cultural question. is the subject of a very different piece by NY Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, "Can Christianity Be Restored to the Center of American Life?" [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/religion-revival-america.html].

Anyone familiar with Douthat's work will know that the cultural role of religion in American society has long preoccupied him (cf. his earlier book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics). Douthat's present concern in this article whether "a Christian center can be restored in American life." By that, he means "a set of religious beliefs and institutions that are embraced and respected in the broad middle of the country, cultivate a widely shared interpretation of the American story and operate effectively at the elite level, informing political conduct and intellectual arguments even among nonbelievers."

For Douthat, we once had such a religious center in the institutions of mainline Protestantism, which "went into steep and perhaps terminal decline" between the 1960s and the 1980s. Here he draws on political theorist Joshua Mitchell's argument ("Whither the Reformation in America?) that "the relationship between the Protestant tradition and the American idea" was founded on a "civilizational wager" that modeled modern American society on biblical Israel's "sense of divine mission and a covenantal relationship with God."

Of the possible successors to the old mainline Protestantism, Mitchell regarded evangelicalism "as fundamentally anti-worldly," and Catholicism "and the intellectual conservatism that it has ended up powerfully influencing" as too Old World. A third alternative, "the direct heir of the defunct Protestant establishment" is woke progressivism, which, however is. neither Protestant nor Christian anymore.

Based on Mitchell's generalizations, Douthat argues that to "lead and shape America, a religious tradition would need to be, first, worldly in the sense of relating in a serious way to a complex cultural and political and intellectual landscape where many people do not share its beliefs." Secondly, it would need to believe in an American "national mission and sacred destiny." Thirdly, it would need to be actually Christian.

He agrees that unworldly evangelicalism is insufficient "to form and shape an intellectual elite and to engage politically outside of Manichaean categories." Catholicism's insufficiency "is its still uncertain relationship to the American drama as a whole — not because most Catholics in the United States aren’t patriotic, but because a vision of America as a promised land and almost-chosen people still does not integrate easily with Catholic ideas and categories." (I might add that, as Catholicism become ever more associated with the global South and less with Europe and North America, that "relationship to the American drama as a whole" will likely become, if anything, even more, not less, uncertain.)

As for the third alternative, according to Douthat, "the insufficiency of woke post-Protestantism is that it believes in sin but not in God."

Thus, this Holy Week at least, neither author envisions a recovery of American Christendom. That said, an alternative model of a Great Awakening in an authentic but more modest, more intentional, more diasporic movement of grace can yet be detected among our not quite so secular almost chosen people.