Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Evangelical revival

Marta’s sister

Our congregation in Campinas doubled between 2019 and 2024. Not because we advertised. Because a woman named Marta brought her sister, and her sister brought her neighbor, and the neighbor’s husband came one Sunday because his business was failing and someone told him there were people who would pray with him until something moved. His business did not recover. He started a new one. He says the prayer was the difference. The secularists will tell you that is a cognitive bias. We will tell you Marta’s sister was on antidepressants for three years and is not anymore.

The secularization thesis was never a discovery. It was a projection. European intellectuals watched their own continent and assumed the species was following. Meanwhile, Pentecostalism went from zero adherents in 1900 to over 600 million in 2020. São Paulo is not a village. Lagos is not premodern.

What the churches provide

What the secularists miss is what the churches provide. Not just belief. A functional community in cities where traditional structures have been shredded by migration. A credit network. A childcare network. A moral framework that tells a factory worker she has dignity her employer’s spreadsheet does not recognize. The sociologists can map this functionalist explanation, and we do not reject it. But the functionalist explanation is the scaffolding, not the building. The building is the encounter — people come because someone prayed and something happened that the secular frame has no category for.

The sociologists keep telling us we are cherry-picking continents. The continents we are picking contain most of the world’s population.

Where we concede ground: The prosperity gospel is ours, and it is a scandal — preachers exploiting people we claim to serve.

What would change our mind: Sustained attendance decline in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America coinciding with rising GDP over twenty years.

Read the full synthesis: Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?