The rebound, not the resurrection
Start with what we’ll grant, because it is a lot. The secularization thesis — that religion fades as societies modernize — was stated too confidently, and the data embarrassed it. America’s nones stopped climbing. Bible sales jumped. We do not dispute the numbers. We dispute the story being told on top of them.
A rise in attendance is not a rise in belief. After the 2008 crash, churchgoing ticked up too; people return to institutions in frightening times and drift back out when the fear lifts. The Asbury students are real, but every Great Awakening — 1740, 1801, 1906 — produced a spike and then a return to roughly the prior trend. Cohort effects, a brutal decade for young people, the plain exhaustion of an over-online generation reaching for anything offline: all of it predicts a bump with no supernatural cause required.
We are not the sneering atheists of 2006. The meaning crisis is empirically real — loneliness, despair, and disaffiliation rose in lockstep, and people are right to go looking for community. We simply think a sociologist can explain the looking without a Spirit. What reads as God to the evangelicals reads to us as a social species that evolved to need belonging, finding it in the last institution still offering it cheaply.
Where we concede ground: We called secularization inevitable, and we were wrong. Belief turned out more durable and more adaptive than our models assumed.
What would change our mind: A sustained rise in actual doctrinal belief — not attendance, not vibes — that holds across a full economic cycle rather than one downturn.
Read the full synthesis: What would a religious revival actually look like?