“Priests are swapping stories about record attendance numbers,” Ruth Graham reported in the New York Times on November 19, and “strategizing about how to accommodate more prospective converts than existing clergy can reasonably handle on their own."
She was writing about Orthodox churches, but The New York Post saw the same trend in Catholics. “Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse,” reported Rikki Schlott in April.
How many? “Nationwide numbers aren’t available yet,” wrote Matthew McDonald in the National Catholic Register. “But certain dioceses are reporting increases of 30%, 40%, 50% and even more than 70%.”
Is this a blip or a trend?
In fact, the trend toward Christianity started long before this year.
In 2023, for instance, young people were flocking to Asbury University in Kentucky after an unplanned continual charismatic prayer service made national headlines. And in 2024, 65,000 people came to Indianapolis for the National Eucharistic Congress — and then, a month later, 1.5 million descended on Lisbon, Portugal, for the Catholic World Youth Day.
Now, the first Pew Religious Landscape Study in 10 years, released in February 2025, puts real statistics to the stories of growth in faith.
The study found that the number of U.S. adults who identify as Christian is no longer dropping. It has stayed steady at 62% since 2019, and the rise of the “nones” — those who mark “none” when asked their religious affiliation — has stopped.
A new article from the Pew Center, released after this was published, stresses that there is “no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults” when you compare 2024 with 2014 and 2007. But this is the same research that shows that the rise of the nones has stopped since 2020.
Some of us have been arguing for quite some time that the reports of Christianity’s death were greatly exaggerated.
This was hard to do, as the number of “nones” rose. In fact, even in Pew’s new study, the organization is quick to point out that while 62% religious affiliation has held steady since 2019, it is still far below the 78% who identified as Christian in 2007 — and that while the number of “nones” isn’t growing, it isn’t dropping, either. To this day, nearly 1 in 3 U.S. adults (29%) say they don’t belong to any religion.
But the late great sociologist Rodney Stark never tired of reminding people that the rise of the “nones” was not what it looked like. “This change marks a decrease only in nominal affiliation, not an increase in irreligion. … The entire change has taken place with the non-attending group,” wrote Stark.
In other words, in the 20th century, people who didn’t go to church still felt the need to identify themselves as “Episcopalian,” or “Lutheran,” or at least “Christian” — but in the 21st century, they no longer felt that need. The shame of saying you had no religion had gone.
All along it was nominal Christianity that was dying.
I love the distinction Evangelical Christian Ed Stetzer made between “cultural” Christians who said they were Christian because it was expected, “congregational” Christians who identified with a particular denomination, and “convictional” Christians who believed in Jesus and wanted a relationship with him.
The first two categories of nominal Christians dropped; the last category, true believers, grew slightly throughout the 21st century.
This shows up in the Pew survey, in a way, when it finds that 83% of Americans are theists, 86% believe in a soul, and 70% believe in a supernatural afterlife. But it shows up even more strongly in research by the Evangelical group Barna. “Almost 3 in 10 people who don’t identify as Christian say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus,” according to its polling.
“Undeniably, there is renewed interest in Jesus,” said Barna’s David Kinnaman. “This is the clearest trend we’ve seen in more than a decade pointing to spiritual renewal — and it’s the first time Barna has recorded such spiritual interest being led by younger generations.”
The rise in Catholicism is showing up in statistics too.
The Catholic Herald puts together numbers from a number of sources to report that we can at least say that “more Americans are joining the Catholic church than leaving for the first time in decades.”
But to get the numbers to actually increase, we need to take Kinnaman’s advice seriously and introduce people to Jesus Christ. It is Jesus we meet in Sunday Mass, Jesus who forgives us in confession, Jesus we meet in the Rosary, and Jesus we serve in others.
Show people how they can meet him there, too.
