When does a faith tradition become alive: when it becomes visible everywhere, or when people turn up to it? American Christianity now has something like a popular omnipresence that suggests at a distance the renovation. Pop music is shot through with Christian lyrics. Accessories are crosses reappearing. The speakers of influence talk in the natural tone of testimony. The visibility may be evidence. Culture is not synonymous to congregational life and the two have been drifting apart over the years.
The hardest to date is the work of measurement instead of the mill of feeds. In Pew Research Center 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, 62 percent of American adults claim to be Christians, compared to 78 percent in 2007. The country also has its nones at 29-per cent, and, notably, the two groups seem to have leveled off somewhat since 2019, with the steady downward trend in Christians and the steady upward in the unaffiliated. Such a leveling may be confused with a comeback. However, the same data reveals the thinness of the institutional attachment: only 33 percent of adults report attending religious services at least once a month, and the age factor is steep with younger adults much less likely than the older ones to identify themselves as Christians, to pray every day or to attend services.
This is where the revival narrative becomes loose. Revival means a reversion to common habits- attendance, membership, discipline, the gradual re-formation of life in accordance with the needs of a community. What is more noticeable is a change of religious longing meeting place. Most of the Americans have not lost their spiritual beliefs: according to the same survey, 83 percent of them believe in God or a universal spirit, 86 percent believe in the soul or spirit and 70 percent believe in an afterlife. The appetite lives; the institutions which formerly grouped it are not so obeyed.
Online Christianity has gotten used to adapting to that new reality. The language spoken by Christian podcasters and influencers is of intimacy, less preaching, more sitting close to a friend on the couch; it makes believers feel accessible without the need to enter the house of worship. We are like, listen, we are two mess-ups, too. It is all right, co-host of the Girl Gone Bible Arielle Reitsma told The Times of influencer-led faith groups. The strategy can be an intermediary to individuals seeking meaning but skeptical of institutions, or a replacement, in which case the content can be comforting and the communal obligations are voluntary.
In the meantime, the physical church is stressed, but in less noticeable ways. Lifeway Research projected that in 2024, 4,000 Protestant churches would close and 3,800 open, a minor net loss, but is a churn indicator. It is not the gap, but the context that is significant: congregations stay on the open with fewer people and fewer means, and the future will be greatly reliant on new church plants and new communities instead of a general reversion to inherited practices.
More personal than branding strategy is religious switching, which drives the churn. Pew identifies 35 percent of U.S. adults that have switched (or shifted into no religion) since childhood, and Christianity is losing many more than gaining. Religious upbringing also seems to be weaker when it comes to the youngest adults, whereas nonreligious upbringing seems to be stronger, a kind of asymmetry that is redefining the next generation even before any virus-hymn has any opportunity.
In that regard, the increased cultural volatility of Christianity appears rather less of resurrection than restructuring. It is able to bloom, as beautiful, as content, as the kind of lightweight identity. Institutional faith is not satisfied with recognition, it demands time, submission, and community life that is unstreamable.
What seems all around us is yet in reality seldom experienced.
