Numbers don't back talk of religious revival

Alternet -    Christian conservatives, including but not limited to supporters of President Donald Trump, like to claim that there is a Christian revival occurring right now in America, but The New York Times’ Lauren Jackson pointed out Sunday that the truth is much more complicated.

“Anecdotes don’t make a national trend,” Jackson wrote. “And experts have urged caution: ‘These stories are a very small drop in a very large ocean, whose currents have for decades been taking people away from religion,’ said David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame who researches secularization. ‘For us to call this a true revival, we would need to see a level of conversion that we have never seen in the history of the United States.’ And Pew Research refuted claims of a Gen Z revival, writing that there is ‘no clear evidence that this kind of nationwide religious resurgence is underway.’

Jackson observed that people have stopped leaving churches altogether, and the pausing of this symptom of secularization is “a big deal. It upends decades of assumptions that the U.S. was on an inevitable march toward godlessness.” At the same time, “that doesn’t mean a revival is underway, that suddenly the country is rushing back to the pews. Religious change doesn’t happen that quickly.”