For roughly two centuries, the enlightened man was assured that religion was a childhood illness from which civilization would eventually recover. God, we were told, had served His temporary function. He had frightened the peasants into behaving, decorated the ceilings of Europe, inspired a tolerable amount of organ music, and then, having outlived His usefulness, was to be shown politely to the door by science, democracy, psychotherapy, and the social sciences.
The modern world did not merely doubt Christianity. It announced its succession. Where Christianity had given man sin, modernity gave him neurosis. Where Christianity had given him salvation, modernity gave him progress. Where Christianity had given him the Church, modernity gave him the university, the bureaucracy, the expert class, the newspaper, the therapeutic office, and, in due course, the Human Resources department. This was said to be an improvement.
Then postmodernity arrived and, with the manners of a starving raccoon, began eating the wiring inside the walls. It did not merely question God. It questioned truth, reason, nature, the self, the family, the nation, the body, beauty, language, history, sex, merit, and morality. If modernity had killed God in the name of reason, postmodernity mocked reason itself and called the ruins liberation.
And now we find ourselves surrounded by a curious spectacle. The old churches are diminished, but the religious impulse is everywhere. The secular age has not produced a race of calm rationalists. It has produced lonely mystics, political zealots, psychedelic pilgrims, gender metaphysicians, algorithmic prophets, climate apocalyptics, wellness ascetics, nationalist revivalists, and young men rediscovering incense, Latin, Orthodoxy, masculinity, fasting, hierarchy, and God.
Atheist liberalism won the institutions, but it did not win the soul.
That is the thesis of our age: secular liberalism did not abolish religion. It merely abolished Christianity’s public authority, then watched as inferior religions rushed in to claim the abandoned altar.
The Numbers Do Not Yet Show a Great Christian (Re)Awakening
Let us begin, inconveniently, with the facts, since even prophets should occasionally check the weather.
There is not yet clear evidence of a mass American return to Christianity. Anyone claiming that the churches are suddenly overflowing from sea to shining sea is peddling either hope, nostalgia, or a newsletter subscription. The long decline of American Christianity remains real. In 2007, roughly 78 percent of American adults identified as Christian. By the most recent large Pew Religious Landscape Study, that figure had fallen to about 62 percent. The unaffiliated, the famous “nones,” rose from roughly 16 percent in 2007 to about 29 percent.
This is not a trivial change. It is a civilizational fact. A country that once assumed a broad Christian moral grammar now struggles to agree on whether reality itself has grammar at all.
But the more interesting development is not that Christianity declined. We already knew that. The more interesting development is that the decline appears to have slowed, and perhaps, for now, leveled off. Pew’s recent data suggests that the Christian share of the American population has hovered around the low 60s for several years. The unaffiliated share, after surging for decades, also appears to have stabilized.
That does not prove revival. But it does suggest exhaustion. The secular wave has not crashed, but it may have reached its high-water mark. After decades of institutional secularization, after the collapse of inherited religious loyalty, after every Netflix prestige drama and university department took its obligatory swing at the priest, pastor, father, mother, soldier, saint, and small-town hypocrite, America has not become purely secular. It has become spiritually disorganized.
Gallup’s data still shows religious participation at low levels. A majority of Americans now say they seldom or never attend religious services. Less than half say religion is very important in their daily lives. This is not exactly the Book of Acts.
Yet one must not confuse low church attendance with the disappearance of metaphysical hunger. Pew has found that large majorities of Americans still believe in some spiritual reality beyond the visible world. Most Americans believe people have souls. Many describe themselves as spiritual even when they are not religious. A sizable portion of the country now says, in effect, “I do not trust the church, but I do not believe the universe is dead.”
That sentence may be the seed of the next age.
Failure of Atheist Liberalism
Atheist liberalism had a simple proposition: remove oppressive religious structures, and human beings will become freer, kinder, more rational, and more authentic. This was a flattering theory, especially to the class of people who imagined themselves as the freer, kinder, more rational, and more authentic replacements.
But man does not live by debunking alone. Human beings need more than choice. They need meaning. They need rituals for birth, death, marriage, guilt, forgiveness, sacrifice, failure, and renewal. They need a moral order that explains why their appetites should not rule them. They need sacred time, sacred space, sacred obligations, sacred prohibitions, and sacred stories. They need some account of suffering beyond “that is unfortunate.” They need some answer to death beyond “well, technically, your molecules continue.”
Liberal secularism was excellent at liberating the individual from inherited constraints. It was far less competent at explaining why the liberated individual should get out of bed in the morning, marry, have children, bury his father, forgive his enemy, restrain his lust, honor his ancestors, defend his nation, or endure agony without despair.
So into the vacuum came substitutes.
Politics became religion. Race became religion. Sexual identity became religion. The nation became religion. The market became religion. Therapy became religion. Science, or rather “Science,” became religion. Health became religion. Climate became religion. The body became religion. The self became religion. Even atheism, with its conferences, saints, heresiarchs, catechisms, excommunications, and missionaries, briefly became religion.
This is the great embarrassment of secular man. He did not stop worshiping. He merely became less aware of what he worshiped.
Christianity told man he was fallen and needed grace. Secular liberalism told man he was oppressed and needed liberation. Postmodernism told man he was constructed and needed deconstruction. The present age tells man he is anxious and needs medication, affirmation, identity, content, and perhaps a cold plunge before sunrise.
It is not obvious that this is an improvement.
Postmodernity Didn’t Kill Religion. It Made Everything Religious.
Modernity could still produce atheists with backbone. The old atheist believed in truth, science, progress, argument, civilization, and moral seriousness. He rejected God but often retained a Christian skeleton. He believed in conscience, duty, dignity, rational debate, and the improvement of mankind. He was, in many cases, a Christian heretic who had misplaced Christ.
Postmodernity produced something stranger: a society skeptical of every inherited truth except its own latest moral panic. It trained people to interrogate power, language, and institutions, which was sometimes necessary and often fruitful. But then it forgot to stop interrogating. Eventually nothing was left standing except suspicion itself.
This is why postmodern culture feels spiritually uninhabitable. It can expose hypocrisy, but it cannot absolve sin. It can deconstruct myths, but it cannot found a civilization. It can mock fathers, priests, kings, flags, churches, borders, traditions, and moral codes, but it cannot explain what should replace them. It is magnificently skilled at clearing land and remarkably poor at building homes.
Yet the human need for sacred order remains. So even the most postmodern spaces become liturgical. They develop purity codes, forbidden words, public confessions, scapegoats, saints, martyrs, inquisitions, feast days, pilgrimages, icons, blasphemy laws, and rituals of humiliation. The only thing missing is forgiveness.
This is why political religion has become so ferocious. It offers sin without redemption, confession without absolution, community without charity, and apocalypse without resurrection.
Christianity had original sin. The new religions have inherited guilt. Christianity had repentance. The new religions have cancellation. Christianity had saints. The new religions have influencers. Christianity had devils. The new religions have “problematic people.” Christianity had heaven. The new religions have “being on the right side of history,” a phrase almost impressive in its ability to sound pious while meaning absolutely nothing.
The sacred did not vanish. It metastasized.
This is also why the Trump phenomenon deserves more than the usual partisan sneer or tribal defense. Many of the same Christians who rightly mocked secular people for turning politics into religion proceeded, with magnificent lack of self-awareness, to do precisely the same thing with their own champion. A political leader may claim Christianity, praise Christianity, pose beside Christianity, and promise to defend Christianity, but if his public life is marked by serial deception, sexual scandal, cruelty, vanity, and contempt for the innocent, then true Christians must ask whether they are defending the faith or merely baptizing power. The scandal is not that sinners exist in politics. Christianity has always known that sinners exist everywhere. The scandal is when Christians forget that sin is sin as soon as the sinner is useful to their faction.
This, too, is part of the postmodern condition. Once truth becomes subordinate to narrative, and morality becomes subordinate to power, even Christianity can be repurposed as costume, slogan, tribe, and weapon. Hypocrisy then becomes one of the great wedges between meaning-starved people and the Sacred they seek. Many who turn away from institutional Christianity are not fleeing Christ so much as fleeing the spectacle of men who praise Christ while excusing everything Christ condemned. The church cannot credibly call the world to repentance while acting as though repentance is only required of its enemies. If Christianity is to survive the modern critique and speak to the postmodern soul, it must recover the courage to judge its own idols first.
The Strange Return of Young Men
One of the most interesting countertrends is the apparent rise in religiosity among young men. Recent Gallup data suggests that men under 30 have become more likely to say religion is very important in their lives, rising sharply from earlier measurements. Some reporting also suggests increased attendance among young men, though the overall picture remains complicated.
This should not surprise us.
Young men have been among the great casualties of the postmodern order. They are told masculinity is dangerous, authority is suspect, ambition is oppressive, tradition is embarrassing, discipline is repression, and the past is mostly a crime scene. Then everyone expresses bewilderment when they retreat into pornography, video games, political extremism, steroids, nihilism, or Andrew Tate clips.
A serious religion offers young men something secular liberalism struggles to provide: order, discipline, sacrifice, brotherhood, hierarchy, moral demand, and a story in which their strength can be redeemed rather than merely denounced.
This is one reason Catholicism and Orthodoxy have become attractive in certain young male circles. They are not embarrassed by ritual. They do not decorate themselves in the beige carpeting of suburban therapeutic Protestantism. They have incense, icons, saints, chants, fasting, history, authority, and beauty. They do not begin every sentence by apologizing for existing.
Of course, this trend can be overstated. Anecdotes are not a census. A few young men discovering Latin Mass clips on YouTube does not constitute a national revival. Some highly publicized claims of Gen Z religious resurgence have later been challenged or withdrawn because of flawed survey data. Caution is necessary.
But the cultural signal matters even when the statistical wave is still uncertain. The fact that young men are looking toward older, stricter, more demanding forms of religion tells us something important. They are not merely looking for comfort. They are looking for form.
A civilization that gives its young men no noble road to discipline should not be surprised when they choose ignoble roads instead.
The Metamodern Religious Synthesis
If religion is returning, it is not returning to the same world it left.
A metamodern religious synthesis cannot simply rewind the tape to 1955. Too much has happened. Science happened. Darwin happened. Nietzsche happened. Freud happened. Marx happened. Biblical criticism happened. Feminism happened. The abuse scandals happened. Institutional collapse happened. The internet happened. The lonely, deracinated, overeducated, medically managed, algorithmically exhausted modern person cannot simply be ordered back into belief as though nothing occurred between the Council of Nicaea and TikTok.
The modern critique must be absorbed. The postmodern critique must be acknowledged. Religious institutions have abused power. Language can conceal domination. Communities can become cruel. Tradition can become dead habit. Authority can become self-protection. Piety can become performance. The skeptic has evidence. He is not merely wicked.
But the skeptic does not have a civilization. A metamodern Christianity would have to say: yes, we know the critiques. We know the church can become corrupt. We know believers can be hypocrites. We know texts have history. We know psychology matters. We know power matters. We know pluralism exists. We know doubt is not always rebellion. We know the old certainties cannot simply be stapled back onto the modern mind.
And still, Christ remains.
The metamodern religious posture is not naive certainty before the critique. It is faithful return after the critique. It is belief that has passed through irony and come out the other side, not untouched, but alive. It is second innocence, not first innocence. It is not the child who has never doubted. It is the adult who has doubted, suffered, read the footnotes, watched the institutions fail, and still kneels.
This is where Christianity may have unexpected strength. It is not merely a moral code. It is a story of incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection. It already knows that the world is broken. It already knows that institutions fail. It already knows that innocence is murdered. It already knows that truth is crucified by respectable authorities. Christianity does not need a cheerful view of human nature to survive. In fact, it has always regarded cheerful views of human nature with suspicion.
Postmodernism’s great discovery was that man is not as rational, neutral, or innocent as modern liberalism pretended. Christianity discovered this somewhat earlier.
Does Christianity Get Left Behind?
The question, then, is not whether the sacred will return. It already has. The question is what form it will take. Some will return to Christianity: Catholic, Orthodox, evangelical, Anglican, Pentecostal, high-church, low-church, house-church, and perhaps forms not yet fully visible. Some will seek “mere Christianity,” tired of denominational squabbles and hungry for the central drama of sin, sacrifice, redemption, and resurrection.
Others will build hybrid spiritualities: meditation, psychedelics, Jung, ecology, prayer, ancestral myth, therapy, and vague theism. Some of this will be shallow and ridiculous. Some of it will be sincere, searching, and perhaps preparatory. One should not mock every wanderer merely because he has not yet found the road.
Still others will choose darker substitutes. Political religion will remain tempting because it gives people enemies, meaning, and moral superiority without requiring holiness. Nationalism can become a sacred vessel, sometimes noble in its love of place and people, sometimes demonic when it forgets that God is not a tribal mascot. Psychedelics may reopen spiritual perception, but they cannot by themselves provide doctrine, discipline, or moral order. Fitness culture can restore the dignity of the body, but the body makes a poor god; it ages and dies, despite the supplements. Technology can promise immortality, but Silicon Valley’s version of eternal life often sounds like being trapped forever in a customer-service portal.
Christianity may not return as Christendom. It may not regain automatic cultural authority. It may not again become the assumed language of public life. But that may be precisely what purifies it.
A Christianity chosen freely in a post-Christian age may be smaller, stranger, and stronger than the Christianity inherited lazily in a nominally Christian one. The church may lose its place as wallpaper and recover its place as witness. It may cease being the respectable background music of bourgeois life and become, once more, an offense.
In that sense, Christianity is not necessarily being left behind. Cultural Christianity may be. Nominal Christianity may be. The Christianity of vague niceness, political respectability, and civic decoration may be. But Christianity as metaphysical rebellion against the empire of death remains very much in the arena.
Indeed, it may be one of the only things left with enough depth to survive the arena.
The Sacred Returns Either as Christ or as Counterfeit
The great mistake of secular liberalism was assuming that religion was an optional accessory rather than a permanent feature of human nature. It imagined that if you removed Christianity, people would become rational humanists. Instead, many became anxious idolaters.
They worship politics and call it justice. They worship appetite and call it freedom. They worship identity and call it authenticity. They worship the state and call it compassion. They worship the market and call it efficiency. They worship technology and call it transcendence. They worship themselves and call it healing.
Man will have gods. The only question is whether they are worthy of him. This is why the return of the sacred is not automatically good news. Religious hunger can lead to saints, cathedrals, families, repentance, beauty, courage, and civilization. It can also lead to cults, mobs, blood myths, ideological possession, and ecstatic cruelty. The soul deprived of true religion does not become unreligious. It becomes vulnerable.
The task of the metamodern age is not to pretend we can go back before doubt. Nor is it to remain trapped forever inside deconstruction. The task is to recover meaning after disenchantment, sincerity after irony, faith after critique, and sacred order after the collapse of both naive belief and smug unbelief.
And this, frankly, is why I remain a Christian. Not because I have never doubted. Not because I am blind to the failures of churches, pastors, institutions, denominations, movements, or the many ridiculous little tyrannies men have built while borrowing the language of God. I have seen enough of human nature to know that piety can become theater, doctrine can become weaponry, and the sacred can be dragged through the mud by the very people appointed to guard it.
But none of that disproves Christ. If anything, it proves why we needed Him in the first place.
I, for example, remain a Christian because I still fundamentally believe in grace. I believe man is fallen, not merely misinformed. I believe evil is real, not just socially constructed. I believe guilt cannot be therapized away, sin cannot be rebranded as authenticity, and the human soul cannot be healed by slogans, pills, politics, or self-esteem campaigns. I believe Jesus Christ atoned for my sins, not symbolically in some polite literary sense, but truly, mysteriously, and cosmically. I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I believe in the sacred God revealed in Scripture, the God who made the world, entered history, suffered under empire, died for sinners, and shattered death from the inside.
And yet I do not believe every person who searches outside the church is merely wicked or foolish. Many are doing what all honest souls do in a disenchanted age: groping through the dark for the outline of the holy. Some find it in beauty. Some in nature. Some in music, myth, discipline, family, sacrifice, psychedelics, philosophy, service, or silence. Some are not rejecting God so much as rejecting the cheap costume in which God was first presented to them. Many who think they are fleeing Christianity may actually be fleeing a counterfeit of it.
There is sacredness scattered throughout the world because the world was made by the Sacred. There are fragments of truth, flashes of beauty, hints of transcendence, and whispers of eternity everywhere. But fragments are not the whole. A candle is not the sun. A symbol is not the thing symbolized. The hunger in man is not finally for vibes, rituals, identities, politics, or private spiritual experiences. It is for the living God.
That is the scandal Christianity insists upon: that the sacred is not merely an atmosphere, not merely an emotional state, not merely an archetype buried in the human psyche, but a Person. The One and True God is not simply one option on the spiritual buffet. He is the source of every longing that sends us wandering through it.
So yes, I believe people can rediscover meaning in many places. I believe the sacred can break through cracked windows, pagan poems, mountain trails, hospital rooms, birth cries, deathbeds, ancient myths, and even the exhausted prayers of people who are not yet sure whom they are praying to. But in the deepest chamber of the heart, beneath all the cleverness, rebellion, trauma, irony, and fear, I believe every soul is searching for the same God.
Modernity killed Him and called it maturity. Postmodernity mocked Him and called it liberation. But man, poor restless creature that he is, kept searching anyway.
The sacred is returning because it never truly left.
And Christ remains because He was never merely an idea to be replaced. He was, and is, the answer to the question every age keeps asking in new disguises: Who will save us from ourselves?
