A couple items about religion today.
Even the best of the media love to identify supposed “trends,” especially if they’re counter-intuitive. Thus there have been articles in newspapers and online about how the decline in religiosity in America is reversing. Wishful thinking, by some?
Jerry Coyne, 17 Feb 2026: There isn’t a revival of religion in America
I was sent the article below I mentioned the ubiquitous claim that there’s a religious revival in America, supposedly because people are experiencing a loss of “meaning and purpose.” The return to religion, as the MSM and some liberals like to say, is because filling the “God-shaped hole” in our souls with religion will help set this cockeyed world aright.
But is there a religious revival? I’ve been dubious. All the evidence for it I can see is the slowdown in the continuing rise of religious “nones” (people without formal affiliation to a church) in the last few years. Here’s a graph showing that as documented by the Gallup organization…
(Graph shown above.)
And then discussion of an article denying any so-called religious revival.
ARC: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, Maggie Phillips, 28 Jan 2026: There Is No Religious Revival, subtitled “Trend stories about rising religiosity are not supported by evidence”
Coyne quotes Phillips and I’ll quote one of his quotes, which begins by citing claims of the revival. Followed by:
But it’s hardly clear that this talk of religious “revival,” while nice wish fulfillment for many, is backed up by the evidence. The Harvard Catholic Center revival consists of eighty students. With Harvard’s graduate and undergraduate population of over 24,000, many thousands of whom are Roman Catholic, that’s a pretty capacious definition of “booming.”
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Are we actually on the threshold of a new Great Awakening? Probably not. As religion demographer Ryan Burge (who teaches at the Danforth Center, which produces Arc) never tires of pointing out, accounts of America’s great religious revival have been greatly exaggerated.
“About 25 percent of Americans report attending a house of worship on a typical weekend,” Burge wrote recently in Deseret News. “If that rose by even three points—a small but noticeable increase—that would mean 10 to 12 million more people in church today than just six months ago. That’s hard to imagine, given that there are only about 350,000 houses of worship nationwide.”
Numeracy.
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Does it matter? Why should I care? Because I’m always curious about why people are religious, especially if they’re recent converts. (One can understand those who were inculcated early in childhood.)
Here’s a book review in today’s NYT.
NY Times, Timothy Egan, 17 Feb 2026: What Is the Argument for Believing in God?, subtitled “In ‘Why I Am Not an Atheist,’ Christopher Beha makes the case for faith.”
The book is subtitled “The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer,” and according to the review is in part a response to Bertrand Russell’s famous essay “Why I am not a Christian” (which I reviewed here).
What can we glean from this review about the reason why Beha succumbed to faith? (And which faith? Christian, of course.) Well, he had a vision. The review begins:
Christopher Beha’s long and winding road from well-read atheist to even better-read Christian begins with a compelling image: An angel appears to him. Not Jimmy Stewart’s befuddled buddy Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but a demanding and persistent apparition.
As he explains in his deep-dive meditation on faith and philosophy, “Why I Am Not an Atheist,” the spirit told him to put his trust in God. “This was no dream,” he writes of the initial visitation in the mid-1990s, when he was 15. “I was awake — I am as certain of that as I’m certain that I’m awake while I write these words — and a terrifying presence was communicating to me.”
To his credit, Beha realizes this might have been an hallucination associated with sleep paralysis. But… my words: he *wants* to believe. He reads the Harvard Classics, he reads the “new atheists”, and asks about atheism, “what’s the point?” He needs a reason. And the only reason he knows is what he grew up with.
He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.”
Sorry, but to me this argument is overly familiar and entirely understandable psychologically. There’s no there there.
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Yet we have another bit of evidence… Beha wrote a guest essay for NYT a week ago.
NY Times, guest essay by Christopher Beha, 11 Feb 2026: Ash Wednesday and the Burden of Living Your Beliefs
He writes about how he embraces Lent. And why the tradition is so important to him. He thinks deeply, but to me, his perspective is narrow. He’s unaware of the possibilities that lie beyond the religion of his ancestors. Still, perhaps he’s dimly aware of this.
I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism.
More things in Heaven and Earth.
