Slowing of religious decline points to ‘shifting’ faith landscape, experts say at New York Encounter

Recent claims of an emerging religious revival in the West may overstate the case, but there are clear signs that belief in God is rising, experts said Saturday at the New York Encounter, the annual conference hosted by members of Communion and Liberation.

Speaking at the gathering, Chip Rotolo, a research associate at the Pew Research Center, cited data showing that religious affiliation in the United States has declined steadily for decades. Yet recent findings from Pew’s Religious Landscape Study have offered reasons for cautious optimism among those concerned about the nation’s secularization.

According to Pew’s data, the share of U.S. adults identifying as Christian (63%) is down from 2007 levels (78%), but has held steady since 2020.

“The fact that the religious decline we’re so used to seeing is leveled off is a huge shift,” Rotolo said, noting that recent data shows that the number of Americans who are religiously affiliated, attend church and pray daily have “been very stable.”

He noted that this stabilization began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many might have expected religious participation to drop as churches closed and communities were forced to rethink worship and parish life.

“If you already had one foot out the door at your church, it would have been easy to step away,” Rotolo said. “But we’ve seen this remarkable stability. That has drawn a lot of attention, curiosity and hope.”

A second key finding has further fueled interest. According to Pew’s research, 92% of Americans express some form of spiritual outlook — meaning they believe in at least one of the following: that people have souls, that God exists, that there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, or that there is an afterlife.

“Something is definitely shifting in American religious life,” Rotolo said. “We can disagree and continue figuring out exactly what that is, but it’s certainly an interesting time to study.”

Also speaking at the panel was Justin Brierley, author of “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” Brierley said that although there have been questions raised about the methodology of surveys showing an increase in religiosity in the West, there has been a noticeable cultural shift away from the “New Atheism” popularized in the early 2000s by figures such as Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion.”

By the 2010s, Brierley said, he began to see public intellectuals acknowledging Christianity’s formative role in shaping Western civilization. Some, he added, have gone further — openly professing religious belief.

He pointed to the conversion of the Somali-born Dutch and American writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who in late 2023 published a viral essay titled “Why I’m Now a Christian.”

“When she came out with that article, it made a lot of people say, ‘If Ayaan Hirsi Ali — arguably one of the most prominent former atheists in the world — has changed her mind, it could happen to anyone,’” Brierley said.

Lauren Jackson, a religion columnist at The New York Times, said her outlet recently launched a series titled “Believing,” inspired in part by Pew’s findings on religious life in America.

“We took all this data together and made the claim that Americans haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion,” Jackson said. Through interviews and surveys, she added, many in the U.S. have expressed “an intense desire for belonging, for meaning, for community, for connection to the transcendent.”

That desire, however, is not always expressed within the walls of a church. The series has explored other avenues through which Americans seek spiritual meaning and communal identity, including the growing popularity of saunas and the sense of belonging fostered by soccer communities.

While the speakers stopped short of declaring a religious revival at work, they agreed that the current moment reflects a significant shift — one marked by a renewed openness to faith and the enduring human search for transcendence.

Brierley noted that to most people the once-popular atheists’ arguments in favor of science and technology as an alternative to religion, haven’t been convincing.

“I think as we’ve lost the Christian story in the modern West, it has led to people looking for other stories to make sense of their life. I think some people did for a while reach for the atheist materialist story,” he explained.

“When you look at where culture has actually gone and the science and technology we put in, it turns out we have made ourselves unhappier,” he said.

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