For nearly two decades, the story of faith in America seemed settled: church attendance was sliding, religious affiliation was shrinking and young adults were walking away from the churches that shaped their childhoods. The rise of the “nones” became one of the defining religious stories of the century, shorthand for a generation that hadn’t necessarily rejected God as much as lost confidence in the institutions claiming to speak for Him.
Lately, though, that story has become harder to tell.
Pew Research Center found that the long decline of Christianity in the U.S. appears to have slowed and may have leveled off, with Christians making up 62 percent of American adults in its 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study and the religiously unaffiliated holding steady at 29 percent. Bible sales rose 22 percent in the U.S. through October 2024, according to Circana BookScan data reported by The Wall Street Journal. Newer congregational research from the Hartford Institute found median in-person worship attendance has climbed from its pandemic low of 45 adults to 70, still far below the 137 reported in 2000 but no longer collapsing in the way many leaders feared.
The obvious temptation is to look at those numbers and declare a revival.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist who studies religion and author of The Vanishing Church, says the data simply doesn’t support that conclusion.
“There’s no revival coming to America, at least nothing I can see in the data,” Burge told RELEVANT. “That’s an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
That doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
Burge sees evidence that Christianity’s decline has plateaued and that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated has slowed. Gen Z appears only slightly less religious than millennials, a notable shift after decades in which each generation seemed substantially less religious than the one before it. But he draws a sharp distinction between stabilization and resurgence.
“A plateau isn’t the same thing as a comeback,” Burge said.
Glenn Packiam, lead pastor of Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa, California, and a senior fellow at Barna Group, agrees that the old narrative of relentless decline no longer tells the whole story.
“I think we’ve moved on to something else,” Packiam said.
He calls the current moment “curious skepticism.”
The phrase captures an unusual reality emerging across American religious life. People seem more willing to engage spiritual questions than they were a few years ago, yet many remain deeply wary of churches and religious institutions.
“There’s a rise in spiritual curiosity, but there is still a high degree of skepticism about religious institutions,” Packiam said.
To understand how America arrived here, Packiam points to the broader cultural shifts of the last quarter century. In the years following 9/11, public conversation was heavily influenced by the new atheists, figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who argued that religion wasn’t merely wrong but dangerous. Over time, that posture softened into something less combative and more indifferent. Faith wasn’t necessarily viewed as harmful; it simply seemed unnecessary.
Then came the pandemic.
Isolation, institutional failures and a broader crisis of meaning forced many people to reconsider questions they had largely ignored. Barna research has since found growing openness to Jesus, particularly among younger adults. Yet that renewed interest hasn’t translated into automatic trust.
“Church isn’t necessarily on the comeback,” Packiam said.
That distinction may be the most important takeaway from the current moment.
For Packiam, many people are revisiting Christianity after discovering that the alternatives weren’t as satisfying as they expected.
“There are folks that are in their early thirties, they’re getting into their careers and they’re like, ‘I walked away from all of it, didn’t believe it, got disillusioned, but I didn’t find anything better,’” he said.
Some replaced faith with politics. Others found meaning in ideological communities that promised belonging but often reproduced the same dynamics of insiders and outsiders.
“Cancel culture has a version of sin,” Packiam said. “You have violated, therefore you are shunned.”
What Christianity offers, he argues, is something many modern communities struggle to provide: a path back.
Grace, forgiveness and reconciliation remain compelling ideas in a culture that often has clear mechanisms for exclusion but fewer pathways toward restoration.
Burge’s research suggests many departures from church were less dramatic than the public conversation often assumes.
“When people leave church, it’s often because life changes,” he said. “They moved, got married, had kids or changed jobs.”
In other words, many people didn’t leave because they lost a theological debate or experienced a crisis of faith. Church simply became less central to their lives. As American culture grew more individualized and entertainment became increasingly accessible from home, participation in all kinds of institutions declined. Churches were hardly immune.
“We ask people why they left church, and it’s often just life circumstance,” Burge said.
That reality helps explain why curiosity alone won’t automatically reverse decades-long trends.
“People don’t become Christians because they lost the argument,” Burge said.
Instead, he believes churches often underestimate the role community plays in people’s spiritual lives.
“The church has always been a place of mixing and matching, of people from left, right and center, of old and young, white collar and blue collar, set side by side as sort of the great equalizer,” Burge said.
That observation overlaps with Packiam’s belief that churches should respond to skeptical curiosity with humility rather than defensiveness. He argues pastors need to engage difficult questions honestly, address serious objections to Christianity and demonstrate how faith speaks to the realities people encounter in everyday life.
At the same time, Packiam warns against reducing Christianity to sociology.
“Our radical claim is that the God of the universe is actually in the room through the Holy Spirit,” he said. “I don’t think we should shy away from that claim.”
Neither Packiam nor Burge believes the data supports declaring a revival.
Both, however, believe something has changed.
For Burge, the change is statistical. The rise of the religiously unaffiliated appears to have slowed, and the decline that defined so much of the last generation has reached a plateau.
For Packiam, the change is cultural. People who once dismissed faith entirely seem increasingly willing to reconsider it, even if they remain unconvinced that churches have earned their trust.
The story isn’t that Christianity is dying. The story also isn’t that America is suddenly rushing back to church.
Instead, the country appears to be entering a new phase—one marked by spiritual openness, institutional skepticism and a growing willingness to revisit questions many assumed had already been settled.
Curiosity is rising.
Whether trust follows remains an open question.
