All over the world, the Spirit is moving
- Bishop Michael Hough
- Jul 23
- 14 min read
The election of Pope Leo comes amidst a new look at the way the Church is seeing itself in the West, and despite pundits, it is clear that far from dying out, Christians find themselves in a time of rapid Christian revival.
Church progressives, along with those who want to see the Church break away from many of its traditions, particularly in the areas of liturgy and ethics, the elevation of the new pope from Chicago has turned out to be a disappointment. Surprise surprise! They had not considered what the Holy Spirit may have had in mind with that election.
The new pope is not the ecclesiastical wokista they have been longing for and probably praying for. Behind this relatively unknown prelate lies a genuine man of God called by God to serve a Western world that has turned away from the Heavenly Kingdom and replaced it with a darker kingdom of this world. His election comes at a time when there is evidence of a recovery of religious feeling in the West.
This revival should not be overplayed, as it is very much a tentative movement and faces enormous challenges both inside and outside the Christian community. There is no objection, however, to the statement that religion has been on the decline in most Western countries.
Reliable studies suggest that the decline remains a reality in most Western countries, particularly in Europe, where well over 50 per cent of people under the age of 30 do not identify with any religion.
In 1965, 70 per cent of respondents to a Gallup poll said religion is ‘very important’ in their lives. Today, fewer than half of Americans – 45 per cent – say religion is ‘very important’.
Europe’s embracing of a post-Christian society has been starkly illustrated by research showing a majority of young people in a dozen countries do not follow a religion.
The survey of 16- to 29-year-olds found the Czech Republic is the least religious country in Europe, with 91% of that age group saying they have no religious affiliation.
Between 70% and 80% of young adults in Estonia, Sweden and the Netherlands also categorise themselves as non-religious.
The most religious country is Poland, where 17% of young adults define themselves as non-religious, followed by Lithuania with 25%.
In the UK, only 7% of young adults identify as Anglican, fewer than the 10% who categorise themselves as Catholic.
Young Muslims, at 6%, are overtaking those who consider themselves part of the country’s established church.
The figures are published in a report, Europe’s Young Adults and Religion, by Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University in London. They are based on data from the European Social Survey 2014-16.
Religion was “moribund”, he said. “With some notable exceptions, young adults increasingly are not identifying with or practising religion.” The trajectory was likely to become more marked. “Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years,” Bullivant said.
The trend of religious affiliation was repeated when young people were asked about religious practice. Only in Poland, Portugal and Ireland did more than 10% of young people say they attend services at least once a week.
In the Czech Republic, 70% said they never went to church or any other place of worship, and 80% said they never prayed.
In the UK, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, between 56% and 60% said they never go to church, and
Between 63% and 66% said they never pray.
Among those identifying as Catholic, there was wide variation in levels of commitment. More than 80% of young Poles say they are Catholic, with about half going to mass at least once a week. In Lithuania, where 70% of young adults say they are Catholic, only 5% go to mass weekly.
According to Bullivant, many young Europeans “will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural and religious identities just aren’t being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them.”
“The new default setting is ‘no religion’, and the few who are religious see themselves as swimming against the tide,” he said. “In 20- or 30-year’s time, mainstream churches will be smaller, but the few people left will be highly committed.”
But not everything is indicative of a woe-is-me future. Recently, for example, there has been some evidence of renewal in decidedly secular Europe. France’s Catholic Church claims to have baptised 45 per cent more people this Easter than it did last year. And, according to the Bible Society, the UK is undergoing a similar conversion. It reports that the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has quadrupled, from four per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent today. The Bible Society said there are two million more people attending church now than there were six years ago.
According to an average of all 2023 Gallup polling, about three in four Americans said they identify with a specific religious faith.
By far the largest proportion, 68%, identifies with a Christian religion,
including 33% who are Protestant,
22% Catholic and
13% who identify with another Christian religion or simply as a "Christian."
Seven per cent identify with a non-Christian religion,
including 2% who are Jewish,
1% Muslim and
1% Buddhist, among others.
Twenty-two per cent of Americans said they have no religious preference, and 3% did not answer the question.
Social commentators have seen this initial resurgence of religion as being something of a counterbalance to the decline in marriage and family, community and civil life, a decline that has in some ways been accelerated by technology. This is where Pope Leo comes onto the scene. In one of his earliest statements, he named artificial intelligence as humanity’s primary challenge: ‘In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour’
It is not all that difficult to understand some of the pressures that are on more technically focussed younger people as technology and AI finds more and more ways to creep into our daily living. There is even a word for this: ‘transhumanism’.
This theory bases human evolution on technology. Therefore, man can only improve, increase and enhance his physical and cognitive qualities if he adopts technological and scientific advances in his organism, such as nanotechnology, genetic engineering, cybernetics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
On the other hand, there is no limit to this theory. Consequently, experts who base their knowledge on this philosophy claim that humans can change, dominate and override natural events such as old age, guilt, suffering and even death. Furthermore, they believe that man can transform his morphology, choosing between various options for the propagation of the species. Some of the transhumanists go so far as to talk about the possibility of leaving aside the human body by transferring all the “information” contained in each individual into a computer. There is a whole philosophy on this going back to the time of Julian Huxley in 1957…
Pope Leo has focused on this new version of the social and moral problems that arose with the Industrial Revolution in 1760. Transhumanism sees ethics and mortality as flaws in our human condition that can be “fixed” by technology, with Mark Zuckerberg even claiming that the pervasive and destructive loneliness of modern society can be addressed by AI-generated avatars assuming the roles of friends and therapists.
Going back to Barna’s latest data on the state of the Church, 66 per cent of all U.S. adults say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus that is still important in their life today. That marks a 12-percentage-point increase since 2021, when commitment levels reached their lowest in more than three decades of Barna tracking.
The Barna Group, often referred to simply as Barna, is a research organisation in the United States that focuses on studying faith, culture, and leadership. They conduct research, primarily in the US but also globally, to provide insights for churches and businesses. Barna's research covers various topics, including faith trends, cultural shifts, and generational differences.
What this suggests is that there appears to have been a significant movement for spiritual renewal in the USA. Commitment to Jesus was lowest in 2021 and 2022, when it bottomed out at 54 per cent. Since then, the research shows a steady, year-over-year increase in the key indicator.
In real terms, this climb in public sentiment towards Jesus means that there are nearly 30 million more U.S. adults who claim to be following Jesus today than in 2021.
Something has changed, and that something has led to a renewal of interest in Jesus. Rather than increasing in irrelevance and possibly disappearing, Christianity appears to be undergoing a significant transformation. “Undeniably, there is renewed interest in Jesus,” says David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna. “Many people have predicted the growing irrelevance of Christianity; however, this data shows that spiritual trends have a dynamism and can, indeed, change. This is the clearest trend we’ve seen in more than a decade, pointing to spiritual renewal. Even more heartening and exciting is how, for the first time, “Barna has recorded such spiritual interest being led by younger generations.”
Gen Z & Millennials Fuel the Turn to Jesus
Among the biggest drivers of the Jesus resurgence are younger generations—particularly Gen Z and Millennials, replacing the Elders and Boomers who had previously been seen as more committed Christians than younger generations. Barna puts this change down to the impact the pandemic had on the lives of many across society. Since then, Millennials and Gen Z have shown significant increases in commitment to Jesus, while Boomers and Gen X have remained mostly flat in their commitment levels to Jesus.
As if that was not counterintuitive enough, Barna notes that it is men—especially younger men—who are more likely to be Jesus followers than are younger women. For example, among Gen Z men, commitment to Jesus jumped 15 percentage points between 2019 and 2025. Millennial men saw a similar spike of 19 percentage points.
This suggests that for young people who are very much agreeing with advances in AI understand that no matter how clever technology becomes, AI can never take the place of human contact. What the philosophy of transhumanism does is highlight how that road is little more than a dead end when it comes to growing a sense of wellbeing, belonging and meaning to life. But AI, no matter how cleverly developed, cannot replace human contact in the physical world. It proves itself to be anti-human, destructive of all the Creator God had in mind.
Social commentators have also observed how there has been an increase in the number of very public and widely accepted rebellions against this form of atheism. Some of the more well-known intellectuals include people such as Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Not to be left out in this remarkable transformation of the way the world in the West seems to be moving has been the revival of ‘natural theology’ among a growing number of scientists. Many of these find themselves working in such fields as biology and physics to evoke a less random understanding of the universe.
This is another case of the turning wheel. Men such as Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler openly embraced religion as they plumbed the frontiers of science. Albert Einstein, noting that his theories devastated notions of a static universe, moved from an agnostic orientation to one that acknowledged what he called ‘a cosmic religious feeling’.
“Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually, the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.”
Einstein’s German contemporary Werner Heisenberg, a theoretical physicist, one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics describes this conversion with a colourful metaphor: ‘The first gulp of the natural sciences will turn you into an atheist’, he wrote, ‘but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you’. And further on this,
“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”
Joel Kotkin writing in Spiked, sums much of this up with the observation that in the long run, the key to religious revival lies not with great intellectuals, but at the grassroots level. Christianity has always produced its best among people seeking to improve their lives, most notably in Africa and among immigrants. In America and elsewhere, evangelical churches and outward-looking Catholic missionaries, like Leo, bring a message of hope to the world’s lower and working classes, striving for a better future.
Is the growth of Christianity a gift to the West?
The answer appears to be very much a “yes”. Increasingly, evidence suggests that Christianity is an antidote to many of the ills of the modern West, from shrinking families to an epidemic of anxiety, depression and loneliness.
Christian values help families address the anti-family movement that has caused so much heartache, violence and poverty across America, but particularly in black communities. According to recent studies, the fertility rate of women attending weekly religious services is significantly higher than that of women who don’t go to church at all. As families play a critical role in building community cohesion, something much needed in the modern West, a greater number of women attending church can only be considered a good thing.
Christians have, by virtue of their faith traditions and understanding of biblical teachings, always had the needs of the poor and the marginalised near the centre of their life in the world. It was expected of them by God. This continues today. In the US, for example, religious adherents continue to be the biggest contributors to charities. Sixty-five per cent of people who attend church weekly give to the poor, compared with 41 per cent among the non-religious. Overall, 73 per cent of charitable contributions come from religious sources, while nearly 60 per cent of beds for the homeless are provided by faith-based institutions. A good study of this can be found in the Philanthropy Roundtable.
This is not the only humane task Christian churches continue to commit to, for it has always been at the forefront of the education of the societies in which it found itself working. Much of America’s success, for example, can be attributed to the actions of the faithful among its immigrant population. John Hughes, an Irish immigrant who became New York’s first Catholic archbishop in 1850, helped build the city’s extensive Catholic education system. According to recent research, Hughes’s endeavours played a key role in turning the once-impoverished masses of European migrants – Italian, Irish and Polish – to well-above-average education levels and, in turn, earnings. Little has changed: boys who attend religious school, notes Tulane University sociologist Ilana Horwitz, are twice as likely to graduate from college as those in public schools.
Catholic education in Australia has an equally significant role to play in the early development of the nation, with the following sites representative of the abundance of evidence supporting the importance of the role of education for all Catholic communities.
The social sciences also suggest that religious faith bestows other critical social benefits. For instance, just 10 per cent of the religiously observant say they have no close friends, a number that almost doubles for those who have no faith. According to a recent Harvard study, religious students also enjoy better health outcomes.
For reasons that extend far beyond the boundaries of this reflection, young people today are showing themselves to be limited by mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and an overall lack of purpose and meaning in life. Considering traditional religions’ emphasis on generosity and community, it is hardly surprising to find that 61 per cent of studies find less depression among the religious.
None of the above can be said to apply to all Christian denominations. The more liberal traditions, like those of the mainstream Protestant groups, do not seem to be benefiting from this movement towards renewal. Traditions that have a strong emphasis on traditional Christianity, whose roots go back to the more biblical teachings that we find in the New Testament, are the ones attracting younger people. Their teachings would reflect traditional views on homosexuality, trans, the sanctity of family and the importance of hard work. This is evidenced in the growth among Roman Catholic communities.
After the moral chaos of the 60’s and 70’s, it is now clear that a core part of the renewed Church is its preservation and reinvigoration of its traditional teachings. It is less and less likely to feel under pressure to accommodate modern progressive philosophies into its moral and theological position in the world. Barna points out that in 2019, more Protestant churches closed than opened in the US as mainstream, increasingly woke denominations bled members. Once-dominant Protestant churches (including the Anglicans – Episcopalians) have gone from roughly 50 per cent of Americans in the 1950s to barely nine per cent today. In contrast, more conservative faiths remain robust. Church data from 34 Protestant denominations and groups found that 4,500 churches closed in 2019, while about 3,000 new congregations were started.
There are maybe 12-13 million members, at least on paper, remaining in Mainline Protestantism, down from 30 million 60 years ago. The more traditional, newer denominations include maybe 1.5 to 2 million members. According to Ryan Burge, for the first time, Mainline Protestants are now less than 10 per cent of the U.S. population, down from 50 per cent in the 1950s, currently comprising about 9 per cent. Even this number is inflated by counting all who identify as Mainline. Actual church members equal about 5 per cent of U.S. population.
If the Church is to continue in its revitalisation, it is going to have to ensure it avoids falling into the progressive mindset that seems to have captured the West and led to this sense of loss of direction, ruling out the more liberal positions on issues like gender, gay marriage and open borders. The truth is that the laity is, if anything, conservative on cultural and moral issues. The same can be said of the Jewish communities. Reform and even conservative synagogues are struggling, while orthodox Judaism, particularly the thriving Chabad movement, is gaining in both members and influence.
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-american-jewish-community-will-look-different-in-50-years
and a very interesting and informative article:
Conclusion:
A religious recovery may be just starting under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit. Those individuals and communities who have held strongly to traditional theology and moral theological norms, resisting the temptations of the Woke progressives appear to be vindicated. There has been a long era of persecution of many of these traditionalists for the single sin of holding fast to what has been God given. Contrary to all expectations, the future may be more conducive to religious observance than anyone might have predicted a few years ago. Nor, it seems, will this be a bad thing. If churches and faith communities are to tap into this Spirit of revitalisation and renewal, they need to ensure that at every level of life in the world, what is offered to people, what is taught and what the life of prayer and worship offers is an intimate engagement with the God who has revealed himself and his will for the world in and through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Bishop Michael Hough July 2025
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