Reports of Christianity's Death May Be Premature

Rod Martin reports that "Christianity’s Decline in America Has Halted, and May Now Have Reversed." Martin offers two explanations:

    First, he believes that the decline was being led by people who didn't truly believe or were shaky in their faith who were leaving. But now that those types are mostly gone, the decline halted. He explains (bold in original):

    But why? Why would it stop? If the problem is that Christianity is outdated or offensive to our culture, why wouldn’t we continue to collapse?

    The answer is simple, as I’ve been telling you for decades. The people who were leaving Christianity were not leaving because conservatives were “mean,” or because Christians “lacked winsomeness,” or because the church failed to wrap historic orthodoxy in the therapeutic language of NPR. 

    They left because they were leftists. The belief system of the modern Democrat Party is anathema to the Christian faith.

    Or let me put that another way: the fakers have left.

    There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.

    And they don’t.

    So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.

    Second, Martin links the reversal to a growing number of young conservative men turning to Christianity. He notes: "Young conservative men helped drive the stabilization, and they may now be helping drive the reversal. They are embracing Christianity as part of a broader rejection of leftist ideology, secular despair, and the cultural war against masculinity itself." And it seems the numbers support this:

    Gallup’s newest data show a remarkable shift among young men ages 18–29. In 2024–25, 42 percent of young men said religion is “very important” in their lives, up from 28 percent just two years earlier. Young women, by contrast, remained roughly flat at about 30 percent. Gallup says young men now surpass young women on this measure by a statistically significant margin, a stunning reversal of the long-standing pattern in which young women were more religious than young men.

    Let’s put that in perspective. For the first time in 300 years, among young adults aged 18-24, the gender gap in religiosity has flipped. Historically, women have long been 15-20 percentage points more religious than men (which accounts for much of the church and the clergy’s feminization). But among Generation Z, those days are over.

    This is a very, very big deal.

    My LDS readers may be wondering about all this as it seems the LDS Church is still drifting left and embracing "social justice," DEI, and illegal immigration. For instance, the recent pronouncement allowing women to serve in Sunday School presidencies notwithstanding Paul's admonition in 1 Timothy 2:12. But looking at the statistics, you will see that the Church seems to be following the same trend lines as Christianity in general, albeit lagging by several years. This is illustrated by this article from April 21, 2026: "Why Latter-day Saints appear to be politically shifting to the left." The article explains that contrary to the general trend among Christian denominations, "[o]ver the last 18 years, [LDS] members moved 19 points to the left, according to a new report from the global analytics firm YouGov based on data from the Cooperative Election Survey." However, those members moving to the Left are less devout:

    ... When [Alex Bass, a data scientist] plotted the share of devout Latter-day Saints — those with the highest levels of religious practice, such as praying and attending church — and the share of Latter-day Saints who identify as Republican, they seem to be declining in tandem.

    Of course, correlation isn’t always causation. Bass said, however, the political beliefs of the different devoutness groups haven’t changed — devout members are firmly Republican, and cultural members are near the political center. Now, there are just more Latter-day Saints who are less devout and less Republican.
    
    The share of devout Latter-day Saints dropped from 52% in 2008-2012 to 39% in 2021-2025. Cultural members, those who attend church less than once a month, grew from 21% to 31%. 

And in going to Bass's blog, he reports that there is some data showing a resurgence in Church activity, but warns that "the limited data we have more likely suggests a retrenchment where those who remain are more likely to participate in all religious measures, but people are lost at the fringes." And in line with what Martin was saying, Bass notes: "Looking at party affiliation, in-line with the practice metrics and increasing 'devout' status, we see a rise in Republican Party affiliation. This again shows how strongly correlated these two things are!" 

    The correlation shouldn't be all that surprising. Church members were, prior to the 1970s, roughly split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, but as the Democrats moved ever leftward, the membership shifted to voting Republican. Given the current state of the Democratic party and its embrace of communist theories if not outright communism, it is notable that on July 3, 1936, the First Presidency of the Church issued a statement concerning communism that warned members that communism was anathema to both the teachings of the Church and to our Constitutional form of government, stating in part:

    Since Communism, established, would destroy our American Constitutional government, to support Communism is treasonable to our free institutions, and no patriotic American citizen may become either a Communist or supporter of Communism.

[snip]

    Furthermore, it is charged by universal report, which is not successfully contradicted or disproved, that Communism undertakes to control, if not indeed to proscribe the religious life of the people living within its jurisdiction, and that it even reaches its hand into the sanctity of the family circle itself, disrupting the normal relationship of parent and child, all in a manner unknown and unsanctioned under the Constitutional guarantees under which we in America live. Such interference would be contrary to the fundamental precepts of the Gospel and to the teachings and order of the Church. Communism being thus hostile to loyal American citizenship and incompatible with true Church membership, of necessity no loyal American citizen and no faithful Church member can be a Communist.    

Leftists cannot abide Christianity and Christianity cannot abide Leftism. So eventually the Leftists, where they are unsuccessful in destroying a religious institution, will eventually leave.