The Wall Street Journal recently reported “booming” Bible sales (up 22%), and that “…there seems to be a surge in engagement particularly among members of Gen Z and college students.” Publishers Weekly said “the religious book category had the largest increase in sales” for 2024. A growing number of celebrities have come out publicly on their faith and are endorsing prayer apps, which are also becoming extremely popular. Faith based movies and series are at an all time high. On conservative news networks like Fox News and Newsmax, guests as well as journalists openly testify about the effects of their relationship with God on their life and career.

What’s going on?

The typical explanation for a spiritual renewal is that ‘Americans are worried about the future”, which creates a kind of 9/11 type of spiritual renewal, where churches were crammed full the Sunday after 9/11, and then back to normal after that. However, this doesn’t square with the data. Americans are actually more optimistic about the future than in recent times. Purchasing Bibles and things like public testimony of celebrities tend to represent longer commitments to belief than a quick fix to a church service.

Cultural Revolution

It is a consistent argument in my book, Modern Paganism, that a culture’s values are a reflection of its spiritual or religious values. And we have seen a large shift in the culture toward more conservative values, manifested in our last election. A swing to the conservative party does not necessarily represent a cultural revolution or a spiritual renewal, but this in this case it seems to. Conservatism is the political expression in America of many Christian values in public life.

We also see the cultural change in popular podcasts pushing back against the sexual revolution, such as author and podcaster Louise Perry, articles extolling the role of traditional marriage and motherhood by young women, a massive upsurge in people bailing from public education, a growing recognition that ‘therapy’ is a poor replacement for the transcendent truths found in Christianity, etc. This is not just a desire for economic sanity, but a rejection of the new ‘religion’ of wokeism.

When you keep hearing these strange beliefs (wokeism) described as a ‘violation of common sense’, you know you are dealing with something approaching religious belief.

Wokeism is a counterfeit spiritual awakening, in a fervent attempt to fill the moral and spiritual void by those rejecting Christianity. Until we realize this, we will never understand the motives of those who dogmatically embrace these repugnant ideas. It’s like trying to get cannibals to forsake their practice and belief. Over and over we’ve heard ‘we need to get back to common sense.’ Appeals to common sense don’t work among members of a cult. It’s a religious system that supplies moral validation, and until it’s replaced with a higher system, its adherents will not let it go. Religious belief can only be replaced with religious belief. We tried to replace Christianity with secularism, and that didn’t work out too well. Another religious belief rushed in to fill the void.

Normally culture is downstream from religious belief, but it can be the opposite, and in this case it appears to be so. All of the values which proceed from historical Biblical Christianity – economic responsibility, gender sanity, and the value of equality which includes freedom of expression have been reinforced by the larger population by a large margin, both Christians and secular people alike. Only the pagan religious zealots have held out. The crazy antics of activists you see on the news represents a tiny minority with megaphones, like the little wizard of Oz behind the curtain with a microphone. It is noise, not signal.

This cultural shift represents a return to the values of our historic faith, whether people embrace its source or not, which is the Christian faith. However, it seems many are recognizing the values they cherish in fact do come from the Christian faith that either they have walked away from or never truly had, thus the upsurge in interest in Christianity. Our original cultural values came from the Christian faith and it appears our return to those values is precipitating a return to the faith that created those values, at least by many. Only time will tell whether this trend continues and results in a true spiritual awakening in our country, or a temporary surge that subsides when the effects of the recent pagan weirdness in our society have fully dissipated. For now, the cultural changes we are seeing look to be fairly extensive and long lasting, with many being codified into law. History tells us people tend to turn to God when things get bad, and away from Him after He has rescued us from our enemies, including when the enemy is us. We need large numbers of people truly converted to see lasting change that can overcome the inherent corruption in human nature, and especially in leaders. We all need to be reminded where our values really come from. If we are enjoying the good fruit (common sense conservatism) of this tree, let’s put our roots down into the soil it came from – Biblical Christian faith. Tell your friends.