It’s hard to overstate how transformative the past decade has been in American life. One need only to do a quick survey of the political and social landscape at the dawn of 2015.

A decade ago, Bruce Jenner was still Bruce. The Supreme Court still allowed states to recognize what marriage is. The Republican presidential field was taking shape around Jeb Bush and Scott Walker; Donald Trump was best known as a reality TV host. Print media did not deploy racial capitalization disparities between “Black” and “white.” And American life in 2015 included a litany of cultural touchstones that no longer exist: the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians (including Chief Wahoo), the Dixie Chicks, Lady Antebellum, Splash Mountain, Aunt Jemima, the Boy Scouts of America, Stonewall Jackson High School… the list could go on. 

What’s most interesting about this retrospective is that the sweeping changes don’t always cut in the same direction. Sexual politics and cultural cancellations represent an accelerated liberalism; the developments within the Republican Party are decidedly the opposite. (Likewise, in 2024, my home county voted to restore the Stonewall Jackson name to its high school.) While the postwar era was defined by a clear narrative of the inevitable and ever-expanding triumph of liberal democracy and globalization, the decade that has followed 2015 paints a messier picture. Francis Fukuyama may still rally to the defense of his “end of history” thesis, arguing that it’s those pesky voters who are inhibiting liberal democracy’s triumph. But recent events have beleaguered the thesis more than the good former neocon would like to admit.  

It’s here that new findings from the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study (RLS) can help to clarify the meaning of the past decade. Since 2007, the RLS has provided the most authoritative figures on the size of U.S. religious groups. (The U.S. Census Bureau, which every ten years obsesses over how to define race and ethnicity, has been barred by Congress from collecting religious information since 1976—itself a telling sign of what our gerontocratic ruling class has valued.)

For years, the RLS showed a steady decline of self-professed Christians in the U.S., from 78% in 2007 down to 63% in 2019. This trend prompted significant consternation among groups that had long relied on a thoroughly Christian America. Perhaps most notable was the Republican National Committee’s “autopsy” of its 2012 election loss. In anticipation of seemingly inevitable demographic change, the RNC urged a downplaying of traditionally Christian issues like life and marriage in favor of liberal tenets like “inclusivity” and gay rights. 

But the latest RLS, released in February, shows that the trend was not inevitable. The decline of religiosity has leveled off, with the share of Americans identifying as Christians remaining over 60%.

Even more interesting, the Pew data reveal that Gen Z is a surprising contributor to the stabilization of religious decline. The youngest generation of American adults is about as religious as their older peers in the Millennial generation—bucking a well-established trend of declining religiosity as generations progress. Gen Z, of course, is the same cohort that delivered for Donald Trump above generational expectations for a Republican candidate. The kids may be alright.  

In this light, we can see that the dizzying changes of the past decade represent the dying lurches of a postwar consensus and a re-enchantment of the West. History, contra Fukuyama, is not linear, and epochal shifts will often entail volatility as the old order grapples with its demise. In other words, Pew’s RLS data is more evidence of what N.S. Lyons called the “end of the Long Twentieth Century.” And it may be the strongest evidence yet that we’ve truly turned the page.

Lyons is following Rusty Reno, who sensed in his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods that the era of a Western “open society” consensus was coming to an end. In its place, “strong gods” would return. These strong gods “are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” While the twentieth century saw an attempt to domesticate the strong gods through the promotion of weak ones like “inclusion” and “multiculturalism,” the quest has proved futile. These weak gods stand in negation to certain values—“anti-racism” or “anti-totalitarianism”—and are therefore incapable of stirring the aspirational loyalty necessary for a cohesive society.  

But not all strong gods are equally benevolent. Some can be quite destructive. Reno argued that to counteract the rougher edges of strong gods like nationalism, we will need “to nurture to primeval sources of solidarity that limit the claims of the civic ‘we’: the domestic society of marriage and the supernatural community of the church, synagogue, and other communities of transcendence.”

Thus, we can say that religion is perhaps the strongest of the strong gods. It has the capacity to temper the excesses of its brethren by ordering man’s love for the familiar to its proper end, his Creator. As Lyons notes, there’s a reason “Christian Nationalism” has caused such widespread panic among defenders of the old order. It welds together two particularly potent strong gods.

The arrest of the decline of true religion, then, is a wildly hopeful sign. Even the most ardent defenders of the old order will now begrudgingly admit that the rise of nationalism and populism in the past decade was no aberration. The return of these “strong gods” is a symptom of an ongoing paradigm shift across the West. It is good insofar as it chafes against a liberal order that disdains the unchosen obligations of family, place, and nation, and instead reintroduces a more human ordering principle to our politics—one centered around shared loves rather than ideology. One need only survey the rise of deaths of despair to observe the deficiencies of our current order. The very existence of such a concept would be inconceivable in a healthier polity.

But the era of nationalism and populism also ushers in a big question of what paradigm will replace the dead consensus. Without the tempering and aspirational influence of true religion, nationalism and populism will remain a reactionary force, vaguely grappling towards a better political order, but also capable of indulging its lurking destructive tendencies. As Joe Rogan memorably mentioned in a 2024 interview with Aaron Rodgers, “We need Jesus.” (Curiously, Rogan slammed Christianity as a false mythology in a podcast episode nine years earlier—more evidence of the dizzying change of the past decade, and that the Pew data is no anomaly.) 

A society in which 62% religiosity is cause for celebration still has a ways to go. But when viewed in light of the broader trends in American society over the past decade, the recent RLS data purports that a significant change is underway. The turmoil of the past decade has re-opened questions of traditional faith that were considered settled among the enlightened class not so long ago. Religion is getting a fresh look. As Americans usher out the old public faith that undergirded the “end of history,” another religion will necessarily take its place to order the public square. Pew’s data give us ample reason to think it will be the true one once more.