Catholic churches are appealing to new seekers. Credit: Getty
Six years ago, the writer Wesley Yang coined “the Successor Ideology” to describe the tangle of woke identity and grievance politics that overran Western cultural institutions. The term was potent because it captured the sense that something fundamental had changed, that we were entering a new and dangerous era of history. The tides of faith were rolling back in, and the new faith was quite different from the old.
But we can now say confidently that Yang didn’t get it quite right. Woke-ism, for lack of a better term, no longer seems to be ascendent. Those ideas remain common, maybe even dominant, in many elite institutions, from academe to media and even some houses of worship. But somehow, they seem stale now. When Malcolm Gladwell starts talking like J.K. Rowling, it’s safe to say that mainstream culture is somewhere past “peak woke.”
What, then, is the real Successor Ideology? The short answer might be faith — the old-fashioned kind.
We seem to be in the beginning stages of a Christian revival in the West. About 10 years ago, a new group of secular thinkers, led by the historian Tom Holland and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, began defending the civilizational value of Christianity, noting its contributions to peace, tolerance, and civil rights. After decades of more and more people coming to regard Christianity as a set of repressive superstitions, it suddenly became conventional wisdom in certain quarters that Christianity is good for people and societies.
Then, surprisingly, a number of high-profile artists and intellectuals, many of them British, started announcing their conversion (or return) to Christianity: people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Russell Brand, and Nick Cave. What’s more, YouTube has exploded with Christian-curious seekers making and watching videos about “the meaning crisis.”
The open question has been this: Is this just another celebrity-fueled online fad, like cold plunges or Ozempic? Or will the people actually return to the pews? Charlie Kirk made the case on Facebook just six days before his assassination: “There is revival in the Christian church. Churches are growing. Young people are flocking to faith in God.” But this is the kind of thing that Christians are so desperate to see after decades of decline. It’s possible they’re seeing what they want to see.
Still, some data suggest the ferment is real. Consider a new report from the Bible Society purporting to show that church attendance in England and Wales has surged in recent years. Survey data from The Quiet Revival, as the report was titled, suggests that the number of churchgoing Christians in England and Wales increased to nearly 6 million last year, up from about 4 million in 2018. That’s a 56% explosion in just six years. Perhaps even more surprising, it is young men driving the growth, with 21% of 18-to-24-year-old men reporting that they go to church once a month, compared to only 12% of young women.
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”More from this author” author=”Tim DeRoche”]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2024/09/the-cult-of-kindness/[/su_unherd_related]
“In churches across society,” the report proclaims, “something amazing is happening.”
I’m not the first person to be skeptical of the numbers. As Stephen Bullivant pointed out in First Things, the study suggests that five times as many young men are attending church relative to 2018, and at least 500,000 additional worshipers should be in the pews every week. That’s hard to square with reports of lower attendance since the pandemic.
But there is something going on, and it’s consistent with what we’re seeing in the United States. More young men are telling pollsters that they are religious, and Catholic churches are reporting higher numbers of converts. I recently spoke to two friends, a married couple, who work in ministry at a large nondenominational church in suburban Los Angeles. They report that the church is seeing an influx of hundreds of young people from the local colleges like the University of California, Los Angeles.
“There’s more men than women,” he reports. “And their faith is unusually authentic,” she adds. About half of the kids seem to come from traditional Christian families, and the other half seem to have followed a path that started online with someone like Jordan Peterson. “We really haven’t seen anything like this before.”
What’s weird is that secularization is continuing apace. A recent Pew poll found that the Catholic church loses eight of its faithful for every single person that joins. And the mainline Protestant churches remain mired in a precipitous decline.
Here’s a theory: secularization and re-enchantment are happening simultaneously. It’s showing up as a creative churn in the English-speaking world. As young people, especially young men, enter the church, older folks, especially women, are leaving. I wonder if one day we may be forced to retire the haggard stereotype of the “church lady” who drags her reluctant husband and kids to services every Sunday.
But I also wonder how a church can adapt to a sanctuary filled with “church bros.” Are these men bringing with them a “rad-trad” vision of male-female relations that they picked up online? Or are they rejecting both the nihilism and the macho Nietzscheanism so common in digital spaces? Will young women follow the men back through the church doors? Oh, to be a fly on the wall.
[su_pullquote]“You don’t have to squint very hard to see President Trump as America’s first megachurch president.”[/su_pullquote]
Not all churches benefit from the churn. While milquetoast suburban congregations founder, two very different types of congregations are seeing growth: the first are more traditional, devout congregations in the sacramental traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy; the second are nondenominational megachurches that emphasize a personal, emotional relationship with Christ. The report from the Bible Society suggests the same thing is happening in England and Wales: Catholics and Pentecostals increase in number, while the Church of England continues to see decline.
On the ground, this can be quite disorienting. Here in Los Angeles, my family attends weekly Mass at a gorgeous Italianate church built in the Twenties. It isn’t the Latin Mass, but there is a lot of Latin in the service, and the choral hymns and organ music are defiantly traditional. On a typical Sunday, the pews are full of young families who have traveled up to an hour for this style of reverent worship. It’s often standing-room-only.
Just 10 minutes away is a nondescript Catholic church building built in the Fifties. My family visited one Sunday last year. There’s hardly any Latin, and a folksy guitar player sings modern worship songs. The vibe is eager-to-please, but whom is it pleasing? Not very many people, frankly. The sanctuary is mostly empty, and the average age is north of 60. As the young seek out tradition and transcendence, it is the older Christian generations who cling to flat modernity.
Is it possible to imagine that some new-old iteration of Christianity could evolve into a Successor Ideology that would hold our body politic together, much like liberal Protestantism did for most of the last century? Sure, it is.
Charlie Kirk’s moving memorial, with pyrotechnics and an altar call, was an unabashed mash-up of a tent revival and a MAGA campaign event. You don’t have to squint very hard to see President Trump as America’s first megachurch president. He may not preach the gospel or live a holy life. But like many a Protestant preacher, he combines elements of the prosperity gospel with the subversive instincts of a great stand-up comedian. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings are more sober Catholic men like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.
In this transitory time of social fragmentation, however, Christians aren’t the only ones searching for signs. As some look for evidence in the pews, others are looking to the polling places. Consider the joy and optimism that have greeted Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to be the mayor of New York. For some Democrats, Mamdani’s win in the primary last June was a harbinger of a new, populist Left that would retain a softer woke-ism in combination with democratic socialism in the style of Bernie Sanders. They seem to imagine that this fusion could produce the true Successor Ideology.
At the same time, we are seeing a zealous, idealistic fervor erupt around artificial intelligence and the new reproductive technologies. It seems that much of Silicon Valley is converging on a kind of techno-utopianism that they envision as the engine of the next age.
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”Suggested reading” author=”Tim DeRoche”]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2025/09/why-christianity-is-so-radical/[/su_unherd_related]
And, finally, as we are constantly reminded, you can also squint your eyes and see in Trump not an embodiment of any Christian spirit, but the prototype of a more autocratic leader tapping into a cult of personality. This path could be quite ugly, even if the risk of real fascism seems remote. And this type of leader, despite his populist promises, might be most likely to use his power to promote the interests of his cronies.
It may be helpful here to recall what the Successor Ideology was going to replace. Since World War II, at least, the default ideology of the West was basically a form of Christian liberalism. The relative proportions of Christianity and liberalism might have fluctuated up or down a bit, but the basic throughline was there.
This ideology made two overlapping transcendent promises: eternal life in heaven and infinite progress here on earth, thanks to the onward march of America-inspired liberal democracy. It was Christian liberalism that provided the ideological oomph for that political phenomenon often called neoliberalism.
Between 1980 and 2010 or so, however, Christian liberalism transformed itself — quite gradually and without many of us noticing — into something else that might be called agnostic liberationism. This new ideology denied that it was an ideology at all, and it made no transcendent promise other than more and more freedom for ever and ever. Its apogee was the legalization of gay marriage which swept the West in the 2010s.
The current moment of political upheaval and social crisis is a direct result of the failure of that ideology, which eroded institutions and failed to feed the human hunger for communal transcendence. That’s why woke-ism — with its rituals of confession and penance without forgiveness — was so attractive to so many among the urban professional classes, and why it briefly felt like the thing that was going to overtake the world.
From where we stand now, it’s hard to tell exactly where we are headed. But it’s probably safe to predict that the true Successor Ideology is going to make some sort of transcendent promise. If it is to last, it will also have to renew our institutions and our traditions. In the end, we may be left with the same choices as those who have come before us. Where will we find our transcendence — in God, in the king, in mere government, or in promethean “progress”?
May we choose wisely.
Isn’t this the truth:
”Christian liberalism transformed itself — quite gradually and without many of us noticing — into something else that might be called agnostic liberationism. This new ideology denied that it was an ideology at all, and it made no transcendent promise other than more and more freedom for ever and ever.”
Christianity is actually a better fit as a Warriors Religion than a Hippie’s religion by its full teachings. It is a religion of Hardness, not softness, which people removed from Christianity do not understand. Christianity Never claimed to be nice, pleasant, or easy, but promised to be the harder road of the ones to choose from. It is a religion for tough people, as it has high requirements of its adherents.
“For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Christ’s invitation is for everyone. Only a few are called to that hard, spirtual warrior’s road, brother George.
haha, well rebutted
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. Matthew 7:13 – 14
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? Matthew 16: 24 – 26
This seems like a false dichotomy. Most warriors find their burden light, spiritually, though heavy physically, lighter than the way of softness. Certainly St. Paul rejoiced in his sufferings as a warrior.
I think your quote is more in regard to how difficult people make it to follow God via their own rules e.g. the additional rules the pharisees required.
A more apt quote, supporting the original comment, is for all who would follow Jesus to take to their own cross – to follow the example of voluntary self sacrifice and to continue that pattern in the life and world around you.
So yes the invitation is to everyone, to the benefit of everyone, but it is certainly no light thing in this world.
I remember being shocked in my youth when a girl I knew who had joined a Pentecostal church told me “Being a Christian is about accepting Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. It’s not about being nice.” Other Christians I’ve met down the years would object to that, but I’m starting to think she was right.
It’s also why the Left/socialists dislike the church – i.e. Christians believe their only savior is Jesus and most definitely not the state.
What about those who believe that one’s only savior is oneself?
They tend to end up bitterly disappointed in their chosen savior.
Do they? I must be the exception to that….
Everything is possible within a limited timeframe.
They are listening to the snake in the garden:”Ye shall be as gods”
It doesn’t end well.
The state religion requires you to add levels of victimhood.
The left dislikes the church because it is a competitor. Don’t forget that, certainly in the UK, the organised labour movement owes far more to Methodism than to Marxism – it is a direct descendant of 19th century non-conformist Christianity.
If it is a competitor, is that not because both indicate that we should care for those less well off than ourselves while the right often assumes that when people are not highly successful, it is through a lack of effort.
In England there are Christians across the political spectrum but I realise that in the US most are right wing.
I would flip that around and say that most Christians in the UK are sympathetic to socialism because it appears compassionate, whereas most Christians in the USA reject the loss of individual autonomy that socialism requires. America became great because Americans are freer to fail. Learning from failure is impossible under socialism.
Certainly the history of Christianity would suggest that she was right.
The history of Christianity has plenty of blemishes (as anyone who understands the teaching would expect, see sin, original and concupisence). You’ll have a hard time, however, in finding a governing ideology that has done better in terms of establishing human rights, and fostering scientific and economic progress.
Just to pick one glaring example, the Christian civilization is the ONLY one in history to decide that slavery was a moral evil. Every other culture was forced to abandon it at gunpoint, and some (Islam and China) still practice it under different guises.
If only it would decide that pedophilia was a moral evil, and tell its priests.
Saudi outlawed slavery in 1962
But they still have slave equivalents, they just call them something else.
That was buying new ones!
Existing ones saw no change!
It kind of feels like your are comparing a child who turned in their homework late to a prodigy who taught the teacher something.
The problem with this very well written article is its ceaseless use of the word “ideology.” That word popped into being to distinguish one’s own thought from thought that is not only one’s own. The idea that everyone has their own idiosyncratic view of the world points to the rejection of all things communal and thus the repudiation of the very idea of a universal church. “Ideology” makes impossible the getting to the bottom of anything.
You’ve highlighted precisely why we need to escape the bind of “ideology”, whether secular… or otherwise.
There has been a good deal of psychological research about the importance of stories to the human psyche….how they help us humans make sense of our lives. In a nutshell, what has been found is that – contrary to the Enlightenment Age of Reason paradigm that people’s idea of reality is constructed from tools of logic and analysis – most people in fact, piece together their big picture of reality in large measure from narratives. They construct much of it from stories they have heard or read or made up in their own heads. That is why, in the long sweep of human history, the religious has outlasted all forms of civilisation.
In our own 21st century there is a growing, if inchoate, sense that the goal of an end to wokeness (in other words the bogus quasi-religion of Progressivism) – that has sucked up almost all the energy on the political Right – is not the whole story. One manifestation of this is how many well-known rightist intellectuals have, in recent times, been re-exploring Christian faith. And words like re-enchantment have started to enter the language of intellectual discourse. Both of these are signals of a sense that something else has gone awry with Western liberalism.
Yes “Godless liberationlism has curdled”. For more on how and why this has happened see: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west (from which the above text is taken)
I wonder whether religions have such longevity because they have survival value. People bond over common goals perceived as meaningful. Religions are also driven by powerful narratives, as you suggest. Even Buddhism, which does not subscribe to the concept of a creator god, has a seductive enlightenment narrative. I’m reading Nexus by Yuval Harari. His analysis of the role of narrative in human history is extraordinary.
It makes sense that since biblical, orthodox (small o) Christianity built Western Civilization, it is the only thing that can save it.
Once you dismiss God, “Love thy neighbor: and “Kill, rob, and rape thy neighbor” have equal moral standing. And just any god won’t due; look at how easily Islam justifies the latter approach.
Islam is a very moral religion – but is is very different indeed – but almost all Muslims would feel just as you do about robbing one’s neighbor.
Islam is a Great Religion, but it is in its own lands, not to become a power in Christian lands.
Muslims don’t typically view non-Muslims as their neighbor. They practice morality within Dar-es-Salaam, and wag war outside of it. It’s the parable of the Good Samaritan, and “love thine enemy” that make Christianity radically different.
Rather than describing Islam as a ‘moral religion’, I would say it has its own moral code, which, as you rightly point out, is very different from the Christian moral code in innumerable ways. The deities they respectively point to are markedly dissimilar.
Both faiths worship the God of Abraham. I think it’s not that the deities are dissimilar, but their prophets and followers have markedly dissimilar ways of showing their devotion.
And the raping and killing part?
The idea of ‘muslim lands’ is contentious, given the history of the ideology. These lands weren’t always muslim.
Once you dismiss God, “treat others as you would wish to be treated” is a perfectly sound basis for a system of morality. The well-developed human urge towards reciprocity is at the heart of social evolution and the basis of our success as a species
This is self-evident. Belief in god – any god – is a form of psychological delusion so easily recognisable it’s beyond parody.
This isn’t about worshipping “mammon” either, as many religious folk think being free of that delusion is about; rather, simply being aware of our human nature, and natural human spirituality, which is corrupted by religion.
You haven’t read Tom Holland, have you?
Western eg Classical Civilisation predates Christianity by at least a thousand years.
Liberalism -or liberationism, if you prefer- has worked steadily to replace the horizontal relationships that unite people into communities, traditionally understood, with vertical ties that bind atomized individuals to the State and its corporate handmaids. And gen Z is dividing between the children of the elite (and elite wanna-bes) who form Antifa, and the children of hoi polloi who are MAGA.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”
The Church has never understood the significance of this thunderous statement. Always the Church has gone for the egregious ‘happy-clappy’ be nice to one another, love one another as you love yourself. EXCEPT nobody knows themself aright!!! Not knowing that you don’t even exist as your body nobody is going to love another also and equally confused!!! Christ pierced the ‘human-condition’ meaning that your life as an ‘ego-I-person’ is to suffer as He suffered upon the Cross of your body. Following God is to separate yourself entirely from ‘man-kind’ and then for you only God looks after you finding work for you to do, things to accomplish, all of which you only see in retrospect. Following Christ is eventually to be Christ, resurrected. You belong to no-one. You are nobody’s friend. You are not the wife or the husband. Society for you is just a game to be played as much as an actor on stage witnesses the part he has to perform. You belong to God alone in the Silence.
This alone is ‘Christianity’!!!
no, each to their own path, and to be Father and Mother, Wife and Husband, is the path which is best for almost all Christians.
Sounds like Albigensianism to me; not good at all. Stick to orthodox Christianity instead of making up your own version.
I always thought the Cathars had a point, actually. Their beliefs make more sense to me than Nicene Christianity does.
Very nicely written. Near the intellectual ground zero is the false notion of philosophical materialists who like to imagine that the religious worldview is composed of “blind faith” in the transcendent. Not so. Our human free will and minds that work with non physical things like numbers and other universals like “justice”, love, etc. are as Aquinas showed, demonstrable from reason alone. Hume never did succeed in refuting the theistic arguments showing a necessarily transcendent ground to being itsef…..BEING. And we are all moved by love. Beauty, truth; goodness. Transcendentals. And so intrinsic to rational beings that we take them for granted unreflectively. Philosophers like Peter Kreeft and Ed Feser refute the false claims of fideism, the bogus idea that reason and faith could even possibly be in conflict. They can’t.
Philosopher Peter Kreeft is wonderfully easy to read and has phenomenal sections on things like proofs of the existence of God from evidence and reason, and analyses of the main prophets of atheistic incoherence. A joy to read. A great philosopher. https://www.peterkreeft.com/
Niall Ferguson converted to Christianity recently as well.
He would.
Strangely, out of the blue, when we, as very active Catholics, have not been asked ‘Faith’ questions for years, two unconnected neightbours have this week asked about our Church. One is a late teens Bulgarian boy, and the other a recently retired man.
God does not exist and Jesus is a mostly fictional confection, but if believing some particular aspects of all that stuff inspires people to lead useful and fulfilled lives that’s fine by me.
It’s when it doesn’t that I begin to have concerns.
The self-deception that’s required to have “faith” primes those who succumb to such things to an ever-increasing defence of their belief, to justify and validate themselves.
That’s precisely why the history of our “wars of religion” (and i include all ideologies in this mind-set) are so vehement, leading to all kinds of oppression. This is true of those who claim to follow Christ as any other religion/ideology.
We really do need to move beyond this self-defeating paradigm.
“God does not exist and Jesus is a mostly fictional confection“. You’re really willing to bet everything on this? How do you know? re Pascal’s wager. It might be wiser to take the line of Tom Holland, Jordan Peterson, Louise Perry etc and be open to the possibility of God existing and the bible being true, while recognising that the fruits of a Christian basis to civilisation (rather than Christianity merely as optional, personal faith) are undeniably better than anything else the world has seen.
Jesus is the most well attested historical figure and a high 90s percent of scholars, critical and Christian alike, agree he lived and was crucified.
Suggested reading: “cold case Christianity”, and “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist”
You kinda have to ask yourself if in fact what you are saying isn’t actually the invented story that keeps people complacent, as opposed to something that has been and continues to be world-changing and embraced globally and by the greatest thinkers of every age, including the large majority of those on whose backs our civilization had been built.
We are increasingly surrounded by ‘deaths of despair’ – overdoses, suicides – and the even more numerous near-deaths and life-in-deaths of friends, family, the famous, neighbours, close-up strangers, and colleagues. These are inevitable, tragic outcomes of the dominant Mammon-Moloch anti-culture. The scientism and solutions of the godless machine are proving powerless against the extreme poverty of the spirit. The writing is on the wall: deaths will increase before they subside. They are forcing many to contemplate – or attempt to contemplate – life, death, reality, eternity, and truth. To seek shelter from the pain of life, a solid rock to stand on, light in the darkness. Christ’s yoke – including picking up the cross of self sacrificial love – is easy compared to the dead weight of the thanatocracy we exist under.
What’s happening isn’t just a religious revival: it’s a crisis of meaning production. The West, especially the U.S., has long been the global “maker of meaning” –exporting values, ideologies, and narratives, even after losing its monopoly on material production to China. But when its own meanings (liberalism, progress, freedom) curdled into hollow slogans, the ground opened for a return to faith. Christianity is re-emerging not because people suddenly “believe” again, but because the West’s meaning factories –media, academia, politics –stopped producing coherence. China makes the world’s goods; America used to make the world’s purpose. This new turn to God might simply be the West trying to remember how to believe in something real again. And if the West hopes to balance China, it cannot out-China China in material strength: it must rebuild where China is weakest: in creating beliefs, ideas, and shared meaning. But not without showing its moral awakening first like stopping genocide for example…which US is trying to do obviously.
Thankfully, the eternal can look after itself and these questions, however difficult, are not easily avoided.