Catholic conversions are SURGING this year! But does that mean we’re in a revival in the US? The numbers are a little more nuanced than you may first expect…
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I’ve got a lot of exciting news for you, not least of which is we’re ending the season of Lent and entering the season called Trudiwum, the shortest season on the church’s calendar. Fun fact, it’s the three holiest days of the year. It begins with tonight, Holy Thursday, the mass of the Lord’s Supper, and it’s going to culminate in the Easter vigil. But at the Easter vigil, a lot of people are going to be entering the Catholic Church this year. And so I want to continue to ask a question I started to ask last year, namely, do we see the seeds or the early signs of a Catholic revival in America? Now, when I asked that question last year, we were starting to see some pretty interesting trends. And as we’re going to see, those trends have continued and in fact seem to have be even improving.
But I also want to be cognizant of the pushback the revival narrative has gotten, and quite reasonably. There are some people who, not just because they hate joy, because they respect facts, want to say, yes, there are these positive signs, but there are these negative signs as well. There are plenty of people in the young generation, particularly who are just clearly less religious than the generations before. So we don’t want to paint an overly simplistic narrative. So I want to identify what are the real sources of good news? What are the grounds upon which we can say something does seem to be happening? And then what are the limits on that? Because we don’t want to exaggerate the kind of story. So the first question to ask is just, well, are Catholic conversions really up? And there are a lot of indications that the answer to that is yes, including looking at different diocese record keeping year to year at the Easter Vigil.
So this has been making the news both in Catholic spaces and in secular spaces, because it’s enough of a phenomenon that people are starting to notice. And this is true in Catholicism specifically. We’re seeing evidence of this in the US and in the UK and elsewhere. We also are finding broader trends of just people entering Christianity at what appears to be higher rates. I want to look at a couple of the Catholic specific things, partly because it’s a little easier to get Catholic data because it’s gathered diocese by diocese in one place. It’s still actually not that easy to find the data, but it’s easier. So the Catholic Register points out that we are seeing these trends all over the place. And they put together a list of the Diocese that were showing the biggest year over year spikes in converts. So the number of people coming into the church in 2026, compared even to 2025, a year that was already up for a lot of places, they found places like Norange, Connecticut.
The number of people coming into the church is up 112%, Pueblo, Colorado, 105% year over year, all the way down to Springfield, Cape Girard, a 54% increase. These are some pretty massive surges in the number, but the question with even a term like surge or spike is, is this just a blip? Are we just dealing with a small number of people so that even a little bit of an increase is going to be statistically significant? Well, it seems bigger than that. And this has attracted the attention of places like the New York Times. They had a recent article called Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts, and they point out that bishops are struggling to understand why this is happening. And they put some numbers with it where it’s not just a percentage increase, but you can see pretty concretely that across the country, there does seem to be some pretty tremendous growth.
So for instance, this Easter, the Archdiocese of Detroit, is going to receive 1,428 new Catholics in the church, which is the highest number in 21 years. Galveston Houston will have the most converts in 15 years, Diocese of Des Moines, it’s gone up 51% from 265 people to 400 people, just year over year. And then they point out, this can be a little tricky to do because you’re going diocese by diocese trying to find out what the numbers are. Every diocese has their own kind of system for tracking these things, so it can be very hard to get just good, reliable data. And I would also add that it’s perfectly legitimate to say diocese who are doing well may be more likely to want to share their information. Also, dioceses that are doing well may also be better at record keeping. It might just be a sign of a functional competent diocese where diocese that can’t even figure out how many people are coming into the church that may be an indication of a deeper spiritual malaise.
Either way, with those kind of caveats, what the New York Times found is that looking at two dozen dioceses, including some of the largest ones like LA and Phoenix, Los Angeles is the largest Catholic diocese in the country, but also looking at rural and smaller diocese like Gallup New Mexico and Allentown, Pennsylvania, everyone that they looked at showed a significant jump in converse. So this doesn’t seem to be a regional phenomenon. It doesn’t seem to be just a random blip. Something seems to be happening. And one theory is, well, we’d clearly lost a lot of people during COVID. Whatever growth we were experiencing was dramatically reversed and then some. And so maybe we’re just kind of making up lost ground. And there’s probably some truth to that. But as Elizabeth Diaz points out in this piece in the Times, in many cases, we’re going beyond the COVID dip.
So for instance, in Philadelphia, the new total is double what it was in 2017 in terms of new converts. Think about that. It’s not just better year over year. Going all the way back nine years, before COVID, before any of the more recent disruptions, we’re seeing twice as many people coming into the church in Philly. Similarly, in Newark, 1701 people are going to join this Easter compared to a thousand in 2010. So that’s clearly some evidence at a local, like a diocesan level that something seems to be happening. And we’re seeing this happen in enough places that there really does seem to be something afoot. There is this well-documented broader national trend, not of a revival per se, but of a kind of stabilization, a healthy plateau. When I say healthy plateau, I don’t mean that this is good. I just mean the bad news isn’t getting worse.
So as Diaz points out, the broader Christian population in the US has been stable for several years after years of decline, according to Pew research. And we’re going to see some other research that is actually even higher quality in terms of seeing, yeah, there’s a stabilization and some signs that things might be moving back in the right direction from a religious perspective. So just to kind of flag this, I would say we are seeing early signs of what might be an authentic revival, but it’s too soon to just label it that. And I’ll explain why that is in a second. But in addition to the New York Times taking notice, the Atlantic also did, they had an article called The Real Religious Renewal Happening in Gen Z by Luis Porales, and they’re looking at these anecdotal stories and also putting them in the broader political science context just to see, well, is this real?
Because it’s possible, maybe your church is growing. Maybe more people are moving into your neighborhood. So your church is on fire right now. Tons of young people are moving into the area. Tons of young people are starting to go to your church, but the overall city and country and globe isn’t the same story. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. Here’s what we find. First, we really are seeing an increase around college campuses. So conversions do appear to be going up in big cities and in college campuses amongst young professionals, and Luis Perales tracks down a lot of the campus data, just as we saw from the New York Times, a lot of the diocesan data. So for instance, this Easter at Harvard, nearly 50 students plan to join the Catholic Church through the school’s Catholic Center, which is about double from last year. Arizona State, about 50 planned to join this spring, also about double from last year, University of Michigan, 40 compared to 30 last year.
Now, I will just add anecdotally that in talking to chaplains at Catholic colleges, particularly across the Midwest, I’m hearing these stories as well. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are saying, “This is the biggest OCIA class I’ve seen in my time as a chaplain at whatever university.” So this doesn’t appear to me to be cherry-picked data. Again, there are going to be certain kind of built-in maybe biases or parameters we have to be careful of. For instance, when I’m speaking at a university, this is a sign that they’re invested in bringing a Catholic speaker to the university. The ones that are really lukewarm maybe aren’t even doing that. And so the fact that I’m seeing signs of life is on the one hand really good because I think there really is something there. On the other hand, we do want to be careful, at least at the outset of trying to draw too much from some positive news.
But it’s not just diocese across the country, it’s not just Catholic campuses across the country. We also see in cities something similar happening as well. And so as Perales says, many New York City parishes likewise expect far more converts than usual this Easter. Nearly 90 people will formerly join the Catholic Church at St. Joseph’s more than double the number from last year. As a Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan, 70 are going to join nearly double from last year. Now, that is just part of the story. And I know that’s a ton of data, but I give all of this data to say this isn’t just somebody said, “I noticed there’s a lot of young people here and I didn’t notice that last year.” No, no, we actually have some numbers to put on this and these numbers seem to be pointing in a positive direction, but they’re still pretty piecemeal, pretty incomplete, and we’re going to give bigger numbers in a minute here.
But there’s a qualitative dimension to this as well. It’s not just quantitative. And this is one of the things I thought that the Atlantic article did a really good job of covering is that conversion numbers are just one indication of spiritual engagement. You could have a ton of people join and be lukewarm and not really have their lives transformed in a meaningful way, but that isn’t what appears to be happening. And so they interviewed Bailey Burke, a coordinator for the St. Mary’s student parish in Ann Arbor, and she described seeing greater devotional interests. And again, this tracks with a lot of the anecdotal stuff that I’ve seen and a lot of the anecdotal stuff that I’ve been hearing as well. So she was finding that at the University of Michigan, more of the students are signing up for overnight retreats and applying to the parishes post-grad service fellowship.
They also see more interest in prayer. They’ve recently increased the amount of Eucharistic adoration from two nights a week to four nights a week, a small group of students have begun praying a daily rosary, et cetera. So all of this is to say you’ve got all these scattered data points that are not very well organized that do kind of look like there’s the seeds of a revival going on. And a lot of people have been quick to go ahead and just declare it a revival, including the President of the United States.
CLIP:
I’m very proud to say that during my time in office, both the first four years, and in particular this last year, there has been a tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity, and belief in God.
Joe:
But political scientists like Ryan Burge have pushed back on this and they’ve said basically, hold your horses, you’re making too much of too little and the data doesn’t really support the broad kind of revival narrative. And so I want to engage with this directly because I think Burge is right about a lot of this, but it may be a little more optimistic than the picture he’s painted. Now, if you’re not familiar, he is a political scientist. He was also until, I believe 2024, the pastor of a Baptist church, and that church eventually closed. So he’s done a lot of good work on this and is coming at this from something of the perspective of a religious insider who’s also wanting to just be as fair as he can be in his terms, just calling the balls and strikes. So if you’re familiar with the work of Steven Bullevant in the UK, Ryan Burge is kind of the American Steven Bullevant in some ways.
And so a way to pose the question that he presents is, are we looking at a revival or just a plateau? Because his argument is the young generation is clearly less religious than say the oldest generations. So are we actually seeing this resurgence of like a really religious young generation or are we just seeing that the religious hemorrhaging that we’d been seeing for decades has flatlined? And so things are just not getting worse at a faster rate. Here’s how he kind of presents the argument against a religious revival. And then we’ll look at some more data, including from Ryan Burge himself, to sort of complicate the picture.
CLIP:
There is some data that says that at least that the vibes are on Christianity have increased, but numerically speaking, in terms of revival, that’s not true. The share of Americans who are Christians declined from 90% in the 1970s to about 63% now, and the share of the nuns have risen from 5% to about 28, 29, 30% in the last couple, since 1972 to 2020. What you’re seeing though in the data is a pause in the decline of Christianity and a pause in the rise of the nuns. Since COVID, we’ve really sort of had a stasis, a plateau, a waiting period, but that’s not revival. Revival would be a significant increase in the share of Americans who identify as Christians or go to church on a regular basis or religious importance or a significant decline in atheists or agnostics. And we’ve seen none of those things.
Joe:
So I think there’s two things to recognize at the outset. First, whether we’re seeing a plateau or a revival, either of those is better news than what had been the kind of popular and accurate news, which was people were getting less and less religious. So whether they’re just plateauing and they’re not getting worse, they’re just kind of staying the same level, or whether they’re actually starting to get more religious again, either of those is better news than what we would’ve been getting as news, say, four or five, six years ago. The other thing to notice though is that in asking if we’re seeing a revival, it can be very tricky to assess that quantitatively. And I’ll explain why. Because if you notice when Ryan’s talking, he’s comparing the data from the 1970s to now. So here’s why that’s tricky. I’m recording this in the middle of the day on Wednesday.
And so if you said, “Is the weather getting warmer?” Literally it is. It was cooler this morning, it’s the middle of the day now, it’s getting warmer and warmer. On the other hand, it is cooler today than it was yesterday, quite a bit cooler today than it was yesterday. So if you said, “Well, is the weather up or down?” Both. It just depends what is your point that you’re comparing it to. So if you say, “Do Americans seem to be more religious now than they were two years ago?” There’s some signs that the answer to that is yes, very clear signs that we’re seeing in big sets of data. But if you say, “Is the number of Americans that are religious greater than it was in 1995 or 1955?” Clearly not. So those two stories can both be true, that people do seem to be getting more religious than they were a couple years ago, but it hasn’t completely reversed all of the losses we’ve been seeing for decades.
So we want to be fair, we want to be honest about both halves of that story.
So Ryan has told the story of a plateau, and this story of a plateau was one of the things that actually first drew my attention to the fact that there might be a reversal, that is to say a revival. He noticed this back in 2024, that the number of Americans who labeled themselves as having no religious affiliation, the so- called nuns, had hit a ceiling that had been going up and up and up pretty consistently. And then a couple years ago, it just stopped going up. Well, now Ryan has come out just a couple days ago with new information based on the most recent set of data from what’s called the Cooperative Election Study, which is a massive data set, I’ll get into this in a minute, that is found pretty clearly for now the third year in a row that the number of people with no religious affiliation hasn’t just plateaued, it’s actually clearly going down.
And he’s forthright about this. So he shows on this graph that when you compare the number of people who describe themselves as having no religious affiliation, the numbers went from 36.2% of Americans said that they were either atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular in 2022. That number then shrank a little bit to 35.6% and then shrank faster to 34.1%, and then shrink faster to 31.8%. And at this point, it doesn’t appear to be some kind of fluke in the data. As Ryan points out, this is statistically significant shifts. And the CES, eCooperative Election Study, is a pretty massive study. It’s quite a bit larger than the General Social Survey, which is another big social survey that happens. During election years, they have 60,000 or more respondents, which is just massive. They usually are focused on political science stuff, so that’s why they do more during election years.
But even in off years, they’re above 15,000 respondents. So this is a very large data set. So when it’s showing this level of drop year over year, that’s worth paying attention to. And if you look at the broader trend, remember, this is kind of that point I was making earlier about the weather. How far back do you look? If you’re looking from 1972 to 2024, you can see the number of people with no religious affiliation in the US skyrockets from 5.5%. It goes up slowly for a while, 6.7% in the early 90s, and then it just shoots up in a pretty much unbroken line throughout the 90s and the 2000s and the 2010s, and it caps at about 28%, and now we’re seeing it drop again. Now, it’s still much higher than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago, but it’s also clearly going down.
Those things are both true. Now, having no religious affiliation, as Ryan points out, there’s three groups. You have atheists, you have agnostics, and you have nuns, just people who they’re not atheists, they’re not agnostics, they just don’t have a particular affiliation. And we’re seeing all of those groups apparently on the decline. Atheists were consistently between six to 7% of the sample from 2015 to 2024. That’s a long time. Now, the atheist numbers had kind of peaked. In 2015, they didn’t go markedly up. They just sort of had flatlined. Agnostics are in the same time period, again, about a decade, we’re consistently five to 6%. Now we’re seeing it go down. Now it’s about 5% and 5%. So together, do the math here, about 10% of Americans are atheist and agnostic put together, but they’d been 13% of the sample and 12% of the sample in the last two years.
This is a pretty steep decline. I mean, that is a large drop. Some of that, again, you can say, well, maybe the numbers are not exact fine, but this is a huge dataset that we’re dealing with showing what seems to be a very clear drop. So that’s atheists and agnostics, but again, a lot of the nuns aren’t atheists or agnostics, they’re just nothing in particular. They had actually risen during that decade. So while atheism and agnosticism has flatlined, just a general vague irreligiosity had gone up from 20 to 24%, but it’s also dropping back. And so now it’s down to 21% in 2024 and 21% in 2025 as well. So it’s actually lower now than it was in 2019. So in all three groups of irreligious people, we’re seeing the numbers are actually going down. So that is good news for religion in general. That’s also good news for Christianity in particular because we’re seeing some slight gains, and admittedly, slight gains among the number of Christians and self-proclaimed Christians, just within the last couple of years.
So for instance, Ryan points out that the Protestant share of the population was 32% in 2022 and it’s risen slightly to 33%. The Catholic share has gone up 2% between 2022 and 2025. And so if you’re wondering where are those nuns going, some of them are going to non-Christian religions, but a lot of them are going to Protestantism and Catholicism, and a slight bit more seem to be going to Catholicism. This actually is part of a very fascinating, broader trend. Now, there are a lot of negative trends of every generation being somewhat religious than the one before it, but looking particularly the comparison of Catholics and Protestants in the US, something fascinating is happening. So right now, amongst baby boomers, those born between the years … 1946 and 1964, they’re twice as likely to be Protestant as they are to be Catholic. 21% of baby boomers are Catholic and twice at 42% are Protestant.
Among millennials, 16% of us are Catholic and 27% are Protestants. So again, more than half as many more. So if you’ve got five people, roughly three Protestants and two Catholics, if it’s all a Christian group, among Gen Z, we’re seeing something very fascinating. First, the number of Catholics appears to, if anything, be going up. It’s 19% of the generation compared to 16% in the millennial generation, and the number of Protestants is almost equal to that. The gap is now 22 to 19. And in fact, in the 2023 data, which does seem to have been, in fairness, kind of fluke data, there were actually more Catholics who responded in that data set. And Ryan Burget’s done some good stuff, calling attention to the fact that there was some weird stuff in the 2023 data we don’t really know why. Sometimes polls, you just get a weird crop of people.
But it does seem like that as you’re seeing this growth, particularly amongst the young, there is a bit of a skew towards Catholicism. Now, there’s a lot that goes into that. That’s not all conversion, that can be immigration, that could be people leaving Protestantism, but you’ve gone from a situation where it was two to one Protestant to almost one-to-one Protestant Catholic. And again, that’s just looking at the Christian population, but we’re seeing a conversion to religion, we’re seeing a conversion to Christianity, and we’re seeing a conversion to Catholicism in the data. Now, is that enough to say there’s a nationwide revival? No, I don’t think we’re there yet. I think there’s some exciting signs that we could be heading in the right direction, but what I do think we can say with a good deal of confidence is that we have some small fires blazing.
Now, I’m borrowing and somewhat misappropriating a line from James three here, where James, in describing Sins of the Tongue, says, how great a forest is set ablazed by a small fire. Now, the point he’s drawing, small actions can have really big effects, is something that we should be mindful of, not only in terms of bad actions like sins of the tongue, but also in good actions like little revivals. And I was really pleased to see in the Atlantic article, Luis Perales making this same point that if we overemphas... Read more on Catholic.com