Revival? Yes. Awakening? Not yet.

What is an “awakening,” and do we have one on our hands?

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, conservative Protestants wondered aloud whether the embers of revival are not igniting something larger. Some observers have noted the rise in religious commitment among Gen Z, while others have cautioned against excessive optimism. Awakenings and revivals do not come out of nowhere. Instead, observers need to see recent, reviving events as part of a longer movement to awaken the churches and the culture to Christ.

The Great Awakenings in America were never reducible to a single event. They resulted from a series of events that unfolded over decades and gave rise to movements. The term revival has traditionally referred to a particular event that may or may not have a regional or national impact. Revivals are, as American historian William McLoughlin defined them, Protestant rituals in which evangelists preach to crowds, while awakenings are periods of cultural revitalization that begin in crises of belief and behavior, altering the cultural landscape.

To add to McLoughlin, a collection of events may become a catalyst for a larger awakening, but this is because they generated movements that created the long-term cultural and political change, causing a society to become more Christian. Within the American Protestant experience, what becomes a mass awakening starts as a local or regional revival.

Consider the way in which the First Great Awakening contributed to the New Light Divinity of Jonathan Edwards, which fueled the theology of Charles Finney, the man most associated with the Second Great Awakening. Finney fused the emphasis on spiritual experience in the New Light Divinity with the Methodist message of personal holiness in an appeal to voluntary religion—a winning recipe for social transformation. This theological shift led to a surge in voluntary religion that became the heart of American Protestantism. A poll could never reflect the impact of such a seemingly small theological shift in Edwards’s Puritanism, the full effects of which were only seen a century later.

The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s laid the groundwork for the massive social and political changes ushered in by the Second Great Awakening between 1790 and 1850. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was a trend toward secularization, with religious adherence dipping to around 17 percent (in the analyses of Jon Butler, Roger Finke, and Rodney Stark). Depending on how one counts church attendance, the Second Great Awakening increased the percentage of the U.S. population attending church to between 26 and 36 percent by 1850. With a total population of 23.2 million at the time, this would put church attendance between six and eight million. It was not until the twentieth century that attendance and membership rose above 50 percent of the population. 

The larger impact was cultural. The first two Great Awakenings created a Christian cultural landscape that was fertile soil for expansive growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Abolitionism emerged from a fusion of New England theology and Methodist perfectionism among both black and white evangelists and lay persons to create a movement that forced the nation to come to terms with its original sin—a clear example of spiritual renewal fueling cultural renewal.

To gauge whether there is a broader spiritual awakening and renewal in a society, one must look at an interlocking web of signs that includes events like revivals, statistical shifts found in polling, intellectual developments, and the reforming or forming of cultural and political structures. Then, if there really is an awakening, it will show itself in gradual, long-term shifts in church attendance.

Revivals of the 2020s

Let’s start with the most concrete: events. Over the past five years, several events have contributed to a return to God. One might consider the outpouring of prayer at Asbury University in February 2023, the prayer meetings and baptisms led by members of the football team at Ohio State University in August 2024, or even the memorial service of Charlie Kirk. Like the butterfly effect, these events have disturbed the air currents of society, leading potentially to a change in broader weather patterns. 

Take the Asbury event; at Asbury University in Kentucky, a group of students spontaneously continued worshipping after a scheduled chapel service. They did not feel compelled to stop, and their prayer and worship continued into the next day, and ultimately for sixteen days total. Crowds began pouring in, and many people found healing and encountered Christ. The event went viral on social media, and at times the lines to get into the auditorium were over half a mile long.

But the outpouring didn’t stop there. A few months later, another revival event occurred at Auburn University in Alabama, inspired by the outpouring at Asbury. An immediate impact of the Asbury event was Tonya Prewett’s creation of UniteUS, an organization dedicated to bringing salvation, freedom, and Christian community to college campuses across the nation. A UniteUS meeting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in October resulted in eight thousand students gathering in Thompson-Boling Arena to worship and hear testimonies about embracing Christ. More recently, a meeting at Southeastern University, an Assemblies of God school, turned a three-day conference into a time of continuous prayer and worship that lasted ten days. 

How do these spontaneous events translate to more permanent change? Polling can give an indication, and new findings from Barna Group show an increase in church attendance among millennials and Gen Z. 

In keeping with his more cautious posture, political scientist Ryan Burge has suggested that the slight uptick in church attendance among Gen Z in 2024 may signify an inflection point. But Burge is skeptical of saying more. A large-scale awakening would be quantifiable as an increase in church attendance of at least ten million, or 3 percent of the current U.S. population. What statistics do show is that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated has slowed over the past four years. 

More recently, Burge has argued that millennials and Gen Z are more non-religious than older generations, and therefore the religiously unaffiliated will continue to rise as a percentage of the population as they replace boomers. Drawing on statistics, he has claimed that “there hasn’t been a single event in the past fifty years that sparked a sustained, measurable rise in religious attendance in the United States.” He reiterated the point on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast: “This is a plateau, not a reversal. This is not a revival. The directions are not reversing themselves. They’re just staying where they are right now.”

Is Burge correct? Yes, but Burge’s deeper analysis helps to understand how growth and decline can coexist within the same population. Burge notes that the religiously unaffiliated have climbed from 6 percent in 1991 to 30 percent in 2020. He has also indicated that five mainline Protestant denominations are down by at least 30 percent from 1987 to 2021. During the same period, non-denominational churches have grown to represent over a third of all American Protestants. These numbers point toward growth and decline within Protestantism, but not such that the former outpaces the latter. 

Worship Trends

Pulling back, one can see how long it took for the first two Great Awakenings to result in cultural shifts. It takes time for trends to become a movement. For example, the spontaneous outpourings over the past five years came on a new wave of worship music, as Leah Payne has documented in her book God Gave Rock and Roll To You. The worship songs on the lips of the crowds in Hughes Chapel at Asbury were almost entirely from this new music. Elevation Worship, a popular collective producing this new worship music, led the UniteUS rally at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville last September. 

Driven by worship collectives, some of this music has appeared on various Billboard music charts and entered the mainstream. Worship collectives are a throwback to the coffee houses of the 1970s, where young people gathered for food, conversation, and good music. The difference is that these groups meet regularly to record spontaneous worship and compose new songs. 

Most of the singers and song writers leading the new worship are millennials familiar with the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. Some of them, such as Maverick City Music in Atlanta, have fused black gospel with contemporary pop to create a new sound. All of the worship leaders at Charlie Kirk’s funeral came from this millennial generation of musicians and worship leaders. The Christian music industry wave started as a trend in the 1970s and 1980s, but it is now impacting pop culture, slowly, surely changing the cultural landscape.

A second trend is Christianity’s move into the public square, even as what counts as the “public square” has shifted to YouTube, X, Substack, and other new media platforms. When something like the Asbury revival happens, the effects are multiplied online. Fusing new media forms and Christian discourse is not new—it was central to the success of the first two Great Awakenings.

Historians have pointed out how pamphlets and newspapers were the social media of their day, allowing for a distribution network to form. By the late nineteenth century, magazines transformed the landscape as part of the rise of mass media. The transformation of networks like the Salvation Army or the Christian and Missionary Alliance into denominations depended upon magazines to spread the message and forge a common theological and spiritual identity. 

We see something similar happening with the rise of new media like podcasts or online media platforms such as the Gospel Coalition. These new media forms have created an alternative ecosystem to the older magazines that dominated the landscape in the late twentieth-century. 

Writing for First Things, Carl Trueman labeled this cultural turn as Big Eva and Gig Eva respectively. Big Eva refers to stadium-filled conferences, evangelical parachurch organizations, and celebrity preachers/teachers to drive the movement, whereas Gig Eva identifies the fusion of bloggers, podcasters, and celebrity. No doubt Trueman is correct that these “supplements” to the local church are driving forces. They also create the shift from events to movements.

Cultural Christianity 

Perhaps the most significant trend has been the rise of so-called cultural Christianity. While it has largely played out in Britain and among Catholics and Anglicans, the effects reverberate throughout Christendom. It’s not just the historian Tom Holland’s argument in Dominion (2019) that Christianity is the cultural water within which everyone in the West swims; it is a host of intellectuals recognizing that Christianity supplied the moral and theological foundations necessary to navigate social and political challenges. 

In his article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity, Carl Trueman identified Ali’s anthropological argument for Christianity: She became convicted that a culture which values human personhood must be connected to the order of creation found in Christianity. Mary Harrington and Louise Perry have both found their way to a similar conclusion, having both written in support of a Christian sexual ethic over and against the dehumanizing effects of the sexual revolution.

Perry’s own article,“We Are Repaganizing,” makes the case for Christianity’s transcendent moral order over the immanence of paganism. The return of paganism means the return of power over life at the expense of the dignity of life. Perry has since become a Christian, claiming that she recognized her arguments were really a form of natural-law thinking. She reasoned that if Christian ideas about men, women, and marriage were sociologically true, then Christianity must be supernaturally true. She and her husband attend an Anglican church.

Trueman noted that Ali’s UnHerd article on her conversion omitted a sense of transcendence, but that article only tells part of the story. Ali’s husband, the Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson, has filled out the narrative, including his own conversion, explaining in an interview that he recognized that being spiritually naked and void is too miserable, especially in the face of tragedy and trauma. Ferguson found his way back to the faith first by studying how atheist totalitarian regimes destroyed human lives. He and Ali are currently Anglicans.

Cultural Christianity is best understood as a movement among intellectuals over the past six years. They have become aware that the Christian vision of moral and social order is the only thing that can combat radical secularism and Islamism. This is what connects the atheist Richard Dawkins’s stated preference to live in a Christian society to the conversions of Ali and Ferguson. 

There are other examples of this “Quiet Revival.” Justin Brierley’s Premier Unbelievable? Podcast represents a shift back toward the Christian heritage of the U.K. and Europe. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen claimed, in a talk last April, that Denmark needed a spiritual rearmament as much as a military one. Denmark’s Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs Morten Dahlin concurred, telling the conservative paper Berlingske that “Danish soldiers must fight for Christianity.”

Return of Strong Religion

Behind the large-scale movements toward nationalism in America and Europe is the desire to reverse the cultural deconstruction of secularism. The emptiness of secularism also explains the intellectual return to religion. First Things editor Rusty Reno has catalogued this move in several pieces, most notably his discussion of “The Return of Strong Religion.” In a follow-up article on revival, Reno pointed toward the resurgence of Catholicism and Pentecostalism among the younger generation in the U.K. 

There is a powerful story at work here, the Christian story, which not only reshaped the West and became its story, as Tom Holland argued, but offers the best chance for a deeply humanizing approach to life. This is the story and argument promoted by revivals and worship collectives, on the one hand, and the new Christian intellectuals on the other. It is appealing, but will it lead to a bona fide awakening? 

The past six years represent an inflection point. It is not simply the revival events or even the rise of cultural Christianity. We are witnessing the emergence of a renewed Christianity that combines personal spirituality with deep theology. The fruit of this story is mission and evangelization. The mainline championed social and political activism instead of evangelization, and in doing so, signed its death warrant. In this renewed vision of Christianity, evangelization is crucial to the recovery of Christian culture. Mission is to the church as fertility rates are to the survival of a nation and a culture. Evangelization comes through local and regional revivals. 

Christianity thinks in terms of centuries, not decades or even generations. We are having lots of revivals, but they have not fully translated into a large-scale awakening. It took close to two centuries for American Protestants to capture more than 50 percent of the U.S. population. I would not expect these renewals to produce a significant statistical change until the mainline is small enough to no longer matter. While it may take some time to realize fully the return of church attendance Ryan Burge wants to see before pronouncing a “revival,” they are breaking up the soil of secularization and planting the seeds of Christian cultural renewal. If the past two Awakenings are any indication, this is a necessary first step to the recovery and future growth of Christianity in the West.

Justin Brierley, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakening, and Reform

Leah Payne, God Gave Rock and Roll to You

Lousie Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution