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Is the secularized West witnessing a religious revival?

A Church historian skeptical of recurring talk about revivalism admits that new forms of religiosity are appearing, but wonders if we’re using the right indicators to observe them

La Croix International

A few seats away from me on my late afternoon train ride from Paris to Brussels, two Black people in their thirties are engaged in a conversation. They didn't know each other until a few moments ago. The man is in a tracksuit and speaks with a muffled and soft voice. The woman is wearing a stocking cap and a large gray wool coat, despite the mild autumn weather, has a clear and infectious laugh.  

Immersed in my reading, I am suddenly startled to hear "That's the Holy Spirit!" and then "Glory be to God!" arise from their conversation. I make the somewhat lazy assumption that they must have discovered that they’re part of the same Pentecostal Church. Their conversation will soon resonate with other events that unfold on this Tuesday in late October.

The president of secular France in Rome 

On the previous leg of my journey, while taking the train from Bordeaux to Paris, I had seen on Twitter that French President Emmanuel Macron, while making a visit to Rome, had asked priests at the Basilica of St John Lateran to pray for him and other world leaders. A few hours earlier, the pope had asked Macron’s wife to pray for him and she assured Francis that she prayed for him every day. 

While sitting in the frequent traveler’s lounge in Paris while waiting for my connection, I picked up a free copy of Le Figaro. It had an article on Rishi Sunak, revealing that Britain’s new prime minister was a devout Hindu. Sunak was quoted as saying that faith was the foundation of his life, and that one of the proudest moments of his career had been lighting diyas on the steps of 11 Downing Street to celebrate Diwali when he was chancellor of the exchequer.

That morning, even before leaving Bordeaux, I had an interview with a journalist from the paper Le Parisien. She had asked me about the new popularity of religions in general, and Christianity in particular, among young people. She said she was struck by the explicitly confessional behavior so many of them express on social media and in the street and wanted to know what explained this.

It was the fourth time in six months that I was questioned by the media on this phenomenon, which is counter-intuitive, at least for Catholicism. After all, empirical evidence and statistical data seem to converge towards the unquestionable observation of a crisis in the transmission of religion to new generations.

Faced with an anxious future

Each time I attempt an answer,  I try to put things into perspective and urge caution. The return of religion was already announced at the end of the 1990s (the New Age, wearing headscarves in schools, the success of the World Youth Days, etc.). There was also talk about the resurgence of faith at the end of the 1970s (Solidarnosc in Poland, the Iranian revolution, the moral majority in the United States, etc.). 

Isn't this talk of revivalism, which comes up about every twenty years, a kind of recurrent journalistic theme that is based on only a few spectacular, but not really significant, facts? Surveys show that the secularization curve continues to move upward and religious institutions continue to disintegrate.

And yet... What if, in this context of the end of an era, religion really is coming back, as a sort of necessary resource to help people face an anxious and uncertain future? 

What if the prophecy, repeated ad nauseam, about the 21st century being spiritual was already being fulfilled, but that – with our eyes riveted on the endless crisis of the main French religious organization, the Catholic Church, and its entanglement in sexual scandals – we have been blind to resurgences that are taking place at a low level?

We tend to understand religion as a specific activity, localized in time (Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays, depending on the denomination) and space (the place of worship), and we measure it by indicators focused on collective practices. Perhaps this makes us unable to grasp emerging, individual religious expressions, interwoven in the routines of daily life, or nestled in the tiny spaces of the digital world. 

Beyond the sound of creaking and crumbling infrastructures, a spiritual revolution may very well be underway.

Charles Mercier (b. 1977) is professor of contemporary history at the University of Bordeaux (France). His latest book, L’Église, les jeunes et la mondialisation. Une histoire des JMJ (Bayard, 2020) looks at the Catholic Church, young people and globalization in the context of the World Youth Day celebrations.