Unwarranted optimism, I think

Ross Douthat seems to have had such a good holiday in Italy, visiting a famous Benedictine monastery, that he has written a column headed:

Religion Has Been in Decline. This Christmas Seems Different. 

The reasons he presents for this seem way, way, more about his good mood after a holiday, rather than a serious consideration of evidence.

If anything, even if you restrict the view to the USA, the fact that even Catholics have swung to a character like Trump should give more grounds for pessimism about the future of religions, rather than optimism.  I mean, here is the Washington Post talking about the Trump flunky just appointed to be his Vatican ambassador: 

Burch co-founded Catholic Vote, a lay advocacy group in 2005. The organization backed Trump in 2020 and 2024. Burch is the author of the 2020 book, “A New Catholic Moment: Donald Trump and the Politics of the Common Good,” and co-author of a 2021 book “America Catholic Daily Reader,” about Americans who have been shaped by their Catholic faith.

According to exit polls, Catholic voters supported Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin. In 2020, Catholics backed Biden, who would become America’s second Catholic president, by a five-point margin. In both years, just over 1 in 5 voters were Catholic.

The only reason I think Ross can sense a mood swing might be around certain culture war ones such as the extremes of trans rights.   But just because the extremes of identity politics might be undergoing some successful pushback hardly means a return to mainstream religion in the population overall. 

Update:   a more interesting article, to me, in the NYT is a short discussion with famous writer on early Christianity, Elaine Pagels, who really must be getting on in age.   (Yes, I see she is 81.)   This passage explains her views:

You have a foot in each of two worlds, faith and academia, that often seem like rival sides of the God gulf. Can we find paths of mutual respect to bridge that chasm?

The Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry. Intellectualizing these traditions — or turning them into dogma — doesn’t make them spiritually deep. What we call Christianity is not a single thing. Instead, it consists of a 2,000-year-old collection of stories, prayers, liturgies, music, miracles — sources drawn from traditions as different as Eastern Orthodoxy is from Pentecostalism or Christian Science. No one can swallow the entire tradition: It’s undigestible. Instead, anyone who identifies as Christian chooses certain elements of it.

A professor friend said to me: “I’m an atheist. How can you believe all that stuff?” First of all, as I see it, “believing all that stuff” is not the point. The Christian message, as I experienced it, was transformational. It encouraged me to treat other people well and opened up a world of imagination and wonder.

 Your own faith journey seems to bridge the chasm. You were raised in a household hostile to faith, then became an evangelical, then had a crisis when a friend died and you were told he wouldn’t go to heaven because he was Jewish.

When some Christians said to me that non-Christians are going to hell, I left their church. That made no sense to me. What about Jesus’ message of God’s love? At that point I left Christianity behind. For some people, there’s no middle ground. You’re either in or out — that’s how it’s often practiced. So for years I was out, although I knew that something powerful was there. But after years of being out, I kept wondering, what made that encounter with Christianity so powerful?

So I had to go back, asking questions. How were these stories written? How do they affect us so powerfully? They speak to a deep human longing for a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience. For we can respond to the same story in more than one way. As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story. But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle. As poet Seamus Heaney writes, “Believe that a further shore / is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles.”