There Is No Christian Revival Happening In America

0:00Tired of big tech clashing with your Catholic values? Feed-A-Chat is now live on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. It's private, encrypted, and built by Catholics for Catholics, with features like parental controls and more, connect securely with family, friends, and groups, download Feed-A-Chat at feed-A-dot-email technology with Al-Khan- President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Now with the Home Depot, receive 12 months special financing and free basic installation

1:01on carpet projects with life proof, life proof with pet proof technology, home decorators collection, and traffic master carpets. Bring a new look to your floors, or give them a durable surface that stands up to life's top messes. Get 12 months special financing on installed carpet projects right now at the Home Depot. Oliver Bell at March 12th, March 29th, 2026, exclusions and additional charges may apply for licenses at Home Depot.com slash license numbers. I'll promise, always. My challenge for you for Lent is to pray and fast for not only your own issues that you are dealing with in life, in penance for your own sins, but also to do so for a holy soul and purgatory who has been otherwise forgotten, who has no one to pray for them, and maybe for the conversion of some of the prelates of the church. Well this comes hot on the heels of something the National Catholic Reporter published. I was shocked to see them publish this because, well, usually you almost think they'd be

2:02cheering this on. But the headline here is, Gallup poll, fewer than half of Americans say religion is very important in their lives. This article begins by talking about how the religiosity of the Trump 2.0 administration, he knows going on, but in spite of all that, you know, things aren't getting any better on this front. That's how they begin this. Now, here's the relevant part of the article quote. The percentage of Americans who say religion is very important in their lives is leveled at 47% in 2025. It's been up or down 1% since 2021. Religious service attendance reveals a picture of steady decline. A majority of U.S. residents, 57%, interesting word they're using, the word resident, by the way, 57% say they rarely or never attend religious services. By comparison, in 1992, only 42% said they rarely or never attended services. 42% by the way, 35 years ago is the good old days.

3:03That number's way too high. You should be appalled if that was the number today. Unfortunately, that would be a, you know, one fifth improvement, a 20% improvement here. There's a problem with that. I think this is another piece of evidence about how there is no religious revival happening in America, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist who is a professor of the practice of John C. Danforth Center on religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis. I've used Mr. Orp, I guess, Dr. Burge's data before, he usually posts these things to X. There's nothing here that would represent any sort of major reversal or significant change in the trajectory of religion in America. Most pulled groups of experienced declines in the percentage you say religion is very important in their lives. Among the biggest declines was the percentage of black Americans who say religion is very important in their lives. Between 2001 and 2005, 85% of US African Americans said religion was very important compared with 63% in 2021 to 2025, a whopping 22% percentage point drop over two decades.

4:09Among groups that experienced virtually no decline were Republicans, 66% said religion was very important to them 20 years ago, and 64% of Republicans said the same last year. Democrats fell from 60% to 37% over the past two decades. As an aside, I do wonder how the US bishops would answer this question. Just food for thought here. But Burge said that although Republicans continue to say religion is very important in their lives, their self-reported church attendance has dropped. They like the idea of religion, that hasn't changed, but they don't actually go as much. So it's sort of like a symbolic religion. The number of men who said religion was very important in their lives fell from 51% over the past 20 years to 43% and 8% percentage point drop. Even more significant, the number of women who say religion is very important fell from 66% to 51% over the past two decades, a 15-point drop. That suggests the gender gap is closing. Women are still more religious than men, but the importance of religion is falling fast among females, suggesting the gender gap may eventually disappear if trends continue.

5:15Go back to that. I'm fast and forlorn nonsense. Fasting from the church forlorn. One of the reasons they said it was the rise of anti-women sentiment allegedly in the culture. It's more of the sort of at least the, we'll call it the surface level, right word shift, where certain issues that get dubbed as issues for political issues for women are being viewed with more skepticism than they have ever been in the living memory of most people watching us. Probably that's why, because we already know what the political breakdown is among men and women. We already know what that looks like. And yet to ask yourself, since we've seen a lot of this, and when you go to a mass, if you go to an ordinary form mass anywhere, and this is not picking on the Nova Sordo, just if you go to an ordinary form mass, and you hear homilies that sound like they lack testosterone, they lack the courage, the spine, the intestinal fortitude, calling

6:17people to repentance and talking about sin and such, instead you get these kind of politically charged group hug. These homilies that almost sound like the priest is tacitly denying that people do end up in eternal perdition. Those kind of homilies, you kind of wonder how much of that plays into this, the underlying logic, including the number of people who do attend between men and women, and more broadly, because one of the things here is paradoxically, we hear that people want to be called to repentance. They want to hear that preach in the ambo, and they want the priest in the confessional to hold them to account for their sins. But how many of you have avoided the hard priest in the confessional? Go to a confession and say, if you're lucky to have two priests offering confession at the same time, practically inert of these days, but I've seen it happen before, if you see that and you find out that the shorter line has priest A, father A has a history of

7:18being very hard line and old school about the sins that you're confessing. And then line B has kind of the older, kind of hippie-ish priest who is, we'll say more in tune with the spirit of the sonotal church in the confessional. But he does offer it in a way that is unequivocally valid. He follows the rules on offering the confession, so you don't have to worry about the validity. Which priest are you going to go to, the one who's likely to yell at you in the confession or the other one? I hear that a lot from people that they will choose the sort of neohippie priest. And it's because we are a soft people and a soft age, though that doesn't necessarily mean a priest should be yelling at you in the confessional either, my very mixed feelings about that entirely. But those religious numbers don't get any better, actually. We have a, this is from a, I believe a Protestant motivational speaker, not so many normally would quote much, but the data is, that how it checks out that he shares.

8:22For the past 35 years, the percentage of Americans who claim to be non-religious has increased by over 260%. Those who leave the pews to believe in nothing at all, does life get better? Here's some interesting data about the nuns. If you watch Bishop Robert Barron, you've seen him talk about this. He says, I'll let you decide. The nuns report being significantly less satisfied with their social lives, according to Pew 2024. They're more likely to say they have zero close friends to rely on. If they have fewer children, far below replacement rate, and only 32% say they even want to have children at all, they're more likely to pass away at a younger age than those who attend church regularly. They're 1.5 to 3 times more likely to have a substance problem. Also less likely to donate to charity, even the secular charities, less likely to volunteer, less likely to say they're very happy with life. The good news is that after decades of running the strange anti-religious social experiment, we're finally beginning to see how awful it has made things.

9:22We're at the commencement of a significant spiritual change in America. I disagree with him on that last sentence, because there's literally no evidence that there's one happening. There's evidence, though, that there's a hunger for it, as the pollsters said, as Professor Burr said, there's a hunger for America's like the idea of religion. Let me know what you thought of all that in the comments, please. Remember to pray for anybody that we may have spoken about negatively today, not trying to make angry at people in the church with who have authority and positions of power or great influence. It's a problem is people do a good enough job of that on their own, so please pray for them. It is the greatest act of charity you can do to pray for someone, especially someone you don't like, is a great act of charity and humility. Please pray for the church, and if you've thought about supporting the work we do at Return to Tradition, options in the description box below. Patreon, subscribe star, that kind of thing. They do help keep tires matter. They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

10:24Tread confidently with new tires from Tyraq, whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tyraq makes it easy, fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options. Go to Tyraq.com to see tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews, and be sure to check out all the special offers, Tyraq.com, the way tire buying should be. Keep these daily messages coming, get access to a patron-only discord server, and the occasional extra piece of content exclusive to supporters that I will post for you. Like I said, pray for the church. I'm Anthony Stein, Aviv Maria.