Here Is the Evidence. Your Vote Is Needed Today.

Thank you for your responses last week! Many of you answered. Some answers were emphatic,  some were angry. A few told me I was asking the wrong question—hold on to that thought.

Bottom line upfront: Last week, I asked what you saw as evidence of a revival in America. This week, I will show you everything I have—the best case that America is in a revival and the best case against.

The case that America is in a revival

The decline stopped. Pew's Religious Landscape Study, built on 36,908 interviews, puts the Christian share of U.S. adults at 62 percent—down hard from 78 percent in 2007, but essentially flat since 2019. The unaffiliated plateaued near 29 percent. The Cooperative Election Study, surveying 50,000 adults, found the nonreligious share falling from 34 percent to 31 percent in a year. After thirty years of unbroken secularization, the losing stopped. This is the most defensible pro-revival claim available.

Young men came back. Gallup, on 2024–25 data, found 42 percent of men aged 18 to 29 saying religion is very important to them, up from 28 percent two years earlier. Fourteen points. Monthly attendance among them rose to 40 percent, the highest since 2012.

Baptisms rose a fifth straight year. The Southern Baptist Convention reported 263,075 baptisms in 2025, up nearly 5 percent—the first five-year run in seventy-five years.

Interest is at a decade high. Bible sales hit a twenty-one-year high, roughly double 2019. The American Bible Society put the “Movable Middle”—curious but not deeply engaged—at 28 percent of adults, up from 25. Roughly nine million more people, pulled out of the previously disengaged.

The case against declaring a revival

A temporary spike in numbers. In 2025 the American Bible Society found a clear uptick in Bible reading and engagement. In 2026 when they measured again the gain had largely evaporated. Scripture engagement returned to 2024 levels. That is not a revival. That is a spike.

The largest study finds nothing. PRRI’s Census of American Religion, an address-based random sample of roughly 40,000 adults across all fifty states, found 66 percent Christian and 28 percent unaffiliated—mirroring the year before. Weekly attendance was unchanged at 26 percent.

Are young men really coming back? Pew examined the same period and found no clear evidence of a nationwide resurgence. Pew reads the narrowing gender gap the opposite way from Gallup: it narrowed because young women’s religiousness declined, not because young men’s rose. And Gallup itself flagged that the gains concentrate among young Republicans—roughly seven points among young Republican men, essentially zero among young Democratic women. A movement of the Holy Spirit does not usually sort by voter registration.

Organizationally reported baptisms are up while membership falls. That same Southern Baptist report showed total membership down more than 3 percent. Baptism counts entry. It does not count whether anyone stayed.

And the one result I cannot get around—because it is ours…

Last autumn we put the SALT Index in front of 6,037 American adults, a nationally representative sample with a margin of error about a point and a half. We were not asking who shows up. We were asking whether anything is being absorbed, lived, and passed on.

Sixty-one percent of American adults call themselves followers of Jesus. Only 33 percent say they expect heaven because they are saved by grace through faith in Jesus. Thirty-five percent read Scripture in a given week. Thirty-eight percent are in a small group. Thirty-six percent ever look for a chance to talk about their faith.

And thirty-one percent—fewer than one in three adults in this country—have ever sat down with one person and helped them grow spiritually.

Now the finding that stopped me cold: people who do not identify as Christ-followers report mentoring at virtually the same rate as people who do. Christian identity, at national scale, is not producing more disciple-makers than no Christian identity at all.

That is why I do not believe we can call this a revival. Not because the interest is fake—the interest is real, and I think it is God-given. But revival is more than a spike in attention. Revival is multiplication. It is people who were found going out and finding others, and those people doing it again. That is the mechanism. That is the whole engine.

We have a harvest showing up at a church with no laborers to work it. Jesus told us exactly what to do when that happens, and it was not to celebrate the size of the field. You cannot have a revival and a discipleship crisis at the same time. One of them is a lie. And we have the data on which one.

Why the researchers disagree

Sort the findings by methodology instead of by conclusion and something jumps out. The instruments built on probability samples—Pew, PRRI, Gallup, the American Bible Society—report stability. The instruments built on opt-in online panels, where people volunteer rather than being randomly selected, report the largest increases.

That is not an accusation of bad faith. But people who volunteer for a survey about faith are not a random slice of America.

Which brings me back to England and the “Quiet Revival” I talked about last week.

When “The Quiet Revival” results were retracted in March, no one was accused of running a scam. Nobody stole anything. Yes, resources moved, youth ministries shifted priorities and long-range planning. Donor appeals were built around this idea of a generation supposedly coming home, and stewardship organizations wrote about a generous future premised on those numbers.

And yet when it all collapsed, the Bible Society chose not to pursue YouGov. There was no lawsuit, or call for funds to be restored. Why?  Because not one of those decisions to expand or redirect ministry was made in bad faith. Every one was made by people who love Jesus and wanted the number to be true.

And that’s the real consequence. Not the money, but the focus that was misdirected.

One last number

In February 2024, 18 percent of Americans said religion was gaining influence in American life. By April 2026, 37 percent said so—the highest Pew has recorded since 2002. Over that same two years, affiliation did not move. Attendance did not move. Prayer did not move.

I have shown you my hand on one piece of this. On the rest, I want your feedback:

Take this new ten-second survey: https://bttb.org/revival2

Next week I will show you what moved between your first answer and your second, what our survey of non-believers said about revival in America—and I will finally tell you what I think about all of it.

All in, eyes up!

P.S. This week on Spiritually Fit Today, Mike Heili is back for a second week to talk about his experiences as an Ironman athlete and how we can overcome setbacks, avoid burnout, and finish strong on our spiritual journey.