People turn to religion in times of crisis. adults, according to Pew, alleged that during the pandemic, their faith became stronger. Across the globe, online searches for the word “prayer” soared. While the white media I grew up with sometimes treated the Black Church and Latinx Catholicism as exceptions, for the most part, godless liberals always seemed to be affirming religion’s reputation for hypocrisy, and I’m sure many would blame their campaign against Christianity for the reason that, in a 2019 Pew Research study, 30 million more Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated than a decade before.īut then COVID hit. Abortion rights and prayer in schools were wedge issues shaping a culture war meanwhile, the Catholic Church was rocked by child abuse scandals and biggoted evangelicals like Ted Haggard were outed as having gay sex behind closed doors. I remember documentaries like Jesus Camp (2006) and the Bill Mahar-helmed Religulous (2008) that made believers the butt of the joke, establishing an enlightened atheist-liberal zeitgeist in stark opposition to Fox-News-watching home-schooled creationists preparing for supposedly soon-to-come end times. with millennials identifying as Christians far less than their older counterparts.
For decades, organized religion was on the decline in the U.S.