NY Times Op-Ed: Religion Has Been In Decline. This Christmas Seems Different.

New York Times Op-Ed: Religion Has Been in Decline. This Christmas Seems Different., by Ross Douthat:

Every Christmas I try to write a column on religion, and over the years they’ve often circled themes of challenge, struggle and decline. In an essay this week on the discovery of God, my colleague David Brooks jokes that “entering the church in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929,” and something similar might be said about becoming a Catholic newspaper columnist 15 years ago: Traditional religious institutions have been scandal-racked and fractured throughout my years at this paper — suffering through an early 21st-century ebb tide, if not quite a vast withdrawing roar.

This Christmas seems different. There is statistical evidence that the latest wave of secularization has reached some sort of limit. There is suggestive cultural evidence that secular liberalism has lost faith in itself, that many people miss not just religion’s moral vision but also its metaphysical horizons, that the arguments for religious belief might be getting a new hearing. Notre-Dame de Paris has been rebuilt from its ashes. I rashly predicted a religious revival earlier this year, and at the very least I expect religious trends in the later 2020s to be different from the trends of the 2010s.

But different probably means really different, not just a return to what existed in the past. The last bastions of the before times, the old religious establishments, are likely to remain in existential trouble. …

[A]ny growth is likely to be nondenominational, subcultural (think Latin Mass Catholics or converts to Eastern Orthodoxy or communally oriented Protestants), mystical and sui generis, with notable flowerings in places where traditional faith has rarely grown before (like in the tech industry, say).

Other New York Times op-eds by Ross Douthat: