The Free Press: Why Evangelicalism Is Winning, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025)):
For all the buzz around a ‘Catholic century,’ evangelicalism is the denomination best placed to thrive in contemporary America.
Of all the predictions Alexis de Tocqueville made while surveying the youthful United States, one of the boldest concerned religion. Notwithstanding Protestantism’s apparent American dominance, the Frenchman prophesied that Roman Catholicism would be the long-term victor in a democratic age. “Our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two parts,” he wrote in Democracy in America, with “some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome.”
The last few years have given that prediction new life. From the spate of traditionalist-inclined college converts to the heretofore secular humanists who have thrilled to Pope Leo XIV’s critique of artificial intelligence, it often feels like Catholicism is the strongest religious alternative to post-Christian tribalism, nihilism, and transhumanism. Writing for the Catholic magazine Commonweal, Wesleyan University’s Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, himself a non-Catholic, envisions “a Catholic century,” in which the church’s thought becomes a “default option” for people seeking the common good amid liberalism’s crisis and AI-driven dehumanization.
As a Catholic I have a similar reading of the intellectual situation. But it’s also essential to look beyond the intelligentsia to assess the health and future of religion. And in the wider culture, the form of Christianity that’s most adapted to late-modern America is clearly not the Church of Rome. It’s evangelical Protestantism. The vibes of a Catholic moment are real enough, but evangelicalism’s resilience is our era’s more fundamental fact.
You can see that resilience across almost every means of measurement: conversion rates, retention rates, identification rates, church attendance, intensity of belief. … In the 2020s, evangelicals are more than twice as likely to attend church weekly as Catholics. They are also twice as likely to describe religious faith as “very important” in their lives. … Evangelicalism doesn’t just win more converts than Catholicism; it also keeps more of its young people in the faith. …
[Evangelicalism weaknesses] offer reasons to be doubtful of the Protestant writer Timon Cline’s recent claim, advanced to counter Catholic triumphalism, that “we may already be in an evangelical century.” They are among the reasons why, despite spending a lot of time in evangelical churches in my childhood, I ended up (with my family) as a teenage convert to Catholicism.
[T]he basic test of any religion, especially any missionary religion, is whether it actually persuades people to practice and believe. And the evangelical model—the entrepreneurial pastor, the adaptable church structures, the emphasis on welcoming seekers and accommodating families, even the suburban and middlebrow aesthetic—clearly works under 21st-century conditions in a way that requires respect and some form of imitation. …
The vices of evangelicalism need correction and critique. But there will be no 21st-century revival, for Catholicism or any other kind of faith, that doesn’t reckon with the sources of its undeniable success.
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