Whether the apparent cultural turn of early 2025 will produce lasting change remains an open question. Despite early promises from universities to scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion and recommit to open inquiry, campus life still feels stultified and defensive. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Sam Abrams wrote in the Washington Examiner this week, “beneath the rhetorical softening lies the same sprawling bureaucratic infrastructure that has shaped campus life for years.”
And following early signs of corporate and institutional retreat from the excesses of 2020-style woke progressivism, reports of wokeism’s demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated. What appeared in early 2025 to be a broad recalibration increasingly resembles a narrow exercise in financial and reputational risk management — one that produced cosmetic changes while leaving the underlying ideological framework intact. While the federal government did meaningfully dismantle DEI programs, many businesses and universities simply repackaged them under softer labels such as “belonging” or “access and opportunity.” Progressive values and themes, meanwhile, continue to dominate university curricula and the entertainment industry.
As Jacob Savage recently noted in his eye-opening essay in Compact, wokeism’s staying power is largely attributable to the brazenly discriminatory staffing practices at elite institutions since 2014. White men, especially those who are not progressive, have been systematically denied entry in favor of nonwhite men and white women who swore loyalty oaths to progressive ideology. Permanently shifting the culture in these institutions will take years, if not decades.
But in at least one respect, the shift of 2025 has proved meaningful, and with any hope, lasting: America’s long decline in Christian affiliation and worship has abated and even reversed in certain respects. And most promising of all, the turnaround appears to be driven by young people.
Indeed, millennials and the much-maligned Generation Z are driving a resurgence in church attendance and Christian worship. A September study from the Barna Group, which has been studying church attendance and faith practices since the 1980s, found that millennial and Gen Z Christians are now attending church more frequently than older generations. Gen Z Christians now attend church services 1.9 weekends per month, leading all age groups. Millennials are right on their heels at 1.8 weekends per month. These rates have doubled from 2020 and represent by far the highest for young Christians that Barna has ever recorded. Boomers, by contrast, have seen a sharp drop in church attendance while Generation X has remained stable.
The Barna study also found that millennials and Gen Z are driving a resurgence in Bible reading. The number of U.S. adults who engage in weekly scriptural reading has surged to 42%, 12% higher than last year’s findings, with nearly half of millennial and Gen Z Christians now reporting to read the Bible once per week. Bible sales surged by 36% in September following the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who rose to prominence by engaging young people on college campuses. HarperCollins Christian Publishing, the largest commercial Bible and Christian book publisher in the United States, reported that people aged 18-34 comprised a large portion of the surge.
Notable in the surge among is the trend of young people converting to Catholicism. Numerous articles in prestige journals and newspapers have detailed the phenomenon this year, highlighting Gen Z’s search for meaning, authenticity, and stabilization during an era of societal decay. These young Catholic converts report being drawn in by the beauty of ancient liturgy and rituals.
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The Pew Research Center backs up Barna’s findings. According to its Religious Landscape Study released this year, the share of Americans identifying as Christian has leveled off at approximately 62% following decades of decline. Measures such as daily prayer and monthly church attendance have also held steady since 2020, while the religiously unaffiliated have plateaued.
At a time when cultural shifts prove fleeting, the spiritual awakening among America’s youth stands out as a profound and potentially enduring countercurrent. That’s something worth celebrating this Christmas.