I consider myself to be a religious person, and I believe that materialism has definite limits. That said, I am not going to bury my head in the sand and blithely insist on what is quite clearly not true. Far from making a comeback, traditional, Western religion is on a steep and steady decline in the developed world. A couple of quick facts will attest to that.

NORC (National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, has been conducting the nationwide General Social Survey since 1972. That year, 90% of the American population identified as Christian, and only 5% failed to identify with any religion at all. In the most recent survey (2022) the proportion of Americans professing to be Christian had fallen to 64% while the share with no religious identity had risen to 29%. The GSS trend is consistent with what other data-gathering organizations (such as the Pew Research Center) have found.

Meanwhile, the Public Religion Research Institute reports that every major Christian constituency saw a drop in numbers between 2013 and 2023. This included mainstream Protestants (-4.5%), white evangelicals (-2.2%), and Black Protestants (-.6%). However, the sharpest decline occurred among Catholics, with 10.3% fewer Americans embracing that denomination. (Non-Christian faiths, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, generally maintained their numbers over the decade.)

And finally, I should point out that affirming some type of 'higher power' should not be conflated with a belief in a Christian God. A higher power may be nothing more than a vague sense of connection with the cosmos, or a reliance on the healing power of love.