Why You Can’t Predict The Future of Religion
In an 1822 letter, Thomas Jefferson expressed confidence that traditional Christianity in the young United States was giving way to a more enlightened faith, much like Jefferson’s own in its rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ. “I trust,” he wrote, “that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”
Less than a year earlier in upstate New York, a young man named Charles Grandison Finney began a multiday interplay of prayer and mystical experience that led to a moment when, he wrote later, “it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face … He stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to Him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance.”
This set Finney on a path that would bury Jefferson’s hypothesis — toward leadership in an age of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, that forged the form of evangelical Christianity that would bestride 19th-century America and encouraged a proliferation of novel sects with supernatural beliefs distant from Jefferson’s Enlightenment religion.
That history is worth mentioning for a specific reason and a general one. The specific is that a Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, just experienced an old-school revival — a multiweek outpouring that kept students praying and singing from morning to night, drew tens of thousands of pilgrims and captured the imagination of the internet. The general reason is that whatever the revival’s long-term impact, the history of Finney and Jefferson is a reminder that religious history is shaped as much by sudden irruptions as long trajectories, as much by the mystical and personal as by the institutional and sociological.
Secular experts writing about religion tend to emphasize the deep structural forces shaping practice and belief — the effects of industrialization or the scientific revolution, suburbanization or the birth control pill. Religious intellectuals tend to emphasize theological debates and evangelization strategies. These analytical tools are always important; the sociological does not disappear just because the mystical has suddenly arrived. Nor, in the shadow of the numinous, does strategy cease to matter: The encounter on the road to Damascus created Paul the Apostle, but his career thereafter was all organizing, preaching and letter-writing.
But the experiences themselves remain irreducibly unpredictable. Why Asbury? Why Saul of Tarsus? Why Charles Grandison Finney? A unique religious culture exists across the Mountain West region of the United States because one of Finney’s contemporaries believed he received a revelation from the angel Moroni. Arguably the most important movement within global Christianity today exists because of a revival that began with an African-American preacher and his followers praying together in Los Angeles in 1906. And I can quote you chapter and verse on the reasonability of theism, but I am a Christian because two thousand years ago a group of provincials in Roman Palestine believed they had seen their teacher heal the sick and then rise from the grave — and then because, as a child in Connecticut, I watched my own parents speak in tongues.
Whether these experiences correspond to ultimate reality will not be argued here. My points are about observation and expectation. When it comes to the religious future, you should follow the social trends, but also always expect the unexpected — recognizing that every organized faith could disappear tomorrow and some spiritual encounter would resurrect religion soon enough.
If you are trying to discern what a post-Christian spirituality might become, then what post-Christian seekers are experiencing and what they claim to be encountering matters as much as any specific religious label they might claim. And if you are imagining a renewal for Christianity, all the best laid plans may matter less than something happening in some obscure place or to some obscure individual, in whose visions an unexpected future might be taking shape.