Christianity’s decline in American life was presented as a foregone conclusion by the late 2010s. A group of prominent thinkers known as the New Atheists propelled anti-Christian polemics into mainstream discussion with mega-bestsellers and popular speaking tours. The ascendant woke movement ripped through America’s cultural institutions, denouncing traditional Christian teaching and values as bigoted, “canceling” people who persisted in public displays of those beliefs.

Meanwhile, church attendance declined, cultural norms related to sex (bogusly referred to as gender), sexuality, and marriage departed from Christian teaching, and the percentage of people who had no religion, commonly known as the “nones,” surged to new heights, reaching 29% in 2021.