Was the year Christianity turned a corner? Throughout the year, on substacks, websites, YouTube videos, and Instagram posts, the signs kept cropping up of what Re-Enchanting co-host Justin Brierley has called the Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God.
Over recent years, and throughout , we have seen a stream of public figures declaring various degrees of interest in Christianity, or even full-on faith. Yet more complicated. The alliance of Evangelicalism with Donald Trump is problematic, to say the least. Vance is a serious Christian, having made the journey from an evangelical church upbringing, through student atheism into Roman Catholicism.
On our Re-Enchanting podcast, Molly Worthen is a good example of why, despite everything, sceptics like her can still find faith in the USA. The Assisted Dying bill passed. Despite the celebrity names, numbers going to church continue to fall, and the public assumptions of the culture remain firmly secular.
Recent articles in the Spectator express the dilemma well. Wilson pens a gloomy assessment of the prospects of Christianity in the west, entitled Is the End of Christendom Nigh? Which is it? Maybe to adjudicate, an editorial, presumably written by its new editor, Michael Gove, entitled In Defence of Faith makes a strong case for Christian faith and its place in national life.
Anecdotally, at the local level, stories abound of people stepping into churches, seeking some kind of meaning in life and re-engaging with faith. Our local church in Oxford has a regular stream of stories of students exploring and finding faith and I keep hearing the same story in churches across the country. In the twentieth century, both Fascism and Communism rose and fell.
