Michael Bubaro: From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bubaro. This is The Daily. Across the country and here in South Central Pennsylvania, church leaders say they're seeing a noticeable shift.

Anonymous Voice 1: Gen Z is returning to faith, but in ways you might not expect.

Anonymous Voice 2: You're seeing the largest number of converts in recent history.

Anonymous Voice 3: Young New Yorkers have a new hot spot: Sunday Mass.

Anonymous Voice 4: We're learning that for the first time in decades, faith in this country appears to be growing after decades of declining church attendance and a profound rise in secularism.

Anonymous Voice 5: I was like, could I maybe go to a church service with you just to like see what it's like?

Anonymous Voice 6: Religion is having a moment in America. I think we do start to question like why is this happening?

Michael Bubaro: Today, producer Austa Chhaturved talks to our colleague Lauren Jackson about why more and more Americans are now choosing to believe. It's Tuesday, May 12th. Hey, Lauren.

Lauren Jackson: Hi. How are you?

Austa Chhaturved: I'm good.

Austa Chhaturved: It's so fun to see you in this space.

Lauren Jackson: Oh, uh, yeah. Let's see how fun it is.

Austa Chhaturved: I love this angle.

Austa Chhaturved: Um, it feels like so much of the conversation about religion in the last few years and even The Daily's coverage of religion has been about how politicized it has become, especially on the right.

Lauren Jackson: True.

Austa Chhaturved: There was a recent faceoff between the Pope and the president, but I'm also thinking about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, battles at the Southern Baptist Convention over female pastors and IVF. Some of these episodes I've produced for The Daily, but you haven't been reporting on religion from that angle. Instead, you've been reporting on faith itself and how and why people in America believe. And I want to understand how all of this started for you and why you decided to begin reporting on this now.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah, there have been so many stories in the last few years of the ascendancy of a very muscular conservative Christianity and the ways in which that is expressing itself in politics. I'm interested in all of them, but I was really interested in how most people in America wrestle with these really big questions of religion and spirituality and how they appear in their lives, their families, and communities. And as I started to look into that, something really dramatic emerged in my reporting, which was there is something hugely significant happening sociologically and demographically within America when it comes to American spirituality and religiosity. And that is that we know people across the political spectrum, young and old, are expressing a renewed interest in spirituality and in religiosity.

Lauren Jackson: We've seen for the first time since Pew Research has been gathering data on religion that people have stopped leaving churches. In essence, secularization is paused. So, it's not an uptick in churchgoing, but kind of a flattening out.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah. And that sounds like it's insignificant. It's just a pause, but it's a really big moment for people's personal relationships to religion and spirituality. We know that in the early '90s, 90% of American adults identified as Christian according to Pew. That number dropped basically over my lifetime to be only about 2/3 of Americans. It was called the great dechurching. It was the largest and fastest shift in American religiosity on record. And some people estimate that 40 million people left American churches. So what demographers and sociologists had said for years was going to be the definitive decline of religiosity in America. That has stopped. It has paused over the past 5 years. And we actually got some new data in the last few weeks and months that really made this picture even more interesting.

Austa Chhaturved: How so?

Lauren Jackson: We had expected that every cohort coming up, so every new group of young adults would be less religious than their parents or their grandparents. But Pew published a report that shows if you actually look at the youngest group of Americans, so 18 to 23 year olds, there are signs that that group is even more likely, and it's slight, but it's it's more likely to attend religious services at least once a month than those just older than them.

Austa Chhaturved: Wow.

Lauren Jackson: And then separately, we got a new survey from Gallup that found a sharp rise in the share of men under 30 who say that religion is quote very important to them. It went from 28% in 2023 to 42% in 2025.

Austa Chhaturved: That's a huge jump.

Lauren Jackson: It is. And it was surprising as well because historically we've seen that young women tend to be more religious than young men. That's changing.

Austa Chhaturved: So a lot of numbers pointing in a similar direction. How should we be looking at them in aggregate? How are you seeing this moment?

Lauren Jackson: It's a really good question and it's one that has sparked a lot of debate both in the pages of the New York Times and also in the people I'm speaking to on the religion beat. You know, plenty of people have declared this a revival. That's a strong word and plenty of other people have said that is very premature and potentially erroneous. But what we do know is that this trend continues. So in 2025, the non-religious share of the American population declined yet again, and the number of atheists and agnostics is back down to the levels we saw in 2014. That's close to 15 years ago.

Austa Chhaturved: Wow.

Lauren Jackson: We do have signs that this shift is happening more on the right, particularly among young men. But we're also seeing this across the political spectrum. And if you take a step back, this is not just about Christianity. It's about all other major religions as well.

Austa Chhaturved: Mhm.

Austa Chhaturved: So the main takeaway is that the story of faith and religion and belief in this country is really at an inflection point.

Austa Chhaturved: And as I said, you've been examining what's been driving all of this. You've been talking to people about what they believe and why they believe it. I can imagine that these conversations are quite intimate. I often say I feel like I'm part reporter, part therapist because it takes a lot of attention and a lot of time to attend to these stories. They're so intimate. They're so personal. And it's also personal for me. My life in a way mirrors the shifts we've been seeing in Americans attitudes toward religion and also their religious practices over the past three decades. Could you tell me a little bit about your journey?

Lauren Jackson: I was raised in a very very conservative and very religious place. I was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was raised a devout Mormon or member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And my family was really practicing. When I was, you know, a little girl, I used to write and send articles to the church magazines because my dream job was to work as a writer for the church magazines.

Austa Chhaturved: Wow.

Lauren Jackson: In high school, I had a 6:00 a.m. Bible study that I attended every day before school.

Austa Chhaturved: That's early.

Lauren Jackson: 6 Yeah.

Austa Chhaturved: Oh my gosh.

Lauren Jackson: Um I was always late. I was always late. I mean, I It's astonishing that I didn't crash on the freeway every day when I was just careening down the highway to get there on time because if I didn't graduate from this seminary class, I couldn't attend the big church university called Brigham Young University. So, I I had to make it.

Austa Chhaturved: Mhm.

Lauren Jackson: I was expected to attend and I expected myself for my whole life to attend, find someone to marry, have children, and raise them in the church. So it was an extraordinary shift when I decided to attend a secular university.

Austa Chhaturved: Was that a big deal in your family?

Lauren Jackson: It was a huge deal. I had a guidance counselor who nudged me and nudged me and nudged me and finally I relented and decided to apply for a scholarship. And when I got it, I was really surprised by how moved I was by the environment, how much I thought I wanted to learn in that space. And so ultimately, I decided to go, but I was terrified. And that was a really, really hard transition for me. It was extraordinarily difficult for me to not only leave that community, but begin to challenge a faith and an ideology that was really comprehensive.

Austa Chhaturved: What did that look like?

Lauren Jackson: The first week I was there, I fell in love with someone who was not a member of my faith. And it's a, you know, very common rupture for a lot of people who then have to begin to question.

Austa Chhaturved: What it is they believe in and how they can negotiate the boundaries of that because the way you were raised, it was like, yeah, you were meant to be with someone from the same faith.

Lauren Jackson: Absolutely. I also encountered ideas, you know, I um in a political science class read Isaiah Berlin on pluralism, the idea that many truths and realities are equally valid and worthy of consideration and examination. And that really cracked my world open, that idea, that concept that there was not one true church, there could be many possible truths. And for me personally, that, you know, was the beginning of a huge reckoning, one that continued as I attended graduate school abroad. And at the age of 25, I ultimately formally left the church.

Austa Chhaturved: How does that affect your relationship with your family given how you were raised?

Lauren Jackson: I mean, of course, if a parent truly and deeply believes that a religion is is true and is the best path to follow and they desperately love their child, they're going to want their child to follow it. So, it was an, you know, an exercise in empathy and trying to understand and really accept my parents' perspective while also holding my own.

Lauren Jackson: Mom, I I need you to know that I am grateful for the many positive things in many ways that being Mormon has brought me. I'm no longer choosing to be Mormon.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) Okay, that sounds good to you. But what you're pushing back is this flow of happiness, joy, inspiration. You know, these were tough conversations, but I knew even then that these were really important moments in my life and that I wanted to remember them accurately. So, I recorded them.

Lauren Jackson: I'm telling you right now, it's not a healthy institution for me and many, many, many people. I do not want to participate and that is the healthiest choice for me for many reasons. I'm asking you to honor that as my mom. I was desperately wanting my parents to not only understand but also to approve of the life choices that I'd made in leaving my faith.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) Okay. I'm just asking if we could I never got any chance to talk to you about it.

Lauren Jackson: But it's not it's not it's not up for debate with you. It's not up for.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) It's not it's not a debate. I guess the thing is that.

Lauren Jackson: And frankly that's not something my parents were willing to offer because they deeply believe in the worldview and the faith that they believe in and that they were raised in and that they live every day.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) I think if you put that over here and you had ever experienced feeling the Holy Spirit, then you would get what I'm talking about. But if you don't have like room in your heart to just try and listen, then.

Lauren Jackson: And so they want me to participate in that.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) I love you.

Lauren Jackson: Love to you looks like being exceptionally prescriptive.

Lauren Jackson: They felt like my rejection of that faith was a rejection of them and that led to a lot of conflict.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) I don't know. I guess if there was a sunset, sometimes you say to somebody, "Come see the sunset." Cuz you get excited and that's all. You know, you can make it sound so demeaning, but it's like a sunset to me. It's like, "Wait a second. Let's not go look at the bush. Let's look at the sunset." I feel like.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her past self) Okay, I've got a different view of the sunset. I've got my own sunset. It's pretty great.

Austa Chhaturved: So, you were on a different path, a part of this great dechurching. What did faith look like to you at that point?

Lauren Jackson: I mean, yeah. Yeah. I stopped going to church, but I didn't stop searching for answers to the big life questions that plague us all. And that made me like most Americans, almost everyone believes in something.

Lauren Jackson: Whether that's religious or not. The most recent Pew survey said that 92% of Americans say that they believe in a god, spirits, souls, or an afterlife. But only 30% of Americans actually attend a house of worship weekly. So, like most Americans, I found meaning outside of religion.

Austa Chhaturved: Mhm.

Lauren Jackson: I threw myself into work. I did what I'd always wanted to do, which was be a journalist. I was really motivated by the mission of the New York Times. I worked all the time. All the time. I also worked out as much as possible in my off time. I hiked. I went to workout classes, SoulCycle, a CrossFit, these expensive workout classes that promise not just a healthier body, but also a better life.

Austa Chhaturved: Mhm.

Lauren Jackson: I never got into astrology, but I understood why so many people, especially young women, had downloaded Co-Star, the astrology app.

Austa Chhaturved: I've had so many conversations over the years about astrology and about Mercury.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah, Mercury seems to always be in retrograde. But I get it. It helps explain the messiness of life. It promises that there's some sort of cosmic alchemy to the chaos. And who doesn't want that?

Austa Chhaturved: M.

Lauren Jackson: And the more I spoke to people, the more I traveled, I couldn't shake a really ingrained worldview that I had, which was one in which I saw belief and spirituality. I saw it everywhere.

Anonymous Voice 7: The people in power are obviously scared of the truth. Yet, no matter how hard they try, they cannot escape from it.

Lauren Jackson: You know, standing at a climate rally with Greta Tunberg on stage at COP in Glasgow, there was a reverence in the crowd.

Anonymous Voice 8: This is what leadership looks like.

Lauren Jackson: A desire for deliverance in the crowd that felt distinctly religious to me.

Anonymous Voice 9: Black matter.

Lauren Jackson: I saw it in the intensity of how people gravitated to social justice and campus activism movements where like you had a sense of what was right and wrong.

Lauren Jackson: I felt it at the Arrows tour.

Anonymous Voice 10: What are people feeling if not an extraordinary ecstatic form of communal gathering rarely found outside of religious spaces?

Anonymous Voice 11: After tonight, when you hear these songs, you're going to think about us and the memories we made tonight on the tour.

Lauren Jackson: So, while we had all this data that millions of people had left American religion, it was still so clear to me that people were looking for an outlet for their beliefs. And then came the Pew report and that data seemed to show that some people were reconsidering religion or houses of worship as a place they could turn to explore those beliefs. And so I started to talk to them to try to figure out why.

Michael Bubaro: We'll be right back.

Interviewee 1: Even though I did attend Catholic school all through elementary and middle school, I felt like I was going through the motions but didn't really have a strong faith of my own.

Interviewee 2: My parents, they were just like, "Religion is dumb." Like why would you believe that? Like I remember I was really little and I was like, "Oh, like what happens after you die?" And they were like, "Nothing. You die."

Austa Chhaturved: Okay. So, Lauren, what did people tell you about what they were looking for and why it led them to religion or back to religion?

Lauren Jackson: Everyone has their own story and it's tough to make generalizations, but as I talked to hundreds of people across the country, a few themes did start to emerge.

Interviewee 3: Um, so I started college in my freshman years when the pandemic happened and suddenly we were like inside all the time and like I wasn't interacting with that many people and I just like became very depressed which was like a big change for me like that was never something.

Lauren Jackson: I think the biggest one that came up again and again is that the pandemic was a moment of extraordinary rupture in American life.

Interviewee 4: Right at the beginning of COVID, my nana, she doesn't have a husband and her oldest daughter just died like she was standing there with a smile on her face praising God. And for me, that was like, damn, I want that. That is the model.

Lauren Jackson: When we look at the Pew data, the moment that we start to see secularization level off or pause, it's just about the exact same moment that the pandemic started.

Interviewee 5: I'm looking at this and I'm like life is full of so much uncertainty and I wish I had like some way like mentally to like deal with that.

Lauren Jackson: People were forced to contend with their own mortality and look hard at the questions that they had about how they were living and if it was working for them.

Lauren Jackson: And a lot of people decided that it wasn't working for them.

Interviewee 6: It wasn't just the work that I'm doing. Like it just feels like a lot of like corporate.

Interviewee 7: Like I think my parents' generation had a much stronger belief that like work is good and like by working you are making the world a better place. But like my generation like a lot of us do not feel that way. A lot of us see our jobs as just a job. We don't see it as an outlet for like meaning.

Interviewee 8: The community piece I think is the piece that still aches. You know, um.

Lauren Jackson: I think many people have realized, especially in the last few years, that they really don't have the depth of community that they long for in their lives.

Interviewee 9: We all live in these separate nuclear homes with our nuclear families. And you think this is like the pinnacle of first world country success, but the huge con of that is we're isolated.

Interviewee 10: I've been like, where's community? All my old undergrad friends have left or like they're all just like in their own little buckets. You know what I mean? Like everyone's separate.

Lauren Jackson: So for me, even though I left the church, I feel a pain I don't really know how to describe.

Interviewee 11: I've had this like really strong desire to like host barbecues like in my apartment complex. I've like felt like I could will a community into existence, you know what I mean? Just like through sheer personality, I could just like invite a ton of people and host like a big party, but I just like it's been 8 months now and I like haven't made a move.

Lauren Jackson: You know what I mean? When things go wrong, when they get sick, when something really hard happens, many people I talk to are looking for connection and community that they're just not finding in comments online. They want a meal train. They want to give and receive really tactile meaningful care and they're looking for spaces that can offer that.

Interviewee 12: In coming back to religion realizing that the high holidays offers a good structure for thinking about the way I live my life especially in relationship. I think the secular world doesn't have a good there's no hallmark card for I'm sorry day and Yom Kippur offers that and I and I think many people feel lost without having to be accountable to something. I mean, I think, you know, guilt gets a bad rap, but I feel guilty if I don't do that process.

Lauren Jackson: And many people have said they're reassessing the value of religion with all of its built-in community ritual. Instead of existential and spiritual answers to the meaning and purpose of life, they're revisiting that whole package in the process, even if that comes with the baggage of what are sometimes deeply flawed institutions.

Interviewee 13: Go to my church. I've been to my church four times since being home in the last like seven or eight months.

Interviewee 13: And every time.

Interviewee 13: Pretty cathartic.

Interviewee 13: And I go these are my values like right in front of me. I'm like this is who I am and I miss it and I want it but I'm like.

Interviewee 13: I don't know like.

Interviewee 13: I really want it to be me that's stepping into it. And that's just a big leap. And it also.

Interviewee 14: I would love to find a way to have what I had then without compromising who I feel I am.

Interviewee 15: I couldn't do it then. And I don't I don't know where to do it now.

Interviewee 16: Like I still want more. Like I still want something to believe in.

Lauren Jackson: So, in addition to the pandemic and this widespread sense of dissatisfaction, there's another theme that has really stuck out to me and it comes back to our politics.

Lauren Jackson: We all know that Trumpism has injected a renewed energy and even sense of ascendancy into conservative Christianity over the past decade. But what surprised me was I started talking to and hearing from more and more people on the left who said that this political moment had also sparked a renewed interest in their own faith.

Interviewee 17: Hey, how are you?

Lauren Jackson: Hey, I'm doing well. Is now still a good time?

Interviewee 17: Yeah. Um.

Lauren Jackson: And there's one person I spoke to who really stood out to me and his name was Nick Woomer-Deers.

Nick Woomer-Deers: We attended mass reg, you know, regularly, but I think they were going more because that's just what upwardly mobile suburban professionals did, you know, late '80s, early '90s, right? And so.

Lauren Jackson: He's 46 years old.

Lauren Jackson: He's from North Carolina and for much of his childhood was a Catholic, but his family wasn't particularly devout.

Nick Woomer-Deers: At that period of time in the church. Like the the catechesus of children was particularly just bad.

Lauren Jackson: Mhm.

Lauren Jackson: Around the time he entered high school, the Catholic Church's sexy scandal was really at the height of its visibility in public life.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And so by ninth grade, I was done with it. And I'm like.

Lauren Jackson: So he said he really did not want to go to church anymore.

Nick Woomer-Deers: I don't believe in God.

Nick Woomer-Deers: This is all.

Lauren Jackson: He fought with his parents and he kind of pitched this personal crusade against it. And I became so insufferable, I think, that my parent was like, "We've lost this this battle." And we stopped going to church.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah. Okay.

Nick Woomer-Deers: So, as an undergraduate, I was as big left-wing student activist, and you know.

Lauren Jackson: He turned to schools, to his workplace, to a meaningful job as a public defender for a sense of purpose in his life.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And just by happen stance, I ended up marrying a woman who was much more devout than I was more as a left-wing Catholic. But through the process of our courtship.

Lauren Jackson: Mhm.

Nick Woomer-Deers: I convinced her that she should leave. And so I would say I was actively hostile to it.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah.

Nick Woomer-Deers: For for decades.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah. Then something shifted for him when Trump was elected in 2016.

Nick Woomer-Deers: You know, I had to like kind of come back and be like like what the hell happened and try to understand like who are these people who voted for him? And I did a lot of things, you know, like kind of self-reflection on why half America hates the Democrats and and and people like me.

Lauren Jackson: What shifted? What changed for him? one, he didn't see the election results coming and it really upended some key assumptions for him about where he thought the country was headed.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And everything, you know. So, I started to read some of these guys who are right-wing kind of influencer people like just go to some Twitter accounts and everything.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And I guess what I realized is it's like that kind of really nasty kind of godlessing.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Some of those guys are just so profoundly evil to me. they've got, you know, what they call race realism stuff.

Lauren Jackson: He also found himself disturbed by the tenor of the discussion and the discourse around politics, social and cultural issues online.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And it's like, you know, basically you need to have solidarity with people who are like you. And of course, that just happens to be white people or whatever. And that scared the out of me. Ross Doutat had some blog post once where he's like if you hated the religious right you're really going to hate the irreligious right.

Lauren Jackson: And he thinks really deeply about the best way to counter what he sees as a kind of toxicity.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And it kind of made me realize that without having a transcendent ideology that's universalistic and grounded in common for all of humanity. We inevitably fall into this kind of us against them world and that just seems very poisonous to me. So the alternative to that is, you know, a universalistic religion where we're all, you know, equal. We're all created in the image of God. And so that's what I felt like I needed.

Lauren Jackson: So to answer the despair that Nick has been feeling about American politics, he's starting to turn to faith. This thing that he's been openly hostile to for so long. What does that look like? Well, he takes steps slowly at first in the middle of the night in secret. And because he was too embarrassed to admit he was going down these rabbit holes, he found himself watching religious videos online alone.

Father Mike Schmidz: Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmidz and this is Essential Presents. So, a little while back.

Nick Woomer-Deers: I think I remember reading in the Times, it was like an interview with this priest named Mike Schmidz from Minneapolis. He's got all these popular Catholic podcasts and he makes YouTube videos every week.

Father Mike Schmidz: One of the things I hate, one of the things you probably hate is like when we find weakness in ourselves or when we just find ourselves like powerless to do what we want to do, you know, where.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And so I started watching some of his videos and I was just watching them, you know, like, oh, what's this saying, right?

Father Mike Schmidz: And one of the things that God wants for us and with us more than anything else is he wants to be in relationship with us. And he wants us to be in relationship with other people.

Nick Woomer-Deers: I'd launch him and I'm like, "Okay, this is terrible."

Father Mike Schmidz: Nothing we can do can fully break any kind of relationship with God.

Lauren Jackson: I've spoken to quite a few people who point to Father Schmidtz as someone very accessible for them in re-examining the merits of a religious life.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And so, he was kind of like my gateway.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Into it.

Father Mike Schmidz: You have freedom. You have power. And you can start living that freedom. And start living that power today.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And it it was like my se my dirty secret, right? Like.

Nick Woomer-Deers: My leftist political commitments which included like a heavy dose of just atheism and it was such a central part of like my persona.

Nick Woomer-Deers: That I I was like ashamed to admit that I was doing this.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah. Finally, he comes to this sense that he wants to reconnect in some way to a faith community.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Eventually, last April, Easter came and went and I just we didn't do anything. We didn't mark it cuz we weren't Christian. I just felt really bad like that we hadn't we're just hanging out, right? Like the utter lack of spiritual significance of this. It just felt.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Icky to me. Mhm.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And so I was sitting in my office. I've been thinking about emailing the dasis and being like, what do I do? But I always just put it off. And then I just went I I snapped. I emailed them and I said.

Nick Woomer-Deers: "I want to do a general confession," which is.

Lauren Jackson: So Nick actually contacts a church. And he's talking to a priest and he says, "Hey, I'm open to coming back, but I have a block. I'm having a real hard time just getting to the believing in God."

Nick Woomer-Deers: And the block is I don't believe in God.

Lauren Jackson: And that feels like a pretty significant problem when it comes to living a religious life or living a Catholic life.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And he said, "Well, here's what you do. Just start reading the Gospels." And I said, "Well, no, I've read all those, right?" And he's like, "No." He's like, you know, you have to read them like with an open heart as if this is giving you some sort of spiritual insight, not as a an academic exercise.

Nick Woomer-Deers: I said, "Okay, all right." And he's like, "And then you have to start come the math. You just have to do it. Just dive in."

Lauren Jackson: So, what did he do? He did what the priest said and he continued to try.

Nick Woomer-Deers: So, I go on Amazon. I order a Catholic Bible. I still told like nobody about this at all.

Lauren Jackson: Huh?

Nick Woomer-Deers: It took me like a week and a half. I had to tell my wife. I was like, "Guess what I did last Friday." She goes, "What?" I said, "I met with a priest."

Nick Woomer-Deers: And she goes, "Why?"

Nick Woomer-Deers: That's weird. And so that was an awkward conversation.

Lauren Jackson: He buys a Bible and he starts going to church, but he does all of this very quietly. And how do you account for his impulse to keep it all a secret? Is it just as simple as not wanting to come off as a hypocrite to his family?

Lauren Jackson: I think potentially in part he said as much.

Nick Woomer-Deers: When I was clandestinely going to I mean it was just kind of a weird thing.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Because it was hard. It was hard to admit that I'd just screwed up you know like you just feel like you go from being so stridened about one thing and then doing a 180.

Nick Woomer-Deers: And it's a little bit you feel a little bit silly.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah. You know, he spent much of his life making an intellectual argument against the church, that there was no value in prayer or church attendance on Sunday. But what really mattered instead were political commitments to progressive causes that he felt would reform society.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Two years ago, I'd say, well, what we need to do is change structures, right? So, what we really need to do is, you know, take over the state, you know, and and create a safety net or whatever, you know, like we need to have state powers so that we can fix these problems. It's not your job as an individual and in fact.

Lauren Jackson: And here he was re-evaluating all of that.

Nick Woomer-Deers: But to ignore the individual component and your individual ethical responsibility is really wrong.

Nick Woomer-Deers: I think and so Christianity also it gives you kind of a broader vision but it's you know again it's it's a very personal.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Thing too I mean.

Lauren Jackson: You know as flawed as Nick thought the church is and as much as he rebelled against it he started to see Christianity as something that he thought could make the world just a little bit better.

Nick Woomer-Deers: Like, you know what? Like, this worked really well for a long period of time. And we're in this moment after, say, this post-war era where we've had all these great innovations, and I think we're starting to realize that it doesn't seem very durable anymore.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah.

Nick Woomer-Deers: You know, Marxism doesn't tell you a whole lot about what you should do with your life. Christianity does.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah.

Lauren Jackson: And this reconciliation of his past worldview with a new one. It wasn't easy, but he did keep trying.

Nick Woomer-Deers: I just, you know, I like the I like the the the smells and the bells and the aesthetics of it. You know, it's the religion of half my ancestors.

Lauren Jackson: And in the process, he found something that was really meaningful to him.

Nick Woomer-Deers: By going through the motions and kind of absorbing and reading sacred scripture and with a different attitude, I feel like I I have a faith like a genuine faith in God now.

Austa Chhaturved: Lauren Nick's conversion seems very powerful, but just because people believe in something doesn't necessarily guarantee that they'll suddenly rush to church or to the mosque or to the synagogue or a temple. We are now only seeing the numbers level off. And while that's significant, as you've said, it's not definitive or predictive, right? There's no guarantee that we're going to see a great rebound in people returning to some established religion.

Lauren Jackson: Of course, and I want to be very clear, we are not seeing a revival of religiosity. What I am hearing about is a renewed interest or new renewed curiosity in religion. For example, even chaplain at Harvard tell me that in the last 25 years, they haven't seen this much interest in religion on campus.

Lauren Jackson: We're also seeing religious references appear more frequently throughout American life. And I think that's most visible at the very top of the Trump administration. You think about J.D. Vance who's been very public about his conversion to Catholicism in recent years. He's publishing a book on the subject soon. Think about Pete Hegth, Secretary of War, who is invoking Christianity in speaking publicly about the war in Iran. So, it's a big part of the Trump administration, but it's become a bigger part of our politics in general.

Mayor Zoran Mdani: There are 11 days remaining until election day. I will be a Muslim man in New York City each of those 11 days and every day that follows after that.

Lauren Jackson: In New York, for example, Mayor Zoran Mdani is being very frontal and open and he has been throughout his campaign about his Islamic faith that Prophet Muhammad was a stranger too who fled Mecca and was welcomed in Medina. He's now in office hosting ifars during Ramadan and he's praying in public.

Mayor Zoran Mdani: Many think of this month solely as the time where we fast from sun up to sun down. And yet for me and I know for so many of you it is a month where we also get to reflect on who we are.

Lauren Jackson: That's new. You know for a long time I think since 2001 really that would have been seen as a liability.

Mayor Zoran Mdani: Religion is not just about other people who lived a long time ago. Religion is about us in the here and now.

Lauren Jackson: And then, you know, if you look to the south, look at Texas State Representative James Talerico, who obviously has been in the news a lot. He'd won the Democratic primary for a Texas Senate seat.

James Talerico: Christian nationalists walk around with a mouthful of scripture and a heart full of hate.

Lauren Jackson: He's been talking about the Christian gospel as a way to combat the rise of what he derides as Christian nationalism. And he's really encouraging voters to see Christianity as the foundation for a more compassionate form of economic populism.

James Talerico: What would Jesus do about a tax system that benefits the rich over the poor?

Lauren Jackson: You know, he's a seminarian. He really knows the Bible and he's really quoting it in a way that we haven't seen in a long time from a candidate in the Democratic party.

Lauren Jackson: Right. It was so interesting to see Telerico too.

Interviewee 18: Oh, how are you?

Interviewee 19: Kind of school, Joe Rogan a few months ago about Christianity.

Joe Rogan: It's always um interesting to see a person who is a Christian who is uh not for of the Ten Commandments in schools.

James Talerico: Yeah. In all of Jesus's teachings, he's always focused on the outsider, the outcast, the person who's left out or the person who's different.

Lauren Jackson: And in general to see all these young political leaders push to counter the dominance around conversations that we've seen so long on the political right.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah, exactly. And beyond politics.

Anonymous Voice 20: The Pope is dead. The throne is vacant.

Lauren Jackson: We're also seeing this in Hollywood. Did you know there's a rabbi here?

Austa Chhaturved: No.

Lauren Jackson: Yeah.

Austa Chhaturved: Where?

Lauren Jackson: He has a beard and he was definitely judging me. sounds like a rabbi.

Lauren Jackson: And in pop music, I'm thinking especially of Justin Bieber and of Rosalia.

Lauren Jackson: Who has a new album out called Lux, which was released to high critical acclaim. It's all about faith, hers, and others. And on it, she even says in one of the songs that she's hot for God.

Austa Chhaturved: Wow. If that doesn't make God cool, then I don't know what does. Um.

Lauren Jackson: Is very cool.

Austa Chhaturved: Um, but what about you, Lauren? I'm curious if any of this has led to you rethinking your position on faith and established religion.

Lauren Jackson: It's a big question. Um, the short answer is I I am not religious. I do not attend a house of worship. I have not gone back to the faith of my family and my childhood. You know, I still pray. I don't know what or whom I'm praying to, but then the fact that my job explores these issues has given me the chance to really examine and to think deeply about the ideas that I grew up with.

Austa Chhaturved: Mhm.

Lauren Jackson: And in a way, it's brought me closer to my parents.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) I think we need to talk about some of the articles more cuz each week I write a newsletter called Believing and every Sunday whatever I write becomes something for us to talk about. You know, the documenting is a job, but your heart and your soul are always, you know, precious to me.

Lauren Jackson: And and while we still don't see eye to eye, I think I've heard from you and dad saying you see this as part of my in your view mission on this earth, which is flattering cuz I know that comes from a really meaningful place for you. I think I see it differently. I'm a journalist and we have found a way to connect again about something that for a long time really drove us apart. I love you.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) Love you. Get better.

Lauren Jackson: Okay. Thanks, Mom. Bye.

Lauren Jackson: (quoting her mom) Bye.

Lauren Jackson: Bye.

Austa Chhaturved: Lauren. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I've had so much fun in this conversation.

Michael Bubaro: We'll be right back.