Once again, people around the world have celebrated what J R R Tolkien described as the ‘Eucatastrophe of Man’s history’: the birth and resurrection of Christ. ‘Eucatastrophe’ is a neologism of Tokien’s creation, meaning the ‘sudden and surprising turn for the better’ when all seems hopelessly lost.
In his own work, the eucatastrophe of The Lord of the Rings is the almost divine intervention of Smeagol/Gollum, who accidentally achieves what the hero Frodo (inevitably, Tolkien says) could not: the final destruction of the Ring. Up to this point, the story had been inevitably falling towards catastrophe. Despite their brief victory, the armies of the West were marching to what they were certain was inevitable doom. At the same time, Frodo’s will was dominated more and more by the power of the Ring, until, at the last, he simply could not do what he had set out to do. Evil was on the cusp of total victory – until the eucatastrophe.
In real life, are we similarly seeing the faintest stirrings of a eucatastrophe in the Christian West?
For most of the past century, Christianity in the West – meaning Europe, America, and the Antipodes – has been under sustained assault, from within and without (in Latin America and Africa, even Asia, meanwhile, it’s been going gangbusters).
From within, both by the self-inflicted wounds of the legacy of churches’ shameful failure to deal adequately with the crimes of serial abusers lurking in its ranks and the rise of ‘woke Christianity’. The Anglican church is a particularly foolish offender in this regard, with its tilty-headed leaders rushing to don rainbow cassocks and embrace every ‘progressive’ fad: up to and including masses led by drag queens and Muslims (who used the pulpit to openly deny the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, the fundamental Christian belief). With the election of Pope Francis and his ‘liberation theology’ (Marxism in a cassock), the Catholics aren’t far behind. The question is whether his successor will be any better.
From without, Christianity has been under sustained and often violent attack by both militant atheism and jihadi Islam. As soon as they gained power, Communists put Karl Marx’s hatred of religion into violent practice, from the Soviet Union to the Red Terror in Spain. The New Left embarked on a decades-long psyop against Christianity (even as they fawn over Islam and primitivist ‘indigenous’ mythologies).
And they’ve been winning. Europe, the birthplace of the calamities of the 20th century, communism, fascism and Nazism, has seen the most dramatic decline. Christianity seemed in danger of vanishing from what was once Christendom. Whilst (often slim) majorities of Europeans still claim to be Christians, only a minority attend church even monthly. Across Europe and Britain, churches are vanishing. Sometimes violently, with thousands of attacks on churches across Europe recorded every year. More often, through simple neglect, which sees churches converted to chic homes, bars, or even mosques.
Even the US, long a redoubt of fervent Christianity, has seen a dramatic decline from its once near-universal Christian identity.
Partly as a consequence of such decline, partly as a result of staggering growth in Christianity elsewhere, Europe and the US now both account for a minority of the world’s Christians. By contrast, in most of the rest of the world, Christianity is growing rapidly, often in the face of violent persecution. In just a century, sub-Saharan Africa has gone from 1.4 per cent of the world’s Christians, to nearly 40 per cent. There are more Christians in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America than the US and Europe combined.
But is the eucatastrophe for Western Christianity beginning, just as all seems darkest for the faith? An extraordinary tectonic, generational, shift seems to be taking place across the West. More and more people are openly identifying again as Christian. Many are being baptised for the first time in their lives.
Notably, the shift is being led by young men.
Gen Z – those born from 1995 to 2010 – are the first generation in nearly a century to be more conservative than their predecessors. Even Gen Alpha, today’s kids, are confounding the ‘progressive’ chattering classes by championing traditional gender roles. Which goes a long way to explain the screeching, hyper-fixation of the left chatterers on such bogey-men as Andrew Tate, and their determination to browbeat boys with finger-wagging garbage like Adolescence.
But Christianity is a religion which thrives in adversity. Even as it seems to be hardest on the ropes in the West, it’s bouncing back spectacularly. Recent research shows faith in Jesus in the US rising for the first time in a quarter-century. “In aggregate terms,” says Christian research group Barna, “the multi-year climb in public sentiment toward Jesus equates to nearly 30 million more US adults who claim to be following Jesus today than in 2021”.
More significantly, Barna’s research shows that the biggest drivers of the “Jesus resurgence” are the youngest adults: Gen Z and Millennials. That demographic change has been particularly obvious since the Covid pandemic. Men are leading the charge of the faithful.
Among Boomer women, belief has declined four per cent; it’s risen nine per cent among Boomer men. Gen X women have flatlined, while men have risen seven per cent. Staggeringly, there’s been a 19 per cent growth of Christianity among Millennial men, compared to just eight per cent in women. Gen Z men have also risen 15 per cent, compared to seven per cent for women.
Even more startling, even in the most aggressively secular nations, Christianity is experiencing a sudden resurgence. In Britain, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds going to church once a month has risen from four per cent to 16 per cent in just six years. The Catholic Church in France will baptise more than 10,000 new converts this Easter, a 50 per cent growth on last year – and the biggest number since statistics have been kept over the last 20 years. Nearly half are under 25.
In Australia, Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop, Peter Comensoli baptised 400 converts at Easter. In his diocese, Sunday mass attendance has gone from 84,000 in 2022 to 103,000 in 2024.
Despite the progressive elite’s hatred of Christianity, more young celebrities are openly embracing it, where once Christian rock stars like Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett and the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano treated their faith as something of a guilty secret. By contrast, comedian Russell Brand famously underwent baptism after a lifetime of unrestrained libertinism. Old school punk and founder of Vice media, Gavin McInnes declared that he ‘became a Christian’ the moment his first child was born.
Even pro skaters are embracing faith: Anthony Daniel “Ragdoll” Scalamere III recently publicly underwent baptism. Skateboarding news and underground culture magazine Shredder writes that “He’s made it clear: Jesus Christ is King. Straight up. Not just something he says – it’s in the way he moves now, the way he carries himself... Just honest skating and an appreciation for being alive and healthy.”
No doubt the pandemic sharpened the minds and faith of a great many people. The growing sense of the essential emptiness of the post-Christian West was laid brutally bare. Here was a culture which offered nothing beyond being a productive economic unit. In a time of crisis, its ‘Great Reset’ offered only emptiness and more of the same which had made each generation more miserable than the last. Like so many converts for over two millennia, young people are discovering Christianity’s message of hope in a troubled, fallen world.
In an age when so-called ‘social media’ is creating a generation of lonely, isolated children, the hyper-isolation, almost solitary confinement, of the pandemic seems to have woken young people up to something vital: the necessity of community. They’re certainly not getting it from social media, which openly treats them as nothing more than economic units to be exploited, with no real connection in return. If anything, social media and its algorithms create nothing more than division.
Of all people, super-woke late night ‘comedian’ Trevor Noah recently nailed what it is that young people are finding in Christianity. “I can’t think of a place that is responsible for more community and connection than a church,” Noah recently told a podcast. Where social media exploits and divides, Christianity unites. “You didn’t need money to come to it… religion was one of the few things where you could opt in. You could walk in off the street and say ‘I want to be part of your club. And the person would be like, ‘Yeah, you’re part of the club.’”
Where social media silos people into increasingly tinier and shriller echo-chambers, the church reminds us that we really do have to love our neighbours as ourselves. This isn’t easy, as C S Lewis’ Screwtape reminds his apprentice devil. “When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided.” Neighbours whom he cannot avoid as they proffer their hands and intone, ‘Peace be with you’.
For many of us, especially in an age where the Long March has atomised us into ‘intersectional’ ‘identities’, this is the hard part of embracing Christianity: living the faith. We are, says Lewis, like “the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by stories from the Odyssey [who] buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.”
But, as more and more young people are finding, as Trevor Noah says, the laborious doing is its own reward. Young people crave community: to belong to something bigger than themselves. The pandemic made brutally clear that ‘progressive’ globalism offered them nothing but themselves writ smaller and smaller until they were in danger of becoming nothing.
On the brink of that catastrophe, a small but rapidly growing cohort of young people are discovering the eucatastrophic deliverance offered by Jesus.
I wrote, last week, that we need to re-Christianise the West. It looks like it’s beginning to happen.
