Last month, the noted public intellectual Jonathan Rauch stood before an audience at BYU’s Wheatley Institute and made a confession. He pulled up a 2003 article from The Atlantic, titled “The greatest development in modern religion is not religion at all — it’s an attitude called apatheism.”
The article made the case for secularism as a social achievement worthy of celebration. Rauch then declared, in deadpan, that this article was “the dumbest thing I ever wrote.”
As secularism has increased, Rauch went on to explain, America has witnessed a number of troubling social trends: the rise of social isolation, extreme polarization and an overall decline in mental health and human flourishing.
The founders, he said, warned the nation about the perils of a democratic republic devoid of religious underpinnings.
George Washington wrote in his famous farewell address: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. … Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Recently released data from Pew Research Center, then, should come as welcomed news. Pew’s latest Religious Landscape study shows a leveling off of what had become a rise of both religiously unaffiliated Americans and those distancing themselves from Christianity (the so-called “nones”). The robust survey of close to 37,000 people attributes this plateau in secularization to the youngest group surveyed, 18 to 24 years old, whose share of the nonreligious has declined from 34 percent in 2014 to 28 percent today.
This special Faith Issue of Deseret Magazine explores this striking change in trend. Mariya Manzhos, a contributing writer at the magazine, looks at why young adults are turning toward faith and how churches are responding. The Rev. Andrew Teal, meanwhile, encourages the faithful to reach out and listen to those who have discarded religion, pointing out that many believers were once in fact “nones” themselves.
In his essay titled “The Religion of AI”, evangelical Christian leader Johnnie Moore points out the many advantages and opportunities the burgeoning technology offers religious institutions in meeting the needs of their community members and society at large. And the Rev. Heber Brown III explains how his calling inspired the creation of the Black Church Food Security Network to address hunger and disease in vulnerable communities.
It wasn’t just Rauch and Washington who observed the need for strong religious threads woven within the American fabric.
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” John Adams said, “revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” Or put in the positive by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “I doubt if there is a problem — political or economic — that will not melt before the fire of a spiritual awakening.”
This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.