(FP) Ross Douthat: Why Evangelicalism Is Winning

Of all the predictions Alexis de Tocqueville made while surveying the youthful United States, one of the boldest concerned religion. Notwithstanding Protestantism’s apparent American dominance, the Frenchman prophesied that Roman Catholicism would be the long-term victor in a democratic age. “Our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two parts,” he wrote in Democracy in America, with “some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome.”

The last few years have given that prediction new life. From the spate of traditionalist-inclined college converts to the heretofore secular humanists who have thrilled to Pope Leo XIV’s critique of artificial intelligence, it often feels like Catholicism is the strongest religious alternative to post-Christian tribalism, nihilism, and transhumanism. Writing for the Catholic magazine Commonweal, Wesleyan University’s Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, himself a non-Catholic, envisions “a Catholic century,” in which the church’s thought becomes a “default option” for people seeking the common good amid liberalism’s crisis and AI-driven dehumanization.

As a Catholic I have a similar reading of the intellectual situation. But it’s also essential to look beyond the intelligentsia to assess the health and future of religion. And in the wider culture, the form of Christianity that’s most adapted to late-modern America is clearly not the Church of Rome. It’s evangelical Protestantism. The vibes of a Catholic moment are real enough, but evangelicalism’s resilience is our era’s more fundamental fact.

You can see that resilience across almost every means of measurement: conversion rates, retention rates, identification rates, church attendance, intensity of belief. A recent overview from Ryan Burge, the religion data analyst, showed that evangelicals have maintained a roughly steady share of the U.S. population since the 1970s, while both Catholicism and the so-called “mainline” denominations (Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and so on) that once dominated American Christianity have seen marked decline. In the 2020s, evangelicals are more than twice as likely to attend church weekly as Catholics. They are also twice as likely to describe religious faith as “very important” in their lives.

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For all the buzz around a ‘Catholic century,’ evangelicalism is the denomination best placed to thrive in contemporary America. https://t.co/e3hTYPNEmb

— The Free Press (@TheFP) October 22, 2026