Ms. Emba is a contributing Opinion writer and a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.
Is America having a Catholic revival? The idea that the United States is seeing a surge in converts to the faith, especially Gen Z-ers, might be more projection than fact. But the reaction to the clashes between Pope Leo XIV and President Trump have made it seem far more plausible -- even understandable.
Since February, the president has prosecuted an under-theorized and unpopular war on Iran with increasing unpredictability and genocidal threats, silencing objections through assertions of political power and military force. But over the past several days, criticism from the Bishop of Rome -- Leo's public rebuke of those threats as "a moral issue for the good of the whole entire population," and later his prayer for "dignity, understanding and forgiveness" to stand against the "delusion of omnipotence" -- appeared to pierce the president's hubris, and inspired a cross-section of Americans to voice their own dismay with Mr. Trump.
The Roman Catholic Church and its leader possess what is needed now: a robust moral vocabulary -- for calling out good versus evil and demanding justice and peace -- that appeals to something higher and more compelling than grim realpolitik, and an independent, consistent point of view that transcends partisan politics. The church is a 2,000-year-old institution with a global remit and, if you're one of its 1.4 billion adherents, a mandate from God to shepherd human souls. It stands apart from everyday institutions and economic systems and thus cannot be captured by voter concerns or fears of a vengeful president. Its perspective is meant to be overarching and eternal, an intriguing proposition in an era that feels painfully unmoored.
In smoother times religion can seem unnecessary. And for many, much of the 20th century seemed compelling enough without it: Individuals were free to make lives of their own; the material dividends of capitalism provided enough novelty and prosperity to distract from deep longings; and liberal ideals could stand in as a sort of state religion, a barely needed justification to undergird an idealistic and mostly functional government.
There was enough hope in the idea of an arc of history bending toward justice to satisfy at least some taste for higher concerns. For a growing share of secular and religiously disaffiliated Americans, living within what the philosopher Charles Taylor describes as the "immanent frame" -- a social understanding that the natural world is all there is, with no recourse to the spiritual or supernatural -- posed few issues.
But as the last several years have made especially clear, the grand project of liberalism is no longer universally affirmed. The economic spoils of capitalism are not novel (nor, for that matter, reliably assured or evenly distributed); prioritization of the self seems to have resulted in loneliness and anxiety. Governing institutions have grown sclerotic and scandal-prone, relinquishing their authority and becoming less able to articulate, let alone respond to, deep questions of purpose and meaning. A mixture of confusion and nihilism hangs in the air; immanence no longer seems to suffice.
Under these conditions, institutional religion of some kind seems poised to make a comeback as a provider of the spiritual and communal anchors people need. The question is which kind.
In recent years, the decline of American Christianity overall has felt well understood and only moderately lamented. But news sites and social media this month appeared fascinated by the possibility of a Catholic-specific resurgence. "60 Minutes" went "inside the Catholic Church's quiet revival." An Evie magazine headline breathlessly reported that "N.Y.C.'s Hottest New Club Is Catholic Mass."
The theory wasn't quite borne out by actual numbers: For every convert to the Roman Catholic church each year, most reports were careful to note, eight to 12 leave the fold. An uptick of conversions in highly networked urban areas (several reports discussed the same New York City parishes) and Ivy League campuses seem overreported on by journalists familiar with those worlds.
Still, even the jaded commentariat find the idea compelling that a disaffected generation raised in a modern, secular world might very well be seeking something transcendent, in continuity with long tradition -- and that other generations might be, too.
Catholicism has never been fully at home in the United States: From the nation's founding, white Protestants made up the establishment elite. Romanism, in contrast, was a religion of immigrants and the poor; the Vatican's influence was seen as a threat to American interests since the Colonial era. But today, many mainline Protestant denominations have squandered their distinctiveness in a quest for relevance, leaching credibility with each attempt to keep up with the latest social justice trend. At the same time, evangelicals have traded scriptural grounding for nearness to political power, becoming in some cases no more than an arm of the Republican Party and less credible for being so.
While the Catholic Church can be dogmatic (quite literally!) on social issues and has weathered scandals such as its clergy sexual abuse reckoning, it has still managed to remain countercultural by modeling what it looks like to think rigorously about moral principles through a Christ-specific lens, grounding them in its particular tradition of thought, and applying them to concrete issues in the public square. The times when the church has broken containment and attracted the interest of those outside its ranks have tended to be those during which it condemned inhumanity and championed the good as an outsider's voice, countering the failures of the age: Pope John Paul II's defense of human dignity as a resistance to Communism; Pope Francis's public commitment to humility and inclusion.
This latest Catholic moment -- both the fascination with new conversions and the resonance of the pope-versus-president imbroglio -- reveals a hunger for moral authority.
It's difficult not to hope that a revival of some kind is on its way.
Christine Emba is the author of "Rethinking Sex: A Provocation."
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