How the Elite Changed Its Mind on Christianity
Bush-era New Atheism couldn't last forever.
Depending on who you ask, America's young people are experiencing a religious revival. Gen Zers are now more likely to attend church weekly than millennials, with young men in particular leading the return to religious services. While Gen Zers are still more likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated than previous groups, there's evidence that certain kinds of religious devotion are also growing in popularity—earlier this year, Roman Catholic dioceses around the Western world reported spikes in adult conversions.
As the decline in religious attendance has slowed, the past few years have also seen a clear rise in the status of religion. It's becoming more and more socially acceptable to be religious in elite intellectual spaces—something that could have a real impact on how religion is perceived by everyone else.
This is a big change from the past few decades, in which internet "New Atheism" effectively framed religion, Christianity in particular, as fundamentally anti-intellectual and subtly low-class. Christians were cast as uneducated rednecks—creationists, climate-change deniers, and pearl-clutching censors. This framing of the religious was obviously influenced by the backlash to George W. Bush-era conservatism. Movies like Jesus Camp and shows like 19 Kids and Counting, which portrayed evangelical "fundies" at their most mockable, only reinforced the impression that religion is a small-minded, bigoted, and jingoistic endeavor.
These New Atheists seized on the cringeworthy, distinctly lower-middle-class aesthetics of Bush-era Christianity. The aesthetics of many non-denominational Evangelical churches—unadorned auditoriums, cheesy worship music, and the occasional smoke machine or pledge to the Christian flag—fit within a broader cultural language of suburban kitsch.
These evangelical churches are essentially the Stanley cups of American religion: consumerist yet distinctly cheap-feeling, appealing to a certain kind of middle-class, middle-aged woman, and a constant subject of mockery for those who see themselves as better and smarter than people like her. New Atheists loved nothing more than mocking and memeifying this kind of Christianity, a sentiment that rubbed off on the intelligentsia writ large.
But that didn't last forever. While evangelicalism is still the most popular protestant denomination, it's no longer the only culturally salient version of Christianity to be found. Much of this is due to how the Republican Party became less entwined with this vision of religion.
When Obergefell v. Hodges took marriage equality national, conservatives no longer had a culture-war issue whose arguments were almost entirely religious in nature. Then Donald Trump—hardly anyone's idea of a religious social conservative—swallowed the Republican party whole, effectively squelching religious grandstanding about the sanctity of marriage. Abortion remained a salient issue during this time, but Trump's ambivalence made it undeniably less attractive as a hobby horse (especially given that many anti-abortion arguments can be made from a secular viewpoint). Either way, with Roe's overturn in 2022, Republicans again had a key religion-inflected cultural issue fall out of focus. In fact, the backlash to state-level abortion bans was so swift that many Republicans attempted to backpedal on the issue. In 2024, the Republican Party went so far as to ditch a call for a federal abortion ban from its platform.
Of course, there are still vestiges of 2000s theocracy-inflected religious conservatism on the right—just look at the handful of states that passed laws or mandates forcing classrooms to display the Ten Commandments or stock Bibles—but they're undeniably more of a fringe element than they used to be. Instead, the Republican Party has adopted a distinctly areligious, distinctly mean posturing that's influenced more by Andrew Tate than Billy Graham. As a result, religious observance has less of a right-wing association. Being religious no longer means being Republican. And being Republican no longer means being religious in the Bible-thumping, "God Warrior" mode.
Gone, for now at least, are the days when religion exists in pop culture purely as an anti-intellectual, lower-class phenomenon. In fact, many in the intellectual class are mourning the recent decline in religious observance, and even self-described atheists are extolling the social value of religious community.
"I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it," Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, an agnostic, wrote last year. "It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost."
Even Richard Dawkins has softened his criticism of Christianity. "I call myself a cultural Christian," Dawkins said during an interview last year. "It's true that statistically, the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down, and I'm happy with that. But I would not be happy if, for example, if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches…If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I'd choose Christianity every time."
If you want an idea of how much things have changed in the cultural arena, take Wes Anderson's latest film, The Phonecian Scheme. The movie follows Zsa-zsa Korda, an ultra-wealthy unscrupulous businessman who, upon realizing that the continual assassination attempts against him will work sooner or later, contacts his estranged daughter, Leisl, a novice nun. Zsa-zsa takes her on a trip across the Middle East in an attempt to swindle last-minute financial support from the investors of an ambitious infrastructure project. All the while, Zsa-zsa is plagued by dreams of his final judgement—God, of course, is played by Bill Murray in robed, white-bearded glory.
In the world of the film, not only does God exist, but it is a very literal biblical God who rules the universe. If there's any ambiguity about whether the characters ought to take this God seriously, at the end of the movie, Zsa-zsa gets baptized and becomes a Catholic. When a skeptical Liesl warns him that the baptism "doesn't work if you're lying," he replies, "I'm not lying. I'm capable of and willing to genuinely believe in the opposite of my personal convictions."
I can't remember the last time I saw a film made by an ostensibly secular filmmaker for a distinctly elite and educated audience that treats religion so credulously. Plenty of films are about religion—ahem, Conclave—or imply that some kind of mysterious, ineffable higher power exists, but few take place in a universe in which the Christian God is affirmed to be both real and good.
I won't speculate on Anderson's own beliefs—and I don't think any kind of religious conversion is necessary for Anderson to have made what is an obviously pro-Christian film. Instead, I think The Phoenician Scheme reflects a cultural moment in which religion is having a distinctly aesthetic upgrade—something a scrupulously visual filmmaker like Anderson would be likely to capitalize upon. Religion is, in short, becoming cool again among the cultural elite.
Much of this comes down to the way Catholicism, in particular, is becoming fashionable again, with many young adults citing an attraction to the aesthetics of "smells and bells" high church worship. "[I] always liked the aesthetic elements of Catholicism," one young convert told Free Press writer Madeleine Kearns, adding that she "loved the architecture and the stained glass" of many Catholic churches, "and how much detail and symbolism was there." Even as the "tradcath" resurgence remains a right-coded phenomenon, it is at the very least a fixation of the intellectual right. One can imagine Dasha Nekrasova from the Red Scare podcast becoming a traditionalist Catholic, but never a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist. It also helps that Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and other "high church" denominations have largely been left out of the discourse around "Christian nationalism."
Religion became cool again among the educated elite once it gained an association with good aesthetics, high art, and sacred music—not Bush-era Republican soft theocracy.
Today, one can belong to the ideas-making class—an aspiring public intellectual or artist—and still be religious, so long as one steers clear of evangelical kitsch. Whether or not a real religious revival is underway in American public life, one thing is clear: The cool kids aren't the smug, strident atheists anymore—they're the Christians.
