(Daily Signal)—A spiritual awakening is stirring among young people in the West, according to a steady stream of survey data.
In February, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that the decade-long decline in Americans identifying as Christian has leveled off. But new studies show that the downward trend is now in full reverse, with the engine driving the change occurring among Generation Z and millennials.
On Monday, Barna Group released data showing that “66% of all U.S. adults say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus that is still important in their life today,” marking “a 12-percentage-point increase since 2021.” The report went on to note that the rise in faith is being particularly driven by those in their 20s and 30s—Gen Z and millennials. “Since the pandemic … Millennials and Gen Z have shown significant increases in commitment to Jesus, while Boomers and Gen X (especially women in these older cohorts) have remained mostly flat in their commitment levels to Jesus,” the group observed.
The data echoed a similar trend happening across the pond in the U.K. According to new research from the Bible Society there, the percentage of Britons who attend church has surged by 50% over the last six years. Driving the rise were young adults, particularly young men. “In 2018, just 4% of 18–24-year-olds said that they attended church at least monthly,” the report found. “Today [the rate] has risen to 16%, with young men increasing from 4% to 21%, and young women from 3% to 12%.”
“[W]e’ve seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church—particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism,” remarked Rhiannon McAleer, co-author of the report. “There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.”
In addition, the percentage of young people engaging with the Bible is also on the rise, according to new findings from the American Bible Society. Released Thursday, the organization’s annual “State of the Bible” report found that the number of Bible users (those who read Scripture at least three times per year) increased from 38% to 41%, translating to an increase of 10 million American Bible users since last year. Once again, millennials were found to be the primary drivers of the increase.
On Thursday, John Plake, chief innovation officer at the American Bible Society, joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to analyze the report.
“We often think about Bible users being anchored by women in America,” he explained. “They have a deep faith. Moms and other women in America are deeply engaged with the Bible, typically. And yet what we saw here was that women were statistically unchanged from 2024. Not a bad thing. But what we saw, interestingly, was that men increased their Bible use by 19% year over year, and that really closed that longtime gender gap in Bible use. And not just men, but millennials. The millennial generation has been in the doldrums for quite some time, really one of the least engaged generations in America. But they saw a 29% increase in Bible use in that generation alone.”
Plake went on to acknowledge the resurgence in faith happening in the U.K. and a growing revival occurring on college campuses. “We’re hearing things coming off university campuses with young people crowding into gospel-focused meetings or crowding into churches. Churches outside Oxford University are beginning to fill up with young people who I think [have] an openness to the gospel that maybe their parents’ or grandparents’ generation never had. And they’re searching for something more.”
Plake further pointed to the success of biblically-based films and shows as well as the exponential popularity of Bible and religious phone apps as another measure of burgeoning spiritual awakening.
“[I]f you listen to Dallas Jenkins and some of the people who are associated with ‘The Chosen’ … they will be able to tell you story after story after story of people whose lives have been interrupted and really deeply impacted by that wonderful storytelling that’s going on, whether it’s, Amazon’s ‘House of David’ or these other theatrical productions that are focusing on biblical themes,” he noted. “I think that many of the people who view these may have been distant from Scripture, and it is causing them to dig in more deeply into Scripture. In fact, our friends at YouVersion who run the Bible app that you may use on your phone, they actually can track spikes in search activity within the Bible app based on what ‘The Chosen’ is talking about during their productions.”
“I think the production companies that stand behind these kinds of Bible-based features are realizing that there is a yearning for something more and that audiences are coming,” Plake added. “It would be different if they were putting out this content and nobody showed up. … But that’s not the case. People are more spiritually open than we would imagine.”
Family Research Council Senior Fellow Joseph Backholm pointed to another reason for the rise in faith among young people: the simple yearning for truth.
“I think one of the causes for this is realizing they were lied to,” he told The Washington Stand. “Secularism and the Sexual Revolution [were] pursued aggressively by Gen Z and millennials and found wanting. It promised joy if only you would focus on pleasing yourself, but they ended up the most miserable generations to have ever lived. The gospel explains why their reality did not align with the theory. We are not created to please ourselves, we are created to please the one who made us and are promised both eternal life and joy as a result. When people experience the devastation of believing a lie, they don’t stop looking for joy and purpose, they start looking for the truth.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
