[chongli]

That story is trying to paint this as a revival of Christianity but looking at the Pew report and the data paints a different picture.

Conservative Muslim countries show a pattern of overwhelming male dominance in religious service attendance. At the same time, over half of the Muslims in the US are recent immigrants [1]. This raises the question to me: is the resurgence in religious service attendance among men driven primarily by a broad return to the Christian church? Or is it largely an effect of the growing Muslim population in western countries?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/04/14/muslims-in-a...

[somenameforme]

I'm not a huge fan of Axios, but chose to link to them for two reasons. (1) They leave their stories bullet pointed instead of feeding them into an LLM, or a human LLM, to add 5,000 words of fluff, and (2) they use extensive citations. Here [1], for instance, is a recent Pew study they linked to. All the studies have Christianity as the driver. And FWIW church itself is not a neutral term. Church => Christian, Mosque => Muslim, Synagogue => Jewish, etc. A neutral term would be 'attending religious services' or whatever.

The sex issue also seems to be just Axios' spin. By their own numbers it looks like church attendance is up 3x for women and 5x for men amongst Gen Z. Definitely a significant difference, but not really in line with their spin on the topic.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...

[chongli]

I do appreciate their citations but the spin is a bit much. I’m still very skeptical about the interpretation of a “return to religiosity” rather than religious immigrants continuing their religious observances in their new home countries.

To show a proper “return to religious observance” (any religion, not just Christianity) means showing a large number of people who attend religious services regularly but whose parents do not.

[somenameforme]

I agree that immigration is probably playing a role, perhaps even a significant one, in these numbers, but at the same time this is also expected even without immigration. Religious families are having more children which means that, over time, there would be an inflection such that a generation starts becoming significantly more religious than the one prior - even if it's 100% because the children of that generation were born to religious families. Bringing over large numbers of religious immigrants is just speed running this endgame.

[chongli]

Yes perhaps I should not have focused on immigrants when the overall question I want to ask is if this effect is driven by religious subgroups/subcultures which include both immigrants from religious countries as well as people from religious communities within the US.

My hypothesis is that we’re not seeing much of a “return to religious observance” from children of parents with low/no religiosity and that nearly all of the resurgence is driven by the aforementioned religious subgroups.