Megan Basham Weighs in on America’s Potential Religious Revival

As part of an ongoing series discussing the question of religious revival in America, The Daily Signal reached out to Megan Basham, an author and culture reporter for The Daily Wire, to discuss what she is observing about religion in the United States.

The Daily Signal asked Basham about what she was seeing on the ground through her participation in a Turning Point USA event.

“I was expecting, kind of what you see in the Charlie [Kirk] videos, like there was going to be this combative questioning, where I needed to be prepared to defend life and defend biblical marriage and two genders. And, you know, that wasn’t the events that I’ve experienced at all,” she said. 

“It’s more like these kids are just looking for advice. You know, they seem very hungry for spiritual things. And to me, what they’re asking about is: ‘How do we have a deeper religious life, and how do we incorporate that into how we live?’ And they’re asking, like, sort of these big ideological questions,” she explained.

Basham emphasized how elite culture suddenly seemed more willing to discuss Christianity.

“We have Elon Musk. We have Joe Rogan. We have all of these sort of manly leaders of tech and culture and media, and they’re suddenly talking about Christ. They’re talking about church. They’re talking about Christianity,” she said.

Basham detailed what she sees as the connection of the decline in trust in American institutions to a renewed exploration of faith on the part of some young men.

“[M]aybe there’s been a moment where they stared into the abyss, and there is only one thing left to turn to. When we’ve come through a culture where all of our institutions have becalmed themselves in such massive ways, what is a solid rock of truth that you can hang on to?” she asked rhetorically.

Basham explained that she had recently interviewed Doug Wilson, a prominent proponent of Christian nationalism who has been profiled in recent months by many mainstream outlets, including The New York Times and CNN.

Basham speculated that part of what was drawing people to the Christian nationalist movement was that “it’s offering answers that are sort of, postmodern liberal society [that] is too afraid to answer, but they’re actually scriptural answers.”

“But they seem, I mean, it seems so foreign now to say, well, actually, yeah, we do believe that not only are there two sexes, but these two sexes have different roles designed for them by God. And you can see the outgrowth of what those roles are by, for example, the fact that women are childbearing, and what does that mean? What comes along with that?” Basham explained, adding:

And so, to me, those guys are really driving the conversation, even though, you know, they’re painted as fringy, they’re moving the Overton [window] of what we’re allowed to talk about. 

Basham emphasized the widespread discussion of doctrinal differences as a positive sign of renewal.

“One of the reasons I do think, I don’t know if we call it a revival, but maybe some sort of spiritual awakening is happening, is because suddenly everybody’s taking their doctrinal [distinction] seriously again. And when I was growing up, I mean, you know, I’m Gen X, so it was all Catholics and evangelicals together, Catholics and Protestants together,” Basham said, adding, “Nobody really talked about doctrinal [distinction] as much, except maybe John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul, you know, it just wasn’t a discussion that people had. And so, to suddenly see these really robust debates not only happening, but being popular content tells me, well, clearly there’s an interest there.”

On the phenomena of some young men converting to more liturgical forms of Christianity, Basham critiqued some of the Protestant outreach methods.

“The problem is, you know, as far as Protestants, so much of what we’ve been represented by is that seeker-sensitive megachurch model that’s like about an inch deep. And understandably, I think that hasn’t been super attractive, particularly to these young men, and that’s why you’re seeing this rise in Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism,” she said.

The post Megan Basham Weighs in on America’s Potential Religious Revival appeared first on The Daily Signal.