The men who spent forty years dismantling every institution that ever formed a soul now want a polling number as their absolution. In “Young men are returning to church — and it could reshape America’s future,” former education secretary William J. Bennett points to a Gallup survey showing that 42 percent of young men now call religion “very important,” recounts his own return to Catholicism after a secular youth, and welcomes the possibility of a new Great Awakening. He argues that a generation recovering a sense of the transcendent will resist the pretensions of the state, defend the family, and prove less susceptible to the despair that has marked recent years. Give him the poll. Give him the personal witness. The trouble is not the numbers. The trouble is that the movement Bennett speaks for did everything in its power to make the parish — the actual, local, flesh-and-blood parish — impossible to sustain, and now it congratulates itself on a trend line as if the building were still standing.
To grant Bennett his strongest points: he is right that the secular order leaves young men empty, that faith is a liberation rather than a chain, and that a generation genuinely anchored in transcendence would value family and inherited moral norms more than the consumer of political activism ever could. I was a cradle Catholic who lost the faith in ambition and found it again only on the far side of difficulty, so I do not deny that a soul starved of meaning will search for it. The question is not whether the hunger is real. The question is what kind of meal the movement now claiming credit has been serving.
The same conservative fusionism that now cheers a rising polling number is the fusionism that spent half a century dismantling the local economic foundations on which a parish rests. It championed a global trade regime that shuttered the paper mill in Wisconsin Rapids in 2020, a thousand jobs gone, the tax base evaporating, the town losing the only employer that paid a living wage — and with it, the families that filled the pews. It cheered the financialization of agriculture that turned the family dairy farm into a contract-growing operation for a snack-food giant, erasing the farm families that once sat on the church council and sent their children to the parish school. The fusionist compact traded the thick, local institutions that form moral character for corporate tax cuts, deregulated finance, and a Supreme Court seat, and it called that trade conservatism. Now, when the Gallup number ticks up, the same voices treat the uptick as evidence that a religious revival has arrived and that conservative political fortunes will rise with it. This is not faith. This is a demographic category searching for a voting bloc.
I know something of what a poll cannot measure. The parish I attend sits in a county where the diocese consolidated half its rural churches over thirty years — not because the faith failed, but because the local economy had been hollowed out and the families who supported those parishes had been scattered by the consolidation that the movement’s deregulatory agenda enabled, the commodity subsidy that rewarded the big operation and starved the family dairy, the buyout that severed a business from its town. The frame parish our county’s immigrant Catholics built in 1884 is still there, but the altar is silent. The men who once filled the council are dead or moved to the cities. The replacement is an influx of seasonal lake-cottage residents and a golf resort that brought jobs but no rooted community. I do not need Gallup to tell me whether religion is “very important” to a twenty-five-year-old. I need a place where a young man can sit in a parish hall on a Tuesday evening with neighbors who know his name and argue a question of theology without shouting a slogan, where the faith is learned not from a podcast but from a community that has held it across generations. That kind of formation requires a local institutional fabric — families, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, a Main Street where the shopkeeper recognizes a face — and the conservative movement has done nothing for a generation but dissolve it.
The men who now celebrate the poll as a political harbinger are the same men who spent decades treating religion as a cultural wedge rather than a lived community. They have defended a corporation’s right to close the hospital as freedom of contract, and they have invoked subsidiarity only when it served to block a federal regulation, never to defend the credit union or the parish from the consolidation they otherwise cheer. The faith they champion is a faith of the individual conscience and the polling booth — a private, portable identity that demands no neighbor, no common purse, no shared roof — and it is exactly the kind of faith that shows up in a survey and evaporates the moment the respondent hangs up the phone. The Church is not a demographic; it is a body, and a body cannot survive on a percentage point.
The counter-model is not a national revival that can be measured by a pollster. It is the local parish that survives because the town survives — because the cooperative keeps a dozen families on the land, because the credit union lends to the hardware store instead of a distant developer, because the VFW hall still serves a fish fry on Friday nights and someone in the kitchen knows your grandchildren’s names. It is the parish adult forum where a difficult question about the Creed is asked and the room sits with it rather than reaching for a partisan talking point, because the people in that room will see each other at the grocery store tomorrow and the truth matters more than a win. It is the co-op’s annual meeting, where farmers who grew up in the same sandy soil argue policy face to face and then go home and milk the herd, because they know their capital is held not in a distant trust but in the institution they govern together. These are the only “awakenings” that have ever lasted longer than an election cycle. The polling number is not the Church. The Church is the woman who taught your son to read Scripture during CCD, the man who fixed the boiler on a Saturday morning, the neighbor who brought a casserole when your mother was ill. The movement that now calls itself faith’s champion spent forty years making those lives harder to live. It can keep the poll. I will take the parish, and the work of keeping its door open — the cold of the sanctuary in February when the boiler was slow to catch, the sound of the latch catching, the stillness before the first voice speaks the creed.