Thinking Out Loud“There’s something happening here. But what it is ain’t exactly clear.” The opening line of the 1960s famous protest song could apply to any number of contemporary puzzles, but definitely to the scenes in Paris when Pope Leo arrived in town in September—the first state visit by a Pope to France since 2008.
The Champs-Élysées was packed with 800,000 Parisians straining to get a glimpse of the Pontiff while priests heard impromptu confessions from kneeling pilgrims along the famous thoroughfare.
This all comes on the back of the tripling of numbers of those seeking baptism in France since 2021 along with a 20% increase in Bible sales in the country since 2024. Trying to make sense of this in such a secular country is complicated. You could definitely make more of it than is warranted. It’s still only 5% of people who go to church in France.
But France is only one of a number of countries causing researchers to puzzle over the spiritual climate where some stats are bucking long-standing trends. In Australia, where religion has continued its decline, 780,000 people ticked “Christian” in the 2021 census having recorded “no religion” in 2016. (Very) anecdotally, ministers keep telling me that people are arriving at church off the street with no previous experience of it.
Could it be that we’ve hit peak unbelief and people are searching for spiritual nourishment they aren’t getting elsewhere?
There are signs that the wager of our age is proving too hard a burden to bear: the idea that it’s up to me, alone, to prove my worth and succeed in life, even if – ultimately – life is meaningless. None of this delivers what we all need: a story big enough to belong to and a trajectory to our lives that offers hope.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.