As I’ve written in previous posts, I think the United States is in the opening phases of a major Christian revival, on par with the first and second great awakenings. We’re currently passing through the later stages of a fourth turning, which will likely culminate in some sort of major armed conflict, though at this point I think we will actually avoid falling into a hot civil war.
But where most first turnings are followed by a period of reconciliation and national unity, I don’t think we’re going to get that this time. Instead, I think we’re going to go straight into a second turning, which is typically a period of spiritual awakening as the old religion either gets renewed or gets thrown out in favor of the new. The last second turning was in the 1960s and 1970s, and it gave us the religion of woke leftism. In this next great awakening, I think that’s all going to get thrown out.
Right now, we are still in the opening phases of a major national Christian revival. We saw this most clearly in the funeral services for Charlie Kirk, where public officials openly invoked the name of Christ—something that would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. But Christianity is returning to the mainstream culture in a big way now, and I think that trend is only going to continue to expand.
In broad terms, here is the trajectory that I think the Great American Revival is going to follow:
- It will start with a period of unity and good feelings, as the various Christian factions work together to get everyone converted and defeat the anti-Christian woke left.
- After the revival defeats the woke left and sweeps over the culture, it will begin to stall out, and the various Christian factions will begin to turn on each other.
- It will end with all of the Christian factions turning on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not just with anti-Mormon rhetoric, but with actual violence.
Currently, there is a cultural trend where men are turning increasingly to Christianity, while women are turning increasinly away from Christianity. I believe that the first phase of the Great American Revival will end when that trend line is broken, and women begin to turn to Christianity in large numbers.
Why will the begin to turn? Because leftist women tend to be miserable, and they also tend not to reproduce. The world has not yet lost the positive influence of its righteous, believing women, and within the next 5-10 years, I think that these women will succeed in bringing the culture back from the brink of nihilistic, anti-human, leftist despair. I am actually quite optimistic about this.
But after the revival has succeeded in overthrowing the old religion of woke leftism, either by destroying or recapturing our major cultural institutions or by building new ones to replace them, the revival will begin to stall. It is at this point that all of the major sectarian divisions between the various Christian factions—many of which go waaay back to the Reformation, the Great Schism, or even the Nicean council itself—will begin to come to the forefront.
Ever since Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, it has been divided against itself. It will not conquer our culture without all of those old fault lines and divisions coming to the surface again.
This is how we get to the third and final phase of the Great American Revival. As the infighting grows feircer, and the war of words becomes heated, a lot of new Christian converts are going to become disaffected with the churches they initially joined, and are going to start investigating other factions. As they begin to do this in large numbers, I think a very large portion of them are going to find and join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Obviously, as a member of the church myself, I’m more than a little biased. But there are many good reasons why I think this is going to happen. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced more or less constant exponential growth since its founding almost 200 years ago, and the period from 2022 to 2025 saw nearly a million new converts join the church worldwide. If current demographic trends continue, a hundred years from now the world population will be under 1 billion people, and something like 200 million of them will be latter-day saints.
There are other reasons, but my goal with this post is to give a broad picture rather than a deep dive. I’ll leave it to others to give their analysis. Bottom line, I think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to do exceptionally well in this Great American Revival, to the point where all of the other Christian factions will ultimately come to see the Church as a major threat.
Most other Christians—Protestant and Catholic—don’t even consider the “Mormons” to be Christian. So when the revival begins to stall out, and the old sectarian divisions begin to return, the other Christian factions are going to need a common enemy to unite them—and that enemy will be the latter-day saints.
The seeds of this have already been planted. Anti-Mormon rhetoric from Evangelical pastors like Mark Driscoll has inspired at least one mentally ill person to shoot up at least one of our churches, and there have been numerous arson attempts against our churches and temples that have failed and quietly not made the news.
And there’s also plenty of historical precedent. In 19th century Missouri, the anti-Mormon violence got so bad that we were driven violently from the state by the state militia, after suffering rapes, beatings, massacres, and the destruction or theft of most of our material belongings. There is a reason why the Mormons made the pioneer trek to Utah, when the territory was little more than an empty high altitude desert.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the wild card that makes this Christian revival different from all the other ones in our nation’s past. It’s a very unique (and uniquely American) Christian denomination that has a tendency to unite all of the other factions against it. And ultimately, I think that’s how the Great American Revival will end.