At the end of 2025, religion by the numbers

Sadly, in Latin America data about religion is hard to find, leading to a void in the world's largest Catholic-majority region.

Without the long-term domestic will to accurately monitor change, Latin America remains a crucial unknown as far as religion is concerned.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

By the end of each year there are polls and surveys going over different issues. Religious practice is one of them, and the end of 2025 delivered at least two new surveys dealing with religious practices in France and the United States.

The most recent poll from the United States, published on December 8 by the Pew Research Center is available here. The one from France, was published by Catholic newspaper La Croix the very same day. The poll is available here (content in French), but sadly, La Croix as most national French media keep their content behind paywalls

Before, in May 2025, there was a British poll mostly concerned with trying to understand changes in religious practice among British youth in the post-Brexit, post-pandemic contexts there. It was commissioned by the Bible Society, and it is available here. It compares with data from a 2018 study, and the main takeaway is a somehow generalized increase in Church attendance/Church practice in the United Kingdom, running contrary to what used to be the norm there.

The simultaneous release of the United States and French polls, coupled with the earlier data from the United Kingdom, sets the stage for an international comparison defined by contrasting trends in religious practice and its potential impact on politics.

For French Catholicism, the poll reveals a profound political fragmentation that, counter-intuitively, holds a hopeful implication: the far-right political currently does not dominate the regularly practicing core, suggesting the French church remains open to diverse political alignments.

Against this backdrop of political re-alignment in France, the United States and the United Kingdom offer contradictory narratives about the state of religious practice itself: the British report suggests the nation is experiencing a “Quiet Revival,” running directly counter to the findings of the Pew Research Center, which concludes there is 'no clear evidence of a religious revival' in the United States.

Religion in the United States

The Pew Research Center report, while confirming that overall religious commitment in the United States has held steady since 2020, finds no clear evidence of the “religious revival” among young adults that some commentators have hypothesized. For example, monthly church attendance among young adults (18-29) has not seen a statistically significant rise.

Furthermore, where a change in gender dynamics is observed, it is due not to young men becoming more religious, but rather to the declining religiousness among young women, which is narrowing the historical gender gap.

The fact that there is no way to talk about a “religious revival” in the United States is relevant because there is a strain of political commentary, most notably at the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times way so happy with such idea as a key driver of Donald Trump’s success in the November 2024 presidential election there.

Taking into consideration the data from Pew Research Center it is almost impossible to go where Ross Douthat and others in his side of the U.S. political field to bet big on Catholicism and other Christian denominations offering the kind of support for Trump and his Make America Great Again movement to be successful in the long run.

The data from the Pew Research Center has traditional forms of Christian belief, such as Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, either in the red or barely breaking even.

“When it comes to Catholicism, far more young people have switched out than in. Overall, twelve percent of today’s youngest adults have switched out of Catholicism. Meanwhile, one percent of adults ages 18 to 24 have switched into Catholicism, meaning that they identify as Catholic today after having been raised in another religion or no religion” (p. 15).

One finds there an eleven percent deficit. And that the high-profile conversions some members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops desperately seek and promote, as in J.D. Vance’s case, as some kind of long-term solution for the future of their church are unable to fix the issue.

More so when one takes into consideration the fact that the same conference has been unable to speak with a single voice when dealing with the violence of the ongoing mass antimigrant raids in the United States these days.

Even if Michael Phạm Minh Cường, the bishop of San Diego, or his former boss there and current archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert Walter McElroy have been very vocal in their criticism of the Trump administration, one does not find the same attitude in Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the current archbishop of New York, or in Robert Barron, the current bishop of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota.

Something similar appears in the case of Greek Orthodoxy, one of the “hot” conversion destinations if one was willing to believe the rather weak reporting of The New York Times on these matters (content behind a paywall).

Running counter to the Time’s depiction of conversion to Greek Orthodoxy, the Pew Research Center data, finds Greek Orthodoxy barely breaking even. They lose as many faithful as they are able to convert to their faith.

The revenge of race

And yet, the major failure of the alleged “religious revival” in the United States, only visible to ideologues such as Douthat, will probably emerge in the coming year, during the midterms, as Donald Trump’s and his underlings’ ability to achieve whatever measure of political success they could have ultimately rides on the back of the renewed political relevance of race and ethnicity in the United States.

Instead of legitimizing the idea, always far-fetched, that the United States was already a “post-racial” society, what the Trump administration has proved is how relevant is for Latino and Black voters to stick together and vote as blocs as the only way to compensate against the violence exerted by the U.S. federal government over the last year.

It is, without doubt a return of race and ethnicity to the forefront of political debates in the United States and with potential consequences elsewhere for the resurgence of race and/or ethnicity as a defining category of political mobilization.

One only needs to pay attention to the outcome of the Miami-Dade Mayoral race to see how even if the Republican party had as its candidate a Latino, he was crunched by Eileen Higgins, the Democratic candidate, able to win her election by 20 points.

In doing so, she ended a 30 year’s hold of the GOP on that city and confirmed the trend already evident in the results from the state races in New Jersey and Virginia, where Latino voters who were willing to vote for Trump in 2024, swung back to the Democratic party.

While political commentary often focusses on the powerful loyalty of the white evangelical and white Catholic vote, the United States Catholic Church is an increasingly diverse body, whose base is unwilling to follow the mantra of “abortion over any other issue.”

The constant, systematic, attack coming from Trump on Latinos and other minorities, such as Somalis, bring back race and ethnicity as a defining feature of politics in the United States. It also confirms that the alleged post-racial landscape the GOP has been pushing over the last 20 years or so is hardly a reality.

On Sunday, Edward Wu and Molly English from CNN published a detailed analysis of some of the most recent results in elections in the United States and the constant loss of Latino support for Trump and the GOP.

According to Wu and English, there is already evidence of a dramatic Blue Wave rebound among Latino voters. In both Virginia and New Jersey, the Democratic margin shift from the 2024 election to the 2025 election was more than double that of the statewide shift. In New Jersey, the Democratic boost in high-Latino counties was an impressive 21 percentage points (from a 14 percent margin to a 35 percent margin), reversing 2024 results.

In California, the rebound was equally pronounced, showing a clear re-engagement with the Democratic party by these vital, growing populations. This is not a forecast, but a factual account of voter behavior—a dramatic reversal that immediately undermines the foundation of the GOP's Latino strategy.

In that respect, race is back as a main feature in shaping political discourse in the United States, more so as Trump himself "begged", on December 10, at a massive rally in Pennsylvania, for migrants from Norway, Sweden or Denmark, while complaining about people going to the U.S. from what he called “shitholes” in Africa and Latin America.

And the effects of the return and race and ethnicity are not over. María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, elected first in 2021, broke the code of silence shaping Trump’s relationship with the GOP when she criticized openly Trump’s decision to not receive refugees from 19 countries, with three of them from Latin America.

For the Catholic bishops in the United States there is a clear challenge that they have been unable to address as a national conference. Some of their members have been at the trenches of the fight against the raids and deportations, but the Conference as such, remains fickle, unwilling to confront Trump and his underlings.

This revenge of race happens as a stark contradiction emerges in the United States public life. Near Trump or closely associated to the seismic changes that made his presidency possible, there are plenty of political and economic “whales,” from the members and frequent guests to the Napa Institute to his Vice President Vance, all of whom claim to be Catholic.

At the same time, one of the groups most affected by his rhetoric and polices are poor Catholic Latino migrants trying to make an honest living in the United States and yet, being blamed for whatever goes wrong in that country, from wages to housing, as an excuse to justify the violence of the raids and even deportations to countries in Africa and Latin America willing to play ball with the Trump administration in the business of instilling fear as a defining feature of his presidential tenure.

The French Catholic

The poll from France, published by Catholic newspaper La Croix the very same December 8, presents a complex, two-part design drawing on a total sample of 2,159 persons.

This first portion, the subsample of 1,004 Catholics identifying themselves as regulars at their Church practices, was interviewed between April 14 and April 29, 2025, deliberately straddling the date of Pope Francis's death on April 21. This means the results reflect opinions gathered immediately following a major, unsettling event, introducing a significant methodological variable for analysis.

The second subsample, which is less detailed in public reporting, consists of 1,155 cases of persons identifying themselves as occasional but engaged attendants. This first “half” of the sample is available at IFOP’s website here (content in French).

Unlike the first “half”, the second subsample integrates persons who identifying themselves as occasional attendants to religious services and other similar activities. This second “half” of the sample, as told by La Croix’s when publishing the summary of the full poll, had 1,155 cases.

Details on this second subsample are scarce; La Croix only states that it was drawn from a larger sample of 18,031 French adults. This lack of transparency on the sample’s second half makes the full poll difficult to interpret.

A major finding from the French poll is that despite the efforts of the most radical factions of the right, whose origins go back to Charles Maurras and his Action Française, there is no evidence of a definitive politicization of French Catholicism.

It is clear that the French right has a slight majority of the Catholic vote, but the French right is far from being a monolith, so even if 40 percent of French Catholics identify themselves as leaning right, they allocate their votes to different parties, and there is at least 30 percent of them identifying as leaning left which, granted, is also an archipelago of parties.

One must notice that the Catholic Church in France is also an archipelago of movements and ways to understand their faith, as one of the findings of the poll is that two thirds of the respondents declare “having nothing against” the Mass in Latin.

It would be interesting to know what the correlations are between French Catholics leaning right and attitudes towards the Mass in Latin but, there is no hint at that in what La Croix decided to publish.

A major finding of the La Croix study is that the region with the largest share of Catholics claiming frequent practice is the Ile-de-France area, where Paris sits.

This finding runs counter to any hypothesis about secularization. The most standard interpretation of secularization assumes that its effects are most noticeable in large urban centers. No one considering a large urban center in France could avoid thinking of Paris.

A more detailed readout of the numbers would be necessary, mostly to figure out the role of income and age in this pattern, but even if any of those two variables played a role, the explanation will need to be more sophisticated and complex than the usual, run-of-the-mill interpretations of secularization.

Another possibility is that Paris, with its more vibrant life, where one is able to find mosques, synagogues or Christian Orthodox temples right next to Catholic churches, on top of militant atheist organizations and Oriental religions sanctuaries, force Catholics to actually live their faith in ways rural France never sees.

Mutatis mutandis it would be as astounding as if, in the United States, the Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut emerged as the region with the largest share of practicing Catholics.

No Catholic Vote

In any case, the fact that no single party concentrates a majority of Catholic electors is good news for a country at risk of falling in similar identity-traps as those shaping U.S. politics these days, that are, for the most part, also present in other European countries witnessing the growing influence of far-right identitarian parties.

These parties have had for the last 15 years or so Vladimir Putin’s support, and now they also have Donald Trump’s endorsement. The United States chief of State blasted “European weakness” when presenting his National Security Plan and during an interview with Politico.

To nobody’s surprise, there was an immediate response from one of the top European officials, António Costa, the European Council president, who reacted to Trump’s plan warning about U.S.’ interference in European affairs.

To see the effects of Trump’s rhetoric on European weakness, one only has to look at news coming from Munich on Wednesday 10, where a group of members of Lederhosen Revolte, a Bavarian far-right identitarian group appeared dressed as Santa Claus/Saint Nikolaus in a subway station giving away leaflets where they were “issuing” travel tickets to migrants and refugees currently living in Germany (content in German).

By dressing as this religiously inspired figure, the group is deliberately co-opting a universal symbol of Christian culture and twisting its meaning to achieve a political objective: racial and national exclusion. They performed a hostile act (issuing fake expulsion tickets) while wearing a costume that superficially represents Christian tradition and charity.

Removing or at least reducing the risk of a full alignment of religious identity and political preference in French offers and advantage and should be a goal for the rest of the members of the European Union.

That stands in clear contrast with the repeated attempts of Catholic Vote USA to build a voting bloc integrating all Catholics under their biased interpretation of Catholic doctrine.

And their efforts are not limited to the United States, as there are corresponding organizations all over Latin America. The piece linked after this paragraph goes over the relationships between the U.S. far-right and its Latin American partners with Catholic Vote as a key player.

One only has to read Leo XIV’s address to a group of members of the European Parliament who visited him hours after Trump’s interview with Politico to figure out the kind of effects Trump’s appeal to identity politics and his explicit support for parties allied with Vladimir Putin is having on European politics and on the way the Catholic Church understands its role in politics.

When going on December 10 over the “rich ethical principles and patterns of thought that are the intellectual patrimony of Christian Europe,” Pope Prevost emphasized how “the mark of any civilized society is that differences are debated with courtesy and respect, for the ability to disagree, listen attentively, and even to enter into dialogue with those whom we may regard as opponents, bears witness to our reverence for the God-given dignity of all men and women.”

The British poll

On the other side of the pond, the findings from the Bible Society's The Quiet Revival offer a sharp contrast to what the Pew Research reports.

In the U.K., the data suggests that, far from holding steady, the Church in England and Wales is growing.

Monthly church attendance for all adults rose from eight percent in 2018 to twelve percent in 2024. The most dramatic growth is found among young adults (18-24), whose monthly attendance rose from four percent in 2018 to 16 percent in 2024—a fourfold increase in six years.

This increase is particularly notable among young men, whose attendance surged from four percent to 21 percent in the same period, completely inverting the historical trend of female-dominated religious practice.

It is still hard to know if these results in the U.K. are something other than a fluke in long-established trends towards loss of religious belies and practices, but it would be shortsighted to dismiss its potential implications, as much as the possibility that this resurgence could be tied to the kind of uncertainties Britons have been facing since Brexit, heightened by the effects of the global pandemic.

Whatever one could say about the Bible Society’s poll it is necessary to be cautious, as this “quiet revival” happens at a time where young Britons are actively seeking to emigrate to Australia, Canada, and continental Europe.

This trend is underscored by the latest figures for the year ending June 2025, which show that British national net migration remains negative, with more Britons leaving the country than arriving (estimated at -109,000).

The data was published at the end of November by the British Office for National Statistics available here. It must be noted also that while the figure for net emigration as of 2025 is high, it is an improvement from previous post-Brexit data.

Britain has seen over the last eight years a massive emigration of both nationals from other countries who resent the racist turn in public discourse behind Brexit, but also the difficulties for young British nationals to find stable employment.

Running for the hills

The report from ONS states:

• The provisional estimate for total long-term emigration for the most recent period is 693,000, an increase of 43,000 from the updated YE June 2024 estimate of 650,000. Most people who left the United Kingdom in YE June 2025 were non-EU+ nationals (286,000), with around half of those leaving originally arriving on study-related visas.

In that respect it is clear that optimism is scarce in Britain, and that the “quiet revival” could be tied to the kind of socio-economic uncertainty unleashed by Brexit and its aftermath, enhanced by the management of the pandemic there and not necessarily to an improvement in religious instruction or practice from the Church of England, the Catholic Church or any other major religious institution there.

There is a long-established tradition in sociological analysis tying the uncertainty brought by deep economic or political crisis with an increased search for meaning.

When key social structures (markets or the polity as such) go through periods of instability, individuals often turn to institutions that offer stability, community, transcendent meaning, and a sense of shared expectations. Religious practice provides that kind of structure.

This is more relevant as the United Kingdom data is rather extreme: The sheer scale of the change in the United Kingdom is astounding. Monthly attendance for young men (18-24) surged from four to 21 percent is not a gradual trend; it’s a sudden shift that demands a look at external shocks (Brexit, pandemic aftermath, economic downturn).

One would have to wonder, when thinking about the perception of a revival in the United States and the actual revival in the United Kingdom if they are not somehow predicated on a similar base: the kind of uncertainty that comes in the context of dramatic social and economic crisis as the one that has been happening in the United States at least since the early years of this century and the aftermath of Brexit in the United Kingdom.

If those caveats were not enough to be cautious about the revival, there is the issue of the effects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Although less publicized at a global scale than what happens in the Catholic Church, one has to remember that Justin Welby had to step down as global leader of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, because of his mishandling of accusations of abuse against a lay member of the Church who, on top of being a repeated offender in the United Kingdom got Anglican approval to operate missions in at least two countries in Africa where he abused male minors again.

Now, to make matters worse, his successor, Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop-designate of Canterbury, has been accused of mishandling accusations against other cleric in her Church.

The issue emerged on December 10, after the United Kingdom media published details about how "due to administrative errors and an incorrect assumption about the individual's wishes, the complaint was not taken forward."

It is hard to forecast the potential outcome of Mullally's mistake, but what is relevant for the purposes of today's installment of this series is that unless churches learn to actually address these issues, clergy sexual abuse will keep coming back to chastise them as leaders and their congregations, undermining the trust of those who, for whatever reason, seek the kind of structure churches provide.

The gender gap: A transatlantic puzzle

Putting that issue aside, even if the United States is hardly a net loser when it comes to migration, as the United Kingdom is now, it is clear that any incentive people had back in the 20th century to migrate, whether legally or illegally, to any of those countries has evaporated.

Also, it must be noticed that the kind of racist discourse one finds in what the Trump administration renders as policy has little or nothing to do with Christianity as such and much more with a certain strain of Christian-nationalism closer to certain varieties of fascism than to the Catholic Church’s Social Doctrine.

That was pointed out by Pope Francis, months before his death, and remains a topic of the now more frequent exchanges Leo XIV has with media beyond the usual exchanges Roman Pontiffs have been having since Benedict XVI travels outside of Italy.

The starkest contrast in the data from France and the United Kingdom as compared to the United States lies in the changing gender dynamics of religious practice, revealing ongoing changes.

The Pew Research confirms a traditional trend in the United States: secularization is being led by young women. The narrowing of the historical gender gap is not a sign of male revival, but rather a result of the declining religiousness among young women.

As a change, it runs counter to some narratives about crystallized gender identities as depicted in “reality” TV series on Mormon wives, as many possible examples. But, outside of legacy media, it is possible to confirm the new trend when one goes over YouTube and social media, one is able to find the videos of Alyssa Grenfell or Irene’s Entropy.

Both go in their videos, whether in long-format as Grenfell’s or short musical as Irene’s, over the painful experience of growing in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints only to realize they were victims of several forms of abuse and manipulation.

In the United States there is also the issue of the idea that only conservative/strict religious denominations grow. Even if back in the 1960s and 1970s both the United States and Canada offered evidence confirming that alleged trend, nowadays it is impossible to find similar evidence in Canada.

What is clear from the data in the available Canadian data is that it is not about how strict and/or conservative denominations are, but about whether or not the members of any given church trust their leaders or not.

In the Great North, the data for the five-year waves of their version of the General Social Survey is available here. The main concern reveals the effect of loss of trust in institutional forms of religion: the massive emergence of the so-called Nones, people with no religious affiliation, as reflected in the papers available, mostly in English, with some of them only in French, over the page of the Canadian Research Data Centre, here.

The idea originally emerged in Dean Kelley’s Why conservative Churches are growing, published originally in 1972 but still cited by darlings of the U.S. far-right as Douthat, who rendered Kelley as a prophet of sorts showing the Catholic Church the “true path” to growth in his 2018 book To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, where he calls the then Pontiff to embrace Kelley’s approach.

Only conservatives?

Contemporary studies found that pastors use sermons to justify economic inequality and defend wealth accumulation to avoid alienating wealthy donors, while securing their economic support for their Church. In other words, Kelley put the horses behind the wagon.

Kelley and those who endorse, up until today, the idea that only “conservative churches” grow, also dismiss that as churches grow large (which requires resources), they shift focus from conversion/evangelism to the ever complex organizational maintenance. The Catholic Church’s Legion of Christ offers a prime example of the kind of risks that religious organizations run in that regard.

Also, one should be aware that large churches can provide specialist benefits that smaller ones cannot, suggesting that financial infrastructure is a key determinant of sustainability and growth, not just strictness.

That on top of how Kelley himself conflated key terms of his take such as “strict” (high demands on members) with “conservative” (theological position) leading to all kinds of misapplication by religious leaders who use the theory to enforce specific political ideologies.

In a nutshell, at least in the United States the alleged growth of the “conservative denominations” is a byproduct of their access to wealthy donors. Defending wealth accumulation to secure donors is a greater determinant of growth than doctrinal purity. When conservative congregations or denominations fall in that trap they are unable to speak truth to power, to speak with parrhesia.

Parrhesia is originally a Classic Greek Philosophy concept but widely used in Scriptural analysis, the study of the Bible, and recovered in the 20th century for the analysis of power dynamics by Michel Foucault.

These dynamics align with the general global patterns observed in Christian-majority nations, both when one tries to understand what is takes to growth a denomination or Church, but also when looking at how women tend to be the most religiously committed but also the first to lead the transition away from faith in secularizing contexts, as it is happening in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, and other Latin American countries.

The United Kingdom, however, provides a complete inversion of this model. The Bible Society's report talks about the Quiet Revival as a primarily male phenomenon while the attendance of young adults as a whole is surging is surging, the most dramatic growth is found among young men, whose attendance rose from four percent to 21 percent in six years.

This unprecedented British male surge runs contrary to almost all modern sociological trends in Western Christianity but as, stated previously, the very speed at which is happening, forces one to be extremely careful about what is behind the revival and how sustainable it could be.

In France, the gender cleavage remains secondary to the political one, yet the core data reinforces the traditional role of women in the Christian churches. French women, like their American and British counterparts, remain the most engaged demographic within the faith.

However, the central finding of the La Croix poll is that the political fragmentation between the traditionally observant core and the occasional attendees is the defining factor, proving that in France, attendance, not just gender, is the defining feature of contemporary Catholic identity. This political volatility, fueled by the memory of Pope Francis's pontificate, stands in sharp contrast to the raw numbers game of growth and decline seen in the United States and the United Kingdom.

This is a feature missing in the United States religious landscape. On December 11, EWTN published a poll by Real Clear claiming Trump still has a hold on U.S. Catholics.

EWTN is a Catholic far-right media outlet that launched a systematic attack on Pope Francis, leading the now deceased Pope to deplore their attitude in September 2021, stating: "I personally deserve attacks and insults because I am a sinner, but the church does not deserve them. They are the work of the devil. I have also said this to some of them".

The main problem in interpreting that poll is that there is no report or poll data of it at RealClear's website.

On top of that, the poll conducted November 9-11 of this year has a very small sample of only one thousand cases, and since there is no way to know the ethnicity of the Catholics in that sample, it is really hard to figure out how representative the poll is.

Despite the lack of data, at National Catholic Register, Matthew Bunson, a boss at EWTN, published his take on the poll, claiming that up to 41 percent of Latino Catholics support Trump’s migration politics, giving him an edge even on that issue.

Polls are a tricky business, and it would be relatively easy to get enough responses from Latinos willing to say that by picking them from the right places, more so in a poll with what is nowadays a small sample.

Oddly enough, RealClear Politics, unlike Bunson’s triumphant Trumpian take on the poll, itself has separate data on Catholics on “handling of inflation,” and there, 55 percent of Catholics, regardless of race or ethnicity, give Trump a D or F grade, far removed from the “A+++++” grade Trump gave himself on the Politico interview.

It must be noted that the piece at RealClear Politics was penned by Steve Cortes “a former adviser” to Trump and Vance, who closes his piece stating “the faithful rallied big to Trump in 2024. They now have valid concerns.”

Latin American realities

As far as Latin America, back in September this series went over the available data for the last 20 years in the Latinobarómetro series which, despite its limitations, especially when compared to surveys tracking more directly the many issues shaping religious practices, it is the best the region has, especially from a comparative approach.

As good as the Latinobarómetro poll is, it is primarily a political and social attitude barometer, and while its comparative strength is unmatched, its religious data is limited by its broad approach, often failing to delve into the specific theological or lifestyle changes that define the United States, France, and United Kingdom data.

Conicet in Argentina, and some private organizations in Mexico have carried national surveys on religious practices in their countries, but they have been limited by their approach and, at least in the case of Mexico, by the lack of interest from both public and private entities willing to fund research on the country, much less to carry a more ambitious survey, similar to Latinobarómetro, on the region as such.

Oddly enough, the only systematic data doing something similar in Latin America, came from United States private funding, when the Pew Research Center, saw an opportunity to measure the impact of Pope Francis’s pontificate. The last time they published a report comparing the perceptions of Pope Francis in the United States and Latin America was in September 2024, seven months before Bergoglio’s death.

Already in February 2025, while Bergoglio was extremely sick at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, Pew Research Center published a summary of all the data at their reach, available here.

Sadly, the lack of previous comparative research with other Popes and the uncertainty about future comparisons now with Leo XIV as head of the Catholic Church looms larger in the current scientific and academic milieus in Latin America.

This lack of sustained domestic will means that the region, the world's largest Catholic-majority area, is chronically unable to monitor its own religious dynamics with the same analytical depth applied to the developed world.

Ultimately, the latest data from the United States, France, and the United Kingdom reveals a global religious landscape defined by contradictions and political volatility. The most striking social findings—the United States decline led by young women versus the United Kingdom's “Quiet Revival” led by young men—are linked not to theological or pastoral resurgence but to socio-economic uncertainty, reinforcing the idea that spirituality is often a response to crisis.

The risk of political polarization

In the United States, the political contrast is starker. There it is possible to find very active churches in the face polarization. A key feature is an extremely wealthy and influential core led by the Catholic far-right orbiting around the Napa Institute and other similar entities, who are clearly betting on building a Christian political bloc with the most radical Catholics as their core.

As far as it is possible to see in December 2025, the bet was lost by the renewed relevance of race and ethnicity among the faithful infused by the racist raids of the Trump administration against migrants.

Conversely, the French Church, defined by resilient fragmentation, finds strength in the fact that attendance/practice, not partisan loyalty, remains the defining factor of its identity, strategically safeguarding the institution from the political “identity-traps” ravaging the United States and other nations, even in Europe.

These transatlantic conflicts are underpinned by severe analytical and institutional challenges. The data confirms the failure of ideological narratives, particularly the outdated Dean Kelley thesis, showing that alleged growth is more likely a byproduct of already available financial resources and donor maintenance than doctrinal purity.

The main problem with Kelley thesis is that it is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy leading churches, Catholic or otherwise, to adopt the most politically active version of themselves, so there is actual growth of political power and influence. In Mexico a good example of that kind of short-term success exists in the Luz del Mundo Church.

Following Kelley’s intuition about religious growth, the Luz del Mundo Church pretended to be rigorous and conservative but, as it is often the case, religious institutions pay a steep price for that kind of growth and the influence associated to it, as their clergy becomes abusive, predatory, and less responsive to their congregations’ needs, as the Luz del Mundo Church and many other cases prove.

And not only the Luz del Mundo Church, within the Catholic Church in Mexico and other Latin American countries, one can find traces of Kelley’s influence in the approaches followed by the Mexican Legion of Christ, the Spaniard Opus Dei, the Peruvian Sodalitium of Christian Life, the Brazilian Heralds of the Gospel, the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word, and the German Schönstatt Fathers, to name only some of the “orders” aligned with the idea that only conservative/rigorist congregations grow in the Latin American Catholic Church.

The crisis of analytical clarity is amplified by the chronic research deficit in the world's largest Catholic-majority region. Without the sustained domestic will to accurately monitor its own religious dynamics.

While this situation exists Latin America remains a crucial unknown, becoming a black hole of data just as the global Catholic Church faces profound institutional uncertainty following the end of Pope Francis's pontificate and the evolution of the clergy sexual abuse crisis that, unlike what one sees in other countries, in Latin America remains uncertain due to major failures in the police and judiciary.

A summary of this piece is available in audio format after this paragraph.

Note on Production: The text of this summary was written and edited solely by the author. Due to a temporary health issue, the delivery of the audio summary was achieved using a high-quality, text-to-speech engine (Voicertool). The AI was used for voice generation only, not content creation.