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Conservatism is back in Europe, as is well known. After decades of dominance by progressive thinking in the form of Marxism, liberalism, feminism, ecologism and much more, more Europeans have discovered the value of conservative thinking.
This has also led to a new interest in Christianity. In several countries, churches that have seen their membership numbers decline for many years can now report that there seems to be a new interest among young people in the Christian faith.
In 2025, the Dutchman Christan Alting von Gesau, who heads the International Catholic Legislators Network (ICLN), wrote an essay on the website GIS (“Christianity and the future of Europe”) about Christianity’s somewhat unexpected return to Europe.
Among other things, he notes that Christianity is doing very well from a global perspective. Between 1990 and 2024, the number of Christians on Earth increased from 1.9 billion people to 2.6. And it is primarily the population growth in Christian Africa that is responsible for this rise.
But in the so secularized West, we have long spoken of a crisis of the Christian faith. But as I said. It may be changing.
Von Gesau writes in his article: “Over the past 10 years, France has seen a 160 percent growth in adolescent and adult baptisms. Some 17,800 French adolescents and adults received their baptism in 2024 alone. This is a 45 percent rise compared to 2023. The United Kingdom saw the highest number of adult baptisms in over a decade in 2024, while church attendance among the 18-24 age group grew from 4 percent in 2018 to 16 percent in 2024. Austria saw an 85 percent increase in baptisms from 2023 to 2024.”
These are, of course, encouraging figures for all Europeans who believe in the West and in Western identity. Christianity has been a significant building block of Western culture, to say the least, and a return to a more affirmative approach to our European culture and identity should reasonably include a return to a more respectful attitude towards our Christian traditions.
But perhaps we should all be on our guard here.
For even if we understand the value of more Europeans identifying as Christians, and even if we understand that a renaissance of our European identity should also include a renaissance of our Christian identity, we should remain skeptical of a reaction against progressive thinking that risks becoming too extreme.
In Sweden, priests working within the Lutheran Swedish former state church (separated from the state in 2000) have testified that young people who seek church (which they do) ask very naive questions and sometimes adopt very “extreme” attitudes towards the faith.
And many who hold conservative political values can testify that the so-called “right-wing Christians” who are now becoming increasingly visible in the conservative debate place a remarkable amount of focus on faith as certainty and security.
It is as if they are reacting to the criticism that has long been directed at Christianity from scientifically inspired environments in the Western world, where scientific knowledge and actual results have trumped the traditional faith’s Bible-based conceptions of the world. Astronomy, evolutionary research and critical Bible exegesis have forced Christian intellectuals into retreat on point after point. Even the modern democratic breakthrough with universal suffrage, free media and legal certainty has come from intellectual environments that do not have their origins in the Christian world.
Now many young people are looking for a faith that gives meaning and comfort and that also makes life something more than just a hedonistically oriented journey between birth and death. And then it is perhaps natural that Christian environments that speak of certainty, of knowledge, of blind faith, and that at the same time distance themselves from the progressive environments in Christendom where faith is clearly being watered down, capture these young people.
But this is hardly a feasible path. The Christian faith should by definition be a faith. It must include doubt and compromise. It must also be able to accept all the progress that humanity has made in the modern world independently of the Christian faith. A viable new Christianity must be based on a faith that is based on the modern world but that still has something substantial to offer.
Who knows? Maybe we need a new Reformation. It is now 500 years since the Christian world was shaken by the emergence of a new faith. We have just passed the turn of the millennium. Maybe it is time again.
If so, we can hope that it is not a faith that is based on some supposed certainty and thus on intolerance and extremism. Faith must be allowed to be a faith. It must contain doubts and compromises. Otherwise, Christian life on earth will be more of a hell than a heaven.