“On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.” This promise, made by Jesus himself, assures Christians that their faith will endure till the end of time. The standard secular perspective, however, is that religion is dying in the world, slain by science and rationality. Yet demographers and data show that faith will infuse the future — whether the West will share that future is another question.

When philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed in 1882 that “God is dead,” he, of course, meant that our idea of God had died. This may seem a strange conclusion to have drawn in the 19th century, a decade before the Supreme Court would declare that there are a “mass of organic utterances that this [the United States] is a Christian nation.” It’s not just that Nietzsche was a European, however, and occupied a continent where Christianity was already more sclerotic, after having once been more robust. During the Middle Ages, for instance, European knights would confess horrible sins and be told to walk to Jerusalem barefoot as a penance, and would actually do it. We may part company with certain aspects of their conception of faith, but their devotion to it cannot be questioned. Moreover, the godless relativism now permeating the West would have been as alien to medieval men as “transgenderism” (which is relativism applied to biology).

This Western phenomenon has inspired the echoing of Nietzsche, with, for example, University of Michigan professor Jeff DeGraff triumphantly proclaiming in a 2016 Salon article title “This is the end of … God. Finally!” Alluding to young Americans’ irreligiosity (among other things), he asks in his subtitle, “My fellow boomers might mock millennials, but what if the new generation has the big questions absolutely right?” But DeGraff has a big trend absolutely wrong. From the Everything You Know Isn’t So File, Pew Research Center told us last year:

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