Generally speaking, there are a few days each year that find Americans scrambling to get inside church doors. We might, as our priests and pastors sometimes tell us, be a nation spiraling into paganism (or at least noneism), but at the very least, we don our too-tight suits and frilly dresses to sit in pews on Christmas, Ash Wednesday, and Easter. For those of us who are more regular churchgoers (and research suggests that it’s really just about 5 percent of us), the whole phenomenon is something of a meme — a meme that has very real consequences for internet behavior. Look at Google search trends for the word “church,” and you’ll notice that there’s generally a peak of activity in the days leading up to each of those three Christian holidays. But in 2025, that graph will look a little different. This past Sunday, Americans started typing the word “church” into their search bars. The numbers aren’t in yet (Google projects numbers and publishes complete data later), but if the projections are close to accurate, the search for “church” last week outstripped the one we typically see at Easter. (READ MORE: The Age of Spiritual Warfare Is Here. Will You Rise or Fall?) Any analyst or statistics geek will tell you, you can only glean so much information from Google search trends. Typing a word into a search engine doesn’t necessarily translate into putting on the aforementioned suit and sitting in a pew. Social media posts (and there were a good number of them on the topic) hardly provide an accurate read of national sentiment. And yet, it seems reasonable to suspect that something stirred in the consciences of ordinary people on Sunday. Why? Christian TikTokers and avid X users credited Charlie Kirk, and it seems likely that his death was a tipping point. That said, the last month of tragic news and political debate have been beckoning people to the pews. The last month has been harrowing and exhausting. First, a transgender man opened fire on a Catholic Church full of school children. Then, a man who should have been in prison or, at the very least, a psychiatric institution, randomly stabbed a Ukrainian immigrant in the neck on a train in Charlotte. Just hours before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a 16-year-old opened fire on his fellow students during lunch at Evergreen High School in Colorado. (READ MORE: What Charlie Kirk’s Murder Really Means) Then Kirk was shot on a Utah college campus in front of hundreds of students, and minutes later, thousands of Americans online were watching the footage. When those same Americans turned to the internet to learn more about the national tragedy unfolding in real time, they stumbled across leftist social media accounts of all shapes and sizes celebrating (or at least excusing) the man’s death because he believed the same things that most Americans believe. It was, quite simply, terrifying and grotesque. Suddenly, Americans found themselves standing on one side of a seemingly impassable political chasm, wanting absolutely nothing to do with the people on the other side. So they flocked to the churches. At this early date, it’s impossible to claim that we’re watching some kind of spiritual revival driven by Kirk’s death. It’s been a week. Just because people decided to pull themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning once in September doesn’t mean they’ll still be doing it on a regular basis come November. Then again, it’s not like this religious revival — if that’s what we’re about to watch — started yesterday. Before his death, Kirk claimed that we were watching a “Christian revival” unfold before our eyes. Back in February, the National Catholic Register pointed out that, “[a]fter reaching its highest ever margin of 30% in 2022, the number of nones dipped to 28% in 2023.” Ross Douthat and Spencer Klavan are so convinced that a revival is underway that they both recently wrote entire books investigating the movement. Even Axios (not exactly a right-wing publication) noted that young men are “leading a religious resurgence.” It’s about time. We’ve spent decades being told that the only way to achieve happiness is to dig deep enough inside ourselves to find our “identity.” Disney sold us that message in movies about princesses and lightsaber-wielding heroines. School teachers told us we could become whoever and whatever we wanted. Doctors allowed us to bend reality to fit our fantasies. None of it made us happier. If it didn’t drive us mad (and it did just that for some of us), it left us empty and lost. So we, especially Generation Z, started to trickle back into churches. All things considered, it’s not so bad to embrace your identity as a child of God, the great “I Am.” That first building block allows the individual to understand his place in the family, his community, his society, and his country, all of which are critical to building a healthy nation. Of course, we’re nowhere near the end of that road, and there’s no guarantee we’ll walk all the way down it; but, at the risk of succumbing to optimism, it does appear that we’re at least getting started. READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: The Horrific Immigration Scandal We Need to Talk More About