In the opening episode of Saturday Night Live's second season in 1976, Lily Tomlin "moderated" a debate between Chevy Chase's Gerald R. Ford and Dan Akroyd's Jimmy Carter. One of the panelists asking questions during the debate was Jane Curtain, who went deep into the economic weeds.
Now I make no claims to be a mathematician. I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But as I watched almost non-stop all the anecdotes flooding onto X over the last week of what can only be described as a global spiritual revival underway in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk Wednesday last, I began look for ways to quantify it.
Barna Research is the foremost authority in tracking and measuring church growth or decline. Over Labor Day Weekend, Barna released a new survey that showed that church attendance, particularly among younger people, was significantly on the rise. This is based on data concluding in July. So it's entirely likely that the movement back to faith from nihilism was well underway before the horrific murder we witnessed in Orem, Utah last week. The recoil of seeing such a naked act of evil has only increased the desire to look for purpose and meaning besides what the secular world offers.
It will take months, perhaps even as long as a year before tangible conclusions can be drawn, but until the data is gathered and analyzed, there are anecdotes and other bits of evidence that can be studied and extrapolated upon in order to paint a picture of what is going on.
Staying in America, and looking exclusively at the Catholic Church, Amira Abuzeid writing for the Catholic News Agency, filed this piece Tuesday.
Matt Zerrusen, co-founder of Newman Ministry, a Catholic nonprofit that operates on about 250 campuses nationwide, told CNA he has spoken with Catholic college ministry leaders throughout the country over the last few days, and “every one of them told me they’ve seen bigger crowds” at Masses and lots of people “they’ve never seen before.”
“I have not talked to anyone who has not seen an increase in Mass attendance,” Zerrusen said. “Some schools are reporting increases of 15%.”
He told CNA that many more college students are also asking for spiritual direction. “So many people are asking ‘What do I do?’ What is evil? How does God allow this?” Zerrusen said.
“They are asking so many basic questions.”
One priest at a large state school in the Northeast told Zerrusen he spoke over the weekend with 15 young men he had never seen before who sought him out for faith advice.
Zerrusen said the spiritual “revival” Kirk’s death has amplified comes amid one he has been observing for months.
In the Protestant world, there's not as much infrastructural cohesion as to reporting what's going on from church to church, even within specific denominations, but anecdotes from what took place in churches are pretty overwhelming.
We’ve broken 3 attendance records in 6 Sundays and FIFTY FOUR found new life in Christ just today @canvas_fl
— J.Mark Johns (@JMarkJohns) September 14, 2025
Can’t wrap my head around it.
The tide is turning. #allforchrist pic.twitter.com/WWxzFXjhIb
Our church was so packed today that they had to bring in rows and rows of extra chairs. From what I’m seeing, Christians are waking up to the fact that they can’t sit on the sidelines anymore. I hope this leads to many more souls coming to Christ.
— ADHDSuperDoug (@extremedougy) September 14, 2025
Record attendance numbers at church this morning. pic.twitter.com/E48Tgq59sh
— Shawn Gorham (@shawngorham) September 14, 2025
Our church was packed today. Hundreds came to Christ through baptism after the service. The Charlie effect. Praise God! pic.twitter.com/lzSOUfNxTf
— Tyler Carditis (@TyCardon) September 14, 2025
Today I am speaking at Revive Church in Martin County Florida…
— Nate Schatzline (@NateSchatzline) September 14, 2025
PACKED to the brim! America is WAKING UP! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/dv5mUlRDBo
I could post hundreds. Our dear friend, Salena Zito, captures in her own inimitable way what real people are thinking and doing. Here's a link to her latest Washington Examiner piece. It squares with much of the online reporting we're seeing.
If you were looking for young people distraught over last Thursday’s brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk here, you were looking in the wrong place.
They went to The Sanctuary church by the busloads. Even Pastor Jason Howard was taken aback by the size and scope of the number of young people who came out on Sunday for service.
“I’ll be honest with you, I am in my forties, so I was caught off guard by the response from people who are in my church in their twenties. They were much more in tune with Charlie’s influence than I was,” he explained.
But his assistant pastor, Cole Yocca, was very much tuned in.
“He is 22 years old, and his immediate reaction was to spontaneously just put out on social media that we were going to gather to pray. And the day after Charlie was assassinated, he had a whole bunch of people just gather in his backyard to pray,” he explained.
“The response was, we are going to be bold and unashamed about the message of Jesus more than ever before,” he said of both the Thursday night vigil and the packed Sunday services.
Did every church pack out? No. Was there a surge? Obviously. And it wasn't just here in the States. Churches globally are filling up more than normal. So what does this mean?
Just in the Protestant world in America, about 32 million people a week attend church. Assume an average of 10% more people attended services Sunday across the board. In some cases, churches saw upwards of a 50% surge. Others didn't see anything other than normal. But a 10% spike is a reasonable estimation based on the prayer vigils and other memorial services that spontaneously popped up around the country and spread around the world. 10% may actually be too small a number, but it tracks with the reporting from Catholic News Agency about seeing 15% growth in Mass attendance. So that 10% boost just in Protestant churches works out to 3.2 million new people. Not all of them made professions of faith, but certainly many of them did.
Bible sales, already up year over year from 2024, are reportedly off the charts over the past week.
THIS 👇🙏
— 🇺🇲 𝑽𝑨𝑵 𝑫𝑼𝑻𝑪𝑯 🇺🇲 (@FrankVanDutch) September 15, 2025
Yes, there appears to have been a notable increase in Bible sales over the past three days (September 12-15, 2025) on a global scale, though much of the available data and reports focus on the United States, with indications of broader worldwide interest driven by…
Online searches for "church", already up for the first eight-plus months of 2025 compared to previous years, peaked, reaching year-long highs, between September 12-14.
The question began to form in my head - what are the odds this movement to faith, across five continents, sparked by the death of Charlie Kirk, resulting in millions of conversions to Christianity, is just random chance? Using the Bayesian model of probability, accounting for the prior probability of spontaneous mass conversion, and calculating in amplifying factors such as global media coverage, Evangelical framing of Kirk as a martyr, existing youth religious networks, political polarization and emotional resonance, and infrastructure for follow-up discipleship, one can assign numerical values and begin to calculate whether the revival we're seeing is predictable and expected, or if there's something bigger at play. This was the model that was used to make the calculation based upon two variables in the query - How many conversions as a result of the murder of Charlie Kirk, and over what course of time.
I mentioned above that just in American Protestant Churches, a conservative estimate of 3.2 million new people showed up Monday. But let's establish a probability baseline. The first probability calculation was made assuming there's a million or more conversions to Christianity globally over the course of a year. I personally believe, but cannot as of yet offer definitive proof, that that number is a lot higher. But at a bare minimum, seeing what we've seen around the world, at least 1 million-plus new converts is intuitively acceptable.
The answer is stunning. The odds of that just spontaneously happening is...
0.0000000072%, or roughly 1 in 13.9 billion. Rerunning the same model with 3 million conversions over a time span of a month following the assassination in Orem last Wednesday, the odds of it being random chance are even longer.
0.0000000005976%, or roughly 1 in 167 billion.
The math is statistical math and by definition has to include lots of assumptions, so further data that comes in can alter these numbers quite a bit. That said, the odds of this all happening this organically without God's hand behind it is, statistically speaking, ridiculously, stupidly non-existent.
In particle physics, the probability burden of proof for something to be accepted as fact has to be within an error margin of 3 X 10 (-7). That's a 3 with 7 zeroes in front of it and a period before that. In genetics, statistical proof is within 5 X 10 (-8).
God is working in people's hearts and souls all around the world, and He's working with error tolerances in the neighborhood of 5.976 X 10 (-12).
So you have to ask yourself why would God be moving in this way and leading millions of people to Him through Christianity if it weren't the one true faith? That does not compute.
To me, if these anecdotes over the last week are backed up over time with survey research and polling analysis in Barna and other places, not to mention living in a world that should begin to act and behave a little differently than before last week, doesn't this mean that Christianity has just been statistically proven true?
Of course, you can continue to embrace the darkness and appreciate the beauty and touching side of evil, like ABC reporter Matt Gutman.
.@mattgutmanABC says he found the messages between Charlie Kirk's killer and his trans boyfriend "very touching, in a way, that I think many of us didn’t expect." pic.twitter.com/8H4E1dFD3K
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) September 16, 2025
Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt rightly described recent events during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee this way.
He's right. It's not just a left versus right cultural fight going on, although majorities of both parties have lined up in Schmitt's overall point. It's about good versus evil, and somebody has to win.
I'm grateful to have chosen the side I have for lots of reasons. Among them? I like the odds that I'm right.
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