Scholars and speakers gathered at Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life to celebrate its 25th anniversary and discuss how religion in America has changed over the last 25 years.
“This past 25 years has been, as Pope Francis said, not an era of change, but a change of era,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture. “It’s such an unsettled time, such a time of unprecedented flux that I think it’s important to step back and think about things from a broader perspective.”
Gibson organized his remarks around five observations.
Gibson said that American Judaism is starting to look more like Catholicism, especially in the ways that Israel plays a central role.
“Rather, the State of Israel is occupying the space for Judaism that the papacy takes up in the Catholic imagination,” Gibson said.
Catholic leaders sound a lot like evangelical Christians, especially in the political sphere, according to Gibson.
“Catholicism, in its public manifestation and private behavior, has been taken over by the language and culture of evangelicalism,” Gibson said. “It happened just as evangelicalism sold out in MAGA Christianity.”
Gibson highlighted how evangelicalism has abandoned its historical enthusiasm for church-state separation in favor of Christian nationalism.
“Today’s evangelicals have turned into contemporary Constantine,” Gibson said.
Gibson described how religion is now more about politics than spiritual beliefs. According to Gibson, as religion becomes more political, secular spaces try to take on moral leadership—but can end up harsh and judgmental.
“The secular has become the locus of moral activism,” Gibson said. “But morality quickly degrades into moralism and neo-puritanism. Righteousness can too easily become self-righteousness—justice without mercy.”
Marie Griffith, a humanities professor at Washington University in St. Louis, focused on evangelical Protestantism. With over 30 years of research and 130 interviews with survivors of clerical abuse, Griffith said many evangelical churches now have a “monarchical” style of leadership, where male pastors have too much control.
“Christian femininity means reflexive obedience and acquiescence,” Griffith said. “There’s a whole culture of disciplining wives, not allowing women to vote, of spanking—and other kinds of discipline—that’s really widespread.”
Griffith also discussed how these churches push people to follow strict rules, enforcing conformity through education, worship styles, and informal advisory structures that discourage dissent.
According to Griffith, many young evangelicals are leaving due to the mix of politics within churches but lack Protestant alternatives. Many Protestant churches, Griffith said, are too small, too liberal, or too unfamiliar to attract those disillusioned by right-wing theology.
Griffith pointed to progressive megachurches like Spark Church in Palo Alto, CA and GracePointe Church in Nashville, TN as models but acknowledged their limited reach.
“The Protestant survivor movement is strong and growing,” Griffith said. “I do think it’s they—along with their allies and supporters—who may provide a better path and future for Protestants in the U.S.”
Michael Murphy, director of Loyola University’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, shared three main points. Murphy stated that people who say they’re “spiritual but not religious” now often practice faith in a private and consumer-like way.
“We don’t have a lot of vibrancy of plurality or care for the other,” Murphy said. “We have instead kind of a Lululemon religion.”
According to Murphy, prosperity gospel theology has changed traditional Christian teachings on poverty and justice, citing figures like Paula White-Cain and Joel Osteen as symbolic of this change. Historical Christian values of solidarity with the poor and care for the marginalized are being ignored and forgotten, he added.
Lastly, Murphy highlighted the role artificial intelligence has had, voicing both the environmental and intellectual costs of it, and stating that this is the biggest cultural change since the invention of the printing press.
“Somewhere a child is writing an essay using ChatGPT and depriving herself of the experience of real thought,” Murphy said. “There is an environmental cost to the AI revolution that is monumental.”
All three speakers agreed that religion in America is now shaped more by politics and culture than by tradition or belief.
Griffith and Murphy said churches haven’t given people better options than politics or consumer culture. Nonetheless, the two said there’s hope in people who’ve been hurt by religion and are now speaking out and trying to bring back its real values.
“I see hope coming from those who’ve been wounded by church leaders and who have managed to come forward and speak about the forces corrupting Christian values,” Griffith said. “They may be the ones to lead us forward.”
