Is America About to Experience Another Great Awakening?

It's easy to miss, in a social media-intense news environment, hugely significant cultural, economic and political changes in America these days, and that is especially the case in the area of religion and spirituality.

Did you know, for example, that the decline in Christianity in this country has leveled off, and is, in fact, showing important signs of reversing? Did you know that a major factor in arresting that decline is the increase in interest among Gen Z young men and women in the Bible? And how about this one: Did you know a top aide to one of the key figures in the New Atheist movement is now a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?

The reality behind each of those three queries is this: Yes, the decline of Christianity in American society has indeed stopped, with a major factor being a totally unexpected upsurge in interest among Zoomers in the Bible, and Josh Tinomen, Richard Dawkin's right-hand man, came to faith in Jesus recently.

Let's look at the last of the three first. Readers of HillFaith.org — the website of a ministry that shares the Gospel with congressional aides working on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. — were recently treated to a 16-minute conversation with Timonen, a millennial who first made contact with Dawkins in 2006.

Timonen initially created Dawkins' website, then steadily became an indispensable resource for the then-high riding English evolutionary biologist and author of "The God Delusion," who was in high demand for speaking engagements, particularly on college campuses and at influential conferences across the U.S. and Europe.

Timonen was riding high, but "during this time, there were definitely glimpses of emptiness in all of this, glimpses of people who were definitely not satisfied with their life." An experience at an atheist conference where Dawkins and fellow atheist advocate Sam Harris were speaking began opening Timonen's eyes.

Harris happened to mention something remotely positive about spirituality and the crowd rebelled, making it clear they didn't want to hear anything remotely good about anything in the way of spirituality, or suggestion that there might be an afterlife.

That intolerance made a deep impression on Timonen.

"He was saying the most lukewarm thing about spirituality, but everybody just shut him down. It bothered me that no one was open to that and that there was such an attachment to a physicalist, materialist worldview.

"The materialist world-view means I'm only going to accept things that are within the natural world and I'm going to exclude anything spiritual or that I cannot explain with natural law. I think the atheist world-view has a lot to do with control. It's about controlling the walls of your sandbox, to say that 'if I keep everything within these walls of sand, then I am safe. I can understand it, I can explain it and that's it."

Not long after, Timonen's wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, who came prematurely, and was not given much chance of living. Timonen recalled thinking that this child was the most important thing in his life, and yet, as an atheist, he had to believe his daughter was just another human who, like him, would simply live and then die a meaningless death.

"The atheist world-view can easily discount the value of a single human, and I remember wrestling with that and thinking 'but this is everything,' and it just felt wrong. It was a moment of realizing that the world-view was not connecting" with reality, he explained.

Then in 2020, Josh and his wife and daughter moved to Portland, Ore., where they witnessed the riots that exploded there and elsewhere in the wake of the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Neighborhoods Timonen had come to know and love were left in flames.

A few of the rioters were being arrested, but then they would be released without consequences the next day. Timonen was amazed when some of his young friends and business associates defended the rioters, claiming it was a "good cause." But what is a "good cause" in an atheistic worldview, he wondered, if there is nothing after death?

"Those kids rioting had no moral compass. That got me thinking a lot about that moral compass, where is it coming from. I thought I aligned with these people who were defending the riots, but I didn't, I thought, wait a minute, I thought we were the good guys. And I remember clearly thinking 'why are you defending what is clearly violence and destruction and desecrating our city"?

 Timonen explains that he was also shocked during the COVID pandemic by how big institutions such as the government, the drugmakers and the medical profession, as well as individual Americans, sought to control people, to "police each other" with social distancing and mask-wearing mandates.

"That really shocked me and it felt like there was a wave of evil that had come over everyone. I think of it like an ocean wave where the individual particles are all being pushed in the same way. I also noticed that there was this upswell of Satanic imagery in the world," Timonen said.

"So you would see evil obviously rising on all these different fronts and at the same time people are celebrating Satanism, claiming that it's all just in good fun. Is this not just a coincidence, this working together, how many coincidence am I going to allow before I say maybe there is something else at work here," he explained.

That's when Timonen ceased being an atheist, because he realized the supernatural had to be acknowledged and considered. He and his family moved to Texas, where they found a culture vibrantly open to and publicly celebrating Christianity in a thousand informal ways.

One thing led to another: They began homeschooling their daughter, and they checked out a church. "We saw the fruit, we saw there was a difference, that people treated each other better, there was more respect. And I think it all goes back to the idea of the soul," he said.

Timonen also saw that a lot of the resistance to the tyranny of the COVID pandemic came from churches and the people attending them. Those people have "the firm foundation that Jesus spoke of. If you don't have that firm foundation, the world has a much easier time of it in pushing you around," Timonen realized.

So Timonen and his wife began a thorough reevaluation of their understanding of Jesus and Christianity. They dug into questions such as: Can the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life be trusted? Did Jesus really exist? Can we trust what people said about His life?

"And then you have to wrestle with is He who He said He is," Timonen said. He dove into "Cold-Case Christianity" by J. Warner Wallace and "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. He became convinced the death and resurrection of Jesus could not be denied or rationalized away.

Today, the Timonens are active followers of Christ.

The answers to the first and second of those three opening queries above demonstrate that the Timonens are far from alone. The Pew Research Center recently announced that:

"The 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) and other Pew Research Center polling find that the Christian share of the population, after years of decline, has been relatively stable since 2019. And the religiously unaffiliated population, after rising rapidly for decades, has leveled off – at least temporarily."

In other words, the Timonens clearly weren't the only Americans who were deeply affected by the public instability, declining trust in government, and political dishonesty of the years between 2020 and 2024.

But here's what's really fascinating about the decline of Christianity being arrested — among the key reasons why the decline stopped is a clear spike in interest in the Bible and the spirituality it encourages among Zoomers, the youngest adult generation among us.

The reality is that younger Americans are most likely to not be flourishing in today's society, thanks to inflation, an intellectually corrupt public education system that indoctrinates instead of educates, the loss of stability that comes with the destruction of the traditional nuclear family, growing addictions, and a whole panopoly of related ills.

But Zoomers who are flourishing are into the Bible, according to the American Bible Society's John Plake, who is editor-in-chief of the State of the Bible Study 2025.

"For the first time, Gen Z's average score for close personal relationships went up, from 6.6 in 2024 to 7.0 in 2025. And here's something even more encouraging: When Gen Z and Millennials deeply engage with the Bible, their lives look dramatically better," Plake explains in the "How's Everybody Doing" video short on YouTube.

"Among 18-44 year olds who are scripturally engaged, the average Human Flourishing Score is 8.1. That compares to just 6.7 for those who don't engage with scripture and 6.9 for the generations overall," he adds.

And Bible sales are rapidly increasing, by 22 percent, while young men are conspicuously returning to church attendance, and, while marriage rates from Boomers to Millennials fell, Zoomers are showing a huge increase in marital planning and interest, the Christian Post reports.

God clearly is moving in America. The first Great Awakening went a long way in preparing the American colonies to declare their independence in the counterrevolution against the tyranny of Britain and King George III.

Are we on the threshold of a new Great Awakening and a constitutional counterrevolution against the Left's declining, secularized, Deep State-driven bureaucratic soft tyranny in Washington, D.C.?