It might have been the most memorable image of the year. The world’s most popular podcaster held up a replica of P52, the oldest fragment of the New Testament, in a sprawling interview with young Christian apologist Wes Huff from Ontario, Canada. So far, the Joe Rogan episode with Huff, who exudes humility alongside seemingly inexhaustible knowledge, has been viewed on YouTube more than 7.8 million times.
What more evidence do you need for a Christian comeback in the United States?
Fast forward 10 months, and Gallup grabbed headlines by reporting one of the largest 10-year declines in religiosity for any country since they began asking in 2007. Only 49 percent of U.S. adults in 2025 said religion is an important part of their daily life, down from 66 percent in 2015. Surveying 160 countries over nearly 20 years, Gallup found only 14 of them have declined more than 15 percentage points over one decade.
What more evidence do you need for a Christian decline in the United States?
Looking back on 2025, we see a year of commas, not periods. Not much has been settled in the last year. Almost all major news stories pose the question “So what’s next?”
Will tenuous peace hold in Israel? What will become of Gaza? Will Ukraine and Russia agree to a U.S.-mediated settlement? Will Iran rebuild its nuclear program? Is anyone willing and able to stop the carte blanche killing and kidnapping of Christians in Nigeria? Can America’s right wing set any boundaries against paid provocateurs? Will Democrats embrace socialism, or will they practice the kind of patchwork party localism that helped them rebound from past defeats?
Looking back on 2025, we see a year of commas, not periods. Not much has been settled in the last year.
We don’t know.
Looking at the United States at least, we’re probably not seeing widespread spiritual revival (except perhaps among some segments of Gen Z, which have become the most regular churchgoers). And Christianity’s collapse since 2000 has probably slowed, if not stopped, as a Pew report revealed this year. Welcome to metamodernism, which seeks to synthesize what it succeeded, with a new set of challenges and opportunities for the church. We’re not living in the either/or but the both/and, the comma instead of the period.
You’ll often ask, “What does this story mean for the future?” while reading this annual retrospective, where I attempt to discern the top theology stories of the year. As always, I write from the vantage point of an American who subscribes to The Gospel Coalition’s confessional statement. Your list will likely differ. But only God knows what’s in store for us in 2026.
10. China launches largest crackdown on urban house churches in 40 years.
Zion Church’s growth to 5,000 attending in 50 locations caught the attention of Chinese officials, who ordered the arrest of founding pastor Ezra Jin and almost 30 others across the country in October.
Government surveillance of Jin began in 2018, when China signaled intent to close house churches with the arrest of Wang Yi from Early Rain Covenant Church. One of the largest churches in Beijing, Zion grew into an urban network during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its leaders were detained this year in Chengdu, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, among other cities.
Writing from prison, Jin insisted, “We do not oppose dialogue with the government, nor do we confront it, but rather emphasize obedience to those in authority.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the detentions and called on the Chinese Communist Party to allow people of faith, including Christians in house churches, to “engage in religious activities without fear of retribution.”
9. Death of John MacArthur and other renowned Bible teachers leaves leadership void.
For at least 30 years, if you studied the Bible on your own or in a small group, you had a good chance of finding help from John MacArthur or Kay Arthur, both of whom died in 2025.
MacArthur’s expository sermons laid the groundwork for the growth of Reformed theology around the world, while Arthur inspired younger generations of women to engage in serious inductive Bible study. Their published and spoken words will continue to form Christians studying the unchanging, ever-dynamic Word. But MacArthur’s longtime leadership of Shepherds Conference, Grace Community Church, The Master’s University, and The Master’s Seminary leaves a gaping institutional void.
Voddie Baucham, who often collaborated with MacArthur, died unexpectedly in 2025 at only 56 years old. Another stalwart leader in the Religious Right, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, died this year at 89 years old.
8. Leading evangelical seminary plans move from United States to Canada.
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s under its second dean, Kenneth Kantzer. Its renowned faculty—including Don Carson, Walt Kaiser, John Woodbridge, Wayne Grudem, and Carl F. H. Henry—helped American evangelicals recover from the fundamentalist/modernist controversies of the early 20th century, as well as the inerrancy dispute that erupted at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1962.
By the early 21st century, TEDS alumni, including David Wells, Mark Noll, Doug Moo, and Craig Blomberg, held research positions in other seminaries, while Michael Oh led the Lausanne Movement.
Long plagued with financial problems, TEDS leaders announced in April they would close the campus north of Chicago after the current school year as they merge with and relocate to Trinity Western University in British Columbia. Kevin Vanhoozer announced that instead of moving to Canada, he would join the faculty at Wheaton College’s Litfin Divinity School.
In other blows to the long-standing influence of Chicago-area theological education, Northern Seminary struggled through a presidential transition, and Trinity Christian College announced its closure after more than 60 years. The balance of evangelical power in the United States continues to shift to the South.
7. Trump opens second presidential term with flurry of executive orders.
During his first week back in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump delivered on several promises that motivated an overwhelming number of evangelicals to vote for him in 2024. Trump pardoned pro-life activists, prohibited federal funding for any medical interventions that seek to alter the sex of minors, thwarted programs or initiatives that promote gender ideology, and enforced the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortions.
Trump’s sagging popularity and the potential flip of one or both houses of Congress to Democrats in 2026 have attracted heightened scrutiny to his more controversial orders, including tightening restrictions on refugees (some of them persecuted Christians) and staging aggressive immigration enforcement and detention raids from church property.
6. John Mark Comer reignites debate over substitutionary atonement.
John Mark Comer has become one of the top-selling evangelical authors and might be the most popular Christian teacher among Gen Z, who are hungry for guidance in spiritual formation. When Comer posted to Instagram that Andrew Rillera’s book Lamb of the Free delivered the “final biblical/exegetical knockout blow” to penal substitutionary atonement, he invited a bevy of Reformed rebuttals and reviews of Rillera.
Even as he critiqued Reformed readings of the sacrificial system in Leviticus, Comer’s own work received criticism for overlooking the church and historical confessions in discipleship.
5. Anglican Communion leadership shifts after new archbishop of Canterbury designated.
The archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t dictate belief or practice in the Anglican Communion, now with some 85 million to 100 million members, with a small fraction living in the United Kingdom and North America.
In October, the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) asserted their own leadership within the Anglican mainstream after the Church of England announced the designation of Sarah Mullally to follow in the line of Anselm, Thomas Becket, and Thomas Cranmer. Serving as the first female archbishop of Canterbury, Mullally supports the recent revisionism of her church in support of same-sex marriage, a source of the communion’s global split.
“The leadership of the Anglican Communion will pass to those who uphold the truth of the gospel and the authority of Scripture in all areas of life,” said Laurent Mbanda, archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church of Rwanda and chairman of the Gafcon Primates Council.
Meanwhile, conservative Anglicans in the United States continue to deal with high-profile discipline cases, including several serious allegations leveled this year against Archbishop Steve Wood, who was suspended from ministry in November after leading the Anglican Church in North America since 2024.
4. First U.S. pope replaces Francis in Rome.
With his death in April, Pope Francis left a legacy of making the Roman Church more Catholic by affirming, embracing, and expanding the world’s largest church to the limits of orthodoxy—and sometimes beyond. Francis often delighted reporters and frustrated conservatives with Jesuit evasiveness that undermined church teaching on sexuality without formally implementing doctrinal changes.
Pope Leo XIV, the second American pope after Francis and the first from the United States, has criticized the “inhuman treatment of immigrants” in his home country. Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, defended the Trump administration as “humanitarian.” The Augustinian pope’s warnings about AI suggest that further Vatican ethical guidance for this emerging and disruptive technology could be forthcoming.
3. Quiet Revival makes loud arrival.
In April, the Bible Society dropped a bombshell report that found substantial increases in church attendance across England and Wales in the last six years, especially between the ages of 18 and 24, and especially among men. Catholics and Pentecostals benefited most, bolstered by migration. But growth in Catholic and Orthodox churches suggests the enduring appeal of traditional religions, a trend also observed in the United States.
The Bible Society report affirmed the sense of a “surprising rebirth” of belief across the United Kingdom, even among Oxford skeptics. The decline of the Church of England, and the advance of abortion and assisted suicide, sets up a secular clash with wide-ranging efforts such as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, where former atheists debate whether to advocate for Christianity as the source of recovery and renewal in Western civilization.
2. The AI apocalypse is here.
Call it the most important new technology since electricity. Describe it as the most important event in world history since Christ’s resurrection. At this stage, no one knows where hyperbole stops and reality begins with unfolding AI revelations, which expose our need for greater focus on theological anthropology and epistemology.
“Should the human race survive?” no longer has an obvious answer, at least in Ross Douthat’s interview with tech giant Peter Thiel, who is searching for the antichrist. Consider chatbots, which have made the search for companionship and advice the number one use of AI among teens and young adults. The uses and variations of AI continue to baffle older generations who thought Wikipedia was unreliable and have yet to consider the problems of alignment and sycophancy in diverging models already teaching theology—and much more—to our children.
1. Charlie Kirk assassinated.
At least outside young American conservatives, 31-year-old Charlie Kirk didn’t become a household name until after his September assassination in Utah. Political organizer, Christian apologist, campus provocateur, Trump loyalist, affectionate husband and father—the varied roles played by Kirk revealed not only his enormous influence but also his complicated legacy.
Into the leadership void at Turning Point USA stepped Erika Kirk, a formidable presence who announced at a memorial attended by up to 100,000 (including Trump and Vance) that she forgave the man who killed her husband.
Will Kirk’s assassination prove a turning point for the dangers of online radicalization and the threat of trans-motivated violence? Will young men become more conservative in theology and morality along with their politics? Or will characters advocating racism and antisemitism hijack any movement that tries to police its boundaries? Can Kirk’s successors mark out a third way between institutionally dominant liberalism and lucrative online revanchism?
Check back in 2026.
The Gospel Coalition