Recently I was watching Fox News, because I was incredibly high and I thought I was in the middle of a rewatch of Succession, and I saw this fascinating segment. Bible sales are up! Christian app downloads are up, the ones where you have to match three things to make them disappear but instead of candy or gems they’re holy relics! Spotify listens are up for DC Talk! Wow! Christianity is cool again, I guess.
Obviously I just saw this shortened segment cross my social media feed, so I went looking for the full clip and I couldn’t find it. Not because this is fake–it isn’t, as best I can tell–but because there are SO MANY clips and articles that Fox News has been pumping out for the past month claiming that Christianity is experiencing a Renaissance, which they have labeled “The Charlie Kirk Effect.” Prior to his death, “The Charlie Kirk Effect” referred to the optical illusion formed by the placement of Charlie Kirk’s facial features that made it impossible to tell whether his head was too big or his face was too small.
The new Charlie Kirk Effect is a narrative Fox News is creating that Charlie Kirk’s murder was not just a senseless act of violence that literally happens daily here in the United States, but a brave sacrifice that will catapult the United States directly into the theocratic Christian utopia that the rightwing has been agitating for for decades.
In addition to the increase in Bible sales, app downloads, and Spotify listens, many of their articles also claim that the churches are suddenly packed with worshippers. Unlike those first three things, they don’t have any data for the packed churches, just vibes. And I do not have data to completely rebut their claim. But…I do have data to call their claim into question.
For a start, decades of surveys show that in the United States and around the world, Christianity is getting less and less popular. According to a Pew Research poll published this past February, the percentage of Americans who identify as “Christian” has been pretty steady since the pandemic, but overall it has dropped from 78% in 2007 to an all-time low of 62% as of March of 2024. Obviously, we won’t know if “the Charlie Kirk Effect” reverses this trend for another year, but that’s a pretty big trend to reverse. It’s especially damning when you compare it to a chart from the same period that shows how many Americans describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religion: we’ve doubled our numbers, zooming up from 16% to 29% in the same period.
This is similar to worldwide trends, where the “nones,” as we are collectively known, rose 16% between 2010 and 2020–from 1.6 billion to 1.9 billion, making us the second fastest growing population after Muslims and the third largest religious group in the world behind Christians and Muslims. In that same time period, the percentage of the world population who identified as Christian fell by about 2 percentage points, down to 28.8%.
So, despite the fact that in that same time period the United States has fallen into a Christian authoritarian theocracy, that is not indicative that the religion is popular. We are ruled by a fascist minority who hold unpopular views on issues important to most Americans, including separation of Church and State, trans healthcare, and women’s healthcare.
At least, they were a minority until Charlie Kirk took one to the neck. So how about those numbers Fox News is crowing about?
Well, the surge in Bible sales is absolutely believable. Bibles go through regular “surges,” with Fox News reporting on it each time as a sign that Christianity is cool again. For instance, here’s an article from last December about Bible sales surging 22% over the previous year. The Wall Street Journal also reported on this jump, talking to publishers who credit growing anxiety, successful marketing campaigns of new editions, and (as a subset of that) influencers like a girl from Love Island US making TikToks about buying her first Bible.
And that really illustrates the issue, here: this is not about spiritual awakening, but about consumerism. Capitalism and Christianity have been bedfellows for decades, with preachers deftly turning from “Jesus flipping tables and kicking merchants out of the temple” to the “prosperity gospel” that began to thrive in 20th century America. Evangelists targeted the poor and disenfranchised, promising them that if they gave their last few dollars to “the Church” then the Lord would return that back to them seven fold. Thus, the preachers got richer and the poor simply died, still clinging to the idea that their windfall was coming any day now.
And so today we have our televangelists doing the same thing on social media, with “influencers” cynically wielding Christianity to hone their image, secure new brand deals, and sell Bibles to people who already have six of them moldering in their attic.
And then Fox News takes this consumerism and uses it as propaganda, suggesting that the unpopular fascist minority is actually a surging grassroots movement with the power of the moral majority.
So yes, Bible sales went up! And how about those apps? Up almost 80% since 2019! Well, apparently the app market has grown by about 12% each year. That means if there were 100 downloads of Christian apps in 2019, an 80% increase would mean there were 180 in 2025. If it kept up with the rest of the app market, we would expect it to be 112 in 2020, 125 in 2021, 140 in 2022, 157 in 2023, 176 in 2024, and 197 in 2025, meaning that Christian apps have actually underperformed compared to the market. I mean, until Charlie Kirk died.
Finally, we have Spotify downloads. Fox News points to an increase of 50% in streams of contemporary Christian music since 2019. Since 2019, Spotify has seen the number of subscribers increase by more than 100%, the total number of users increase by 270%, and revenue has increased by 230%. I couldn’t find details for number of streams, but yeah I’m going to ahead and say that a growth of only 50% on Spotify isn’t anything to brag about. Unfortunately! Spotify sucks. They gave Joe Rogan millions of dollars. Stop giving them your money!
So the data just isn’t there to support the idea that Christianity is growing in popularity, nor is there evidence to suggest the Christians who are here are consuming more stuff. But as outlets like 404 Media have pointed out, there DOES appear to be a strange increase in Christians making and spreading AI slop. 404 found that the slop is actually being made by and for Christians in the West, who can’t get enough of it. They spoke with Corrina Laughlin, who wrote the book Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture. Laughlin said that they don’t care that it looks like shit or makes no sense: they are solely concerned with AI’s ability to quickly mass produce content they agree with and can easily spread to evangelize to the heathens.
I think that AI allows Christians to continue to live in this dream world, completely separate from reality. Fox News does the same thing, but with AI slop they can take things to the next level: it’s not just the false reality that Christianity is wildly popular, or that Charlie Kirk died for some great cause. Now they can also pretend that Donald Trump rescues orphans out of floods, or they can truly envision what’s going to happen when Jesus Christ returns, or they can pretend that Jesus Christ is actually already here and ready to talk to them through an app. Seriously, if you ask the “Jesus AI” app if it’s really Jesus it replies, “I am Jesus, son of God. How may I help you today?” “Yes, I’m calling to cancel my subscription to Pope Facts.”
Honestly? It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if we do eventually see a statistically significant increase in downloads of Christian apps as more grifters realize just how gullible and easily fleeced these people are.
