“Rogan episode likely to be furthest reaching gospel broadcast in history.”
That’s the headline at one evangelical outlet this week, which predicts that Joe Rogan’s recent interview with Canadian apologist Wesley Huff will be heard over 190 million times — more than the number of Americans who watched the moon landing, or Nixon’s resignation speech, or JFK’s funeral, or the O.J. Simpson verdict.
“At some point, [Rogan] stopped mocking proponents of faith, and started listening to them,” the author at Protestia notes.
Joe Rogan’s openness to Christianity was also highlighted last month by the Free Press, which recounted the veteran podcaster’s February 2024 “conversation about the sorry state of America’s youth with New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers”, in which Rogan candidly asserted that “We need Jesus.”
“Not five years earlier, Rogan had hosted Richard Dawkins on his show and poked fun at Christians,” The Free Press article adds.
In that piece, titled ‘How Intellectuals Found God’, senior editor Peter Savodnik compiles a long list of high-profile conversions to Christianity that have taken place in recent years.
While Rogan was not on that list, some surprising names were, including:
American philosopher and author Matthew Crawford, who embraced the Anglican faith after a long academic career as an agnostic.
British comedian and erstwhile womaniser Russel Brand, who was baptised in April 2024, and has since largely repurposed his social media accounts to document his new spiritual journey.
Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, who “had espoused a vague spirituality and had been friends with the late French philosopher and religious thinker René Girard”, but has more recently landed “unequivocally on the side of God”.
English author and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth, who traversed Wicca, Zen Buddhism and a collection of other eastern practices before embracing Orthodox Christianity.
Powerhouse couple Niall Fergusson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who along with their two sons were baptised into the Anglican Church in September 2023. While some critics have dismissed their dual conversion as a sort of political protest, they personally assured Savodnik that their faith is “genuine” and deeply heartfelt.
American thinker and cultural critic Jordan Hall, who found faith in a white-steepled chapel after relocating his life to “Billy Graham country” in the rolling hills of North Carolina.
“Something profound is happening,” writes Peter Savodnik. “Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something.”
He dubs this crowd the “new theists” — a latter-day cultural reply (albeit unintended) to the once-influential new atheists, which included big names like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, whose influence peaked in the late 2000s.
In the years since, Hitchens and Dennett have met their Maker, and more notably perhaps, Richard Dawkins has gone from calling religious faith “one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate” — to unabashedly identifying himself as a “cultural Christian”.
“I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense,” Dawkins said in a radio interview on Easter Sunday last year.
Dawkins is not alone in adopting this label. Genius-belligerent Elon Musk has also lately described himself as a cultural Christian, as has UK Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch.
Other high-profile conversions or spiritual renovations not documented by Savodnik include Tucker Carlson, who grew up a secular Episcopalian but began reading the Bible in 2023 after what he describes as a nighttime mauling by a “demon”, the conversion of occultist and tattoo artist Kat Von D, and the baptism of WWE icon Hulk Hogan.
There’s also been a veritable flood of celebrities entering the Catholic Church, including actor Rob Schneider, podcast firebrand Candace Owens, former porn actress Bree Solstad, and Tammy Peterson, wife of world-famous Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose own spiritual trajectory has been fascinating to observe.
Other data points suggesting a comeback of the Christian faith include a major spike in Bible sales in the United States driven largely by first-time buyers (as reported by the Wall Street Journal); a Super Bowl in 2024 that was dominated by vocal Christians testifying to their faith; a rising trend of “schoolies” lining up to be baptised at traditional partying locations around Australia; the mass exodus of left-wing/materialist governments across the Western world; an uptick in discussions about spirituality and Christian revival on platforms like X; and growing suggestions that America is on the cusp of a fourth “Great Awakening”.
I for one feel that the Western world is decidedly less secular than it was even a few years ago, and that owning my Christian identity is far less likely to inspire hostility or pushback.
Maybe some of these observations are anecdotal. But it’s hard to deny the spiritual shift that is taking place around us.
As one X user quipped, “the change we’ve seen in culture on Christianity follows Joe Rogan’s own journey”.
“We’ve gone from ‘religion is a crutch for the weak-minded’ to ‘Christianity works even if I don’t know why.’”
After years in the cultural wilderness, there’s something the saints can praise God for.
Republished with thanks to Mercator.
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