Whoever believes today, believes against the wind

Three months ago, I launched a website where people could request a small figure of Jesus. Free, no conditions, simply: if you want it, you get it. I expected perhaps a few hundred. It turned out to be seven thousand. Seven thousand Flemings and Dutch people who took the trouble to leave their address to have a small image of Christ in their homes. And with many of those requests came a story. Why they wanted it. For whom. What it meant to them.

You won't find those figures in any church annual report.

This week Niels De Nutte wrote an opinion piece in De Morgen with the title ‘The media fail to compare the number of baptisms with the number of de-baptisms, also by adults.’ He is a researcher at the VUB and works at the research department of deMens.nu, the organization for organized secularism. His argument is statistically well-structured: 689 adult baptisms in Belgium last year, which is 0.01 percent of the population. Compared to 14,000 de-baptisms in the Godvergeten-year 2023. So, he concludes, one cannot possibly speak of a religious revival. The media confuses ‘movement with direction in people's search for meaning.’

It is a good piece. I mean that. It contains a journalistic critique that holds water — if an editorial team headlines ‘more and more adults are getting baptized’ without mentioning the larger outflow figure, that is unbalanced. And he is right that 689 people out of eleven million is not a societal upheaval.

And yet his conclusion is incorrect. Not because his figures are wrong, but because he measures the wrong things.

The thermometer in the wrong room

Measuring religiosity by what percentage of the population sits in the pews on Sundays is like measuring the temperature of a house by reading the outdoor thermometer. It gives you a number, but it doesn't say what you think it says. The question is not how many people in a society are religious. The question is what that religiosity means for those who wear it, and what movement it generates in the culture around it.

I have always had a soft spot for the image of sourdough. A little bit of yeast moves an entire dough. Nobody measures if there is enough bread by counting how many yeast cells there are. You look to see if the dough rises.

De Nutte looks at the number of cells.

What he overlooks is a shift that no statistic picks up, but that anyone walking through a Flemish community with open eyes can notice: whoever believes today, chooses it consciously. And that is a break from how it has been here for decades.

The cost of the choice has been reversed

The great-grandparent generation went to church because everyone did. Not believing was an exception that required explanation. The grandparent generation often still went out of habit and social embedding, although the conviction was already eroding. The parent generation — the people raising children themselves today — in most families only goes in on big days at most. A funeral, sometimes a Christmas Eve, perhaps a niece's communion. For the rest, the connection with a church community has simply disappeared.

For those who are young today, there is no longer a social tailwind towards faith. On the contrary. The wind is directly in the face. The social cost has tilted. Fifty years ago, you had to have courage to be openly atheist in a village. Now you have to have courage to be openly religious in a Flemish workplace.

That reversal is relevant. Because it means that every person who gets baptized today — young, adult, from whatever background — does so without social reward. On the contrary. He or she pays something for it. The raised eyebrow of the in-laws. The colleague who no longer knows what to say. The feeling that you have placed yourself outside of normality.

This makes one adult baptism in 2026 qualitatively not the same as one adult baptism in 1976. They weigh differently. In 1976, someone could be baptized because their in-laws wanted it, because it fit with rural life, because everyone pretended. Today, that is no longer possible. Anyone who gets baptized now has an inner journey behind them. Usually years of doubt, reading, talking, and finally saying 'yes' to a world that at best looks strangely and at worst reacts actively skeptically.

And that is precisely what De Nutte's figures do not capture. He places 689 baptisms from 2025 next to 14,000 de-baptisms from 2023 and says: you see, net there is shrinkage. But those 14,000 are almost all people who had long ceased to be practicing believers. Their deregistration is an administrative correction of something that already factually existed. None of those 14,000 will go to church less tomorrow than yesterday, because they didn't go anyway. De-baptism registers what was already gone.

The 689 baptized, on the other hand, register something that was not there and now is. They come to to a community. They set something in motion. They move themselves, their family, their circle of friends, often their parents who start asking questions again later in life.

That is not a statistical equality. That is a difference in state of aggregation. Liquid water and water vapor have the same chemical formula, but you don't build a house with them in the same way.

Seven thousand figures

Back to the seven thousand figures. That action confirmed for me what I had actually suspected for a longer time: beneath the surface of the official figures, more is moving than you see on that surface. But I must be honest about who those seven thousand people are, because there is a nuance that I must not gloss over — otherwise I will make the same mistake that I accuse De Nutte of.

It is not the case that those seven thousand are all new people, people who never had anything to do with faith before. From the stories that came in, a diverse group emerged. Some are people who are practicing themselves and wanted the figure for a child, a godchild, a friend. Some are cultural Christians who were going through a difficult period and were looking for something tangible. Some are people without a church affiliation but with an underlying religious feeling that they couldn't always name themselves. And some, yes, are people whoexplicitly said they had nothing to do with faith and yet took the trouble to request the figure — for someone else, out of curiosity, because they felt something they couldn't place themselves.

The correct reading of those seven thousand is therefore not 'there are seven thousand people who have converted.' That would be absurd and no one would believe me. The correct reading is: there are at least seven thousand people in Flanders and the Netherlands who were willing to perform one concrete, visible, non-anonymous act around Christ — leaving their address, bringing a small statue into their home. This is a signal about the state of latent religiosity in this country. That state is not zero. Not even in families where the official church tie alreadyhas been broken for a generation.

That, by the way, is also what De Nutte's method doesn't pick up. He only measures the formal transition — baptism, un-baptism — and everything in between is noise to him. But much of what happens religiously in a society happens precisely between those formal boundaries. People who pray without going to church. People who tell a child a Bible story without being professing themselves. People who request a figurine.

The ward that almost doubled

Let me make it even more personal. I am a bishop of a ward in my church. For those unfamiliar with the structure of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that is the local equivalent of a pastor with a small community as a care area. Week after week I see who is there and who is joining. I know their names, their stories, the path they have traveled.

In a year and a half, our ward has almost doubled.

That is anecdotal, I know. One neighborhood is not Flanders. I will not extrapolate that doubling as if all of Belgium is suddenly on the move, because that is precisely the mistake that De Nutte rightly attributes to the media. But the other side of the same mistake is the inverse: claiming on the basis of a macro-figure that there is no movement anywhere. If one community almost doubles in size in eighteen months, the statement 'there is no growth' may be statistically defensible at a population level, but it is phenomenologically incorrect. Something is growing somewhere.And if it grows with us, it probably also grows elsewhere, in places that do not appear in any report because they are too small to move the macro-statistics.

Moreover: who are these new people? That is the most interesting thing about the observation. They are not returned cultural Christians rediscovering their youth. They are people, the majority of whom have never set foot in a church before. Young adults who entered via a podcast. A middle-aged couple who had tried the search for meaning in so many other things and finally ended up here. Someone who was invited by a colleague and kept coming. No folklore, no habit. All active decisions ina context that doesn't help.

Not one church, but several

Something else De Nutte's figures don't show: there isn't 'the church' in Flanders, there are multiple churches, and they are in fundamentally different movements. Anyone who adds up the baptism and debaptism figures of the Roman Catholic Church and draws a general conclusion about the state of Christianity in Belgium, misses half of the picture.

The Roman Catholic Church has historically been the mass institution here. It is losing that role, and the de-baptism figures primarily reflect that loss. But what goes with that is something that often remains underexposed in its own communication: it carries a heavy burden from the past. The abuse scandals, the culture of silence, the way vulnerable people were treated in institutions — all of that is still in the collective memory and scares off many people who might otherwise take the step. ManyFlemings know someone who has a story, or carry that story themselves. 'Godvergeten' was not coincidentally a landslide. Without that burden, the return rates to the Roman Catholic Church would probably be significantly higher.

What you do see is that the Church, itself, is slowly finding something back. Not as a people's church — that role is over — but as a community for those who consciously choose. Pope Francis has been a catalyst in this, adult baptism figures indicate it, the new generation of Catholic influencers speaks a language that no longer sounds defensive. It will take years for the balance to shift, and possibly it will never completely shift back to where it once stood. But something is moving.

At the same time, it is mainly the other Christian churches that today radiate an attractiveness that is precisely not hindered by that historical weight. Evangelical communities, Protestant churches, Orthodox parishes, restoration churches like mine — these are growing in Flanders, each on their own scale and at their own pace, but they are growing. Not because they are better than their Catholic sister — I would decline that idea — but because they do not share the threshold that the Roman Catholic Church does carry. People who are searching come to themoften arrive at a 'yes' faster because there is no past that first needs to be worked through standing in the way.

This makes the overall picture more layered than De Nutte's method allows. He looks at the one statistic that is most visible — the Catholic one — and extrapolates it to 'religion in Flanders'. But religion in Flanders is not the same as the Roman Catholic Church in Flanders. There is a broader Christian landscape in motion and there is more than Christianity alone, and that landscape grows for some, shrinks for others, and transforms for everyone.

Movement and direction

De Nutte writes that whoever speaks of a return of religion 'confuses movement with direction in people's search for meaning.' It is an elegant sentence and I understand what he means. The fact that people search does not automatically mean they end up with religion.

But he makes his own mistake. He confuses absence of mass with absence of direction. Because the direction is not carried by a large group, he concludes that there is no direction. That is a fallacy. Directions are rarely set by large groups. They are set by small groups that consistently move in the same direction, while the large mass spins around in confusion.

In this society, a large majority searches for meaning in a hundred ways, and De Nutte is right that this search does not automatically end with religion. For many people, it ends in therapy, in yoga, in mindfulness, in political activism, in conscious reduction of consumption, in nothing in particular. This movement indeed has no clear direction.

But there is a sub-movement within that broad search that *does* have a direction, and that direction is towards Christianity, towards a consciously lived faith, towards community and connection with the transcendent. This sub-movement is not large enough to tilt the overall picture. But it exists, it grows, and it consists of people who have each made a conscious and costly choice.

What truly follows from that

I conclude with what I think follows from this. Not that De Nutte's figures are wrong — they are correct. Not that Flanders will become re-religious in the next ten years — that would greatly surprise me. The Roman Catholic Church in Belgium continues to nominally shrink as a mass institution, and that process is not yet over.

What does follow is this: the religion that remains will be qualitatively different from the religion that disappears. It will not be more widely supported, but deeper. Not by more people, but by people who want to know more about it, want to invest more in it, want to give up more for it. That is not a revival in the triumphalist sense of 'we are back'. It is something more modest and more important: a transformation where cultural membership disappears and conscious membership emerges.

For those who only look at percentages, it looks like shrinkage. For those who are in the communities themselves, it looks like a modest but real revival. Both are right, because they are looking at different things.

The seven thousand dolls will not all lead to seven thousand believers, I know that too. Maybe it will be a hundred, maybe ten, but not zero because I already know people who have stepped into the baptismal font because of it. It matters less than the fact that they were requested. That is a signal that something is moving under the radar of De Nutte's statistics that he cannot measure.

And the neighborhood that almost doubles will not change all of Flanders. But it does change the Sundays of several tens of people, and that change radiates to their families, their work, their neighbors. That is not zero.

Whoever adds all that up and still says 'nothing is wrong', is measuring the wrong room. The thermometer is outside, while inside the fire is slowly being stoked.

No newspaper sees that glow.