Looking back, we can see that the lockdowns did so much damage. They greatly affected our mental health, the economy, and even the education of our children. But one thing that is not talked about a lot is the impact that the lockdowns had on church attendance in America. In 1958, a Gallup survey found that 49 percent of Americans had attended church within the past 7 days. That number started to decline during the ensuing years, and by 1972 only 40 percent of Americans said that they had attended church within the past 7 days. From 1972 all the way until 2012, church attendance within the past 7 days hovered right around that 40 percent figure. Unfortunately, over the past decade it has started to fall once again. Just prior to the pandemic, a Gallup survey found that 34 percent of Americans had been to church within the past 7 days, and now a new survey has discovered that it is down to just 31 percent…
In the four years before the pandemic, 2016 through 2019, an average of 34% of U.S. adults said they had attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days. From 2020 to the present, the average has been 30%, including a 31% reading in a May 1-24 survey.
The recent church attendance levels are about 10 percentage points lower than what Gallup measured in 2012 and most prior years.
When the lockdowns began, most Americans were forced to attend church services virtually.
Today, most Americans that attend church do so in person, but overall attendance is still significantly lower than it was before the pandemic…
The pandemic had a profound effect on U.S. society, and it continues to have an impact in some ways. Americans have been less likely to attend religious services over the past three years, and at this point, it does not appear that church attendance will revert to pre-pandemic levels. These recent trends have added to the longer-term decline in religious participation that Gallup has documented over the past two decades.
Over the past few years, we have also seen a lot more violence directed at churches.
In fact, the Family Research Council just released a report that found “a nearly 300% increase in acts of hostility in the first quarter of 2023”…
A report from the Family Research Council (FRC), released earlier this month, is highlighting the sharp rise in acts of hostility against the church in the United States.
The report documented a nearly 300% increase in acts of hostility in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same time frame in 2022. If the trend continues, the report underscored that “2023 will have the highest number of incidents of the six years FRC has tracked.”
The acts of hostility contained in the report include “vandalism, arson, gun-related incidents, bomb threats, and more.”
We have witnessed such a dramatic shift in our culture.
Church attendance is in decline, attacks on churches are becoming increasingly common, and more churches are permanently shutting down with each passing week.
Needless to say, this is taking a toll on the mental and emotional health of America’s pastors…
Pastors who reported that their mental and emotional health was below average spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excellent mental and emotional health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.
Pastors also noted that recent years have taken a toll on their physical health, with 22% describing their physical well-being as poor or below average in 2022, compared to only 7% in 2015. While 24% said their physical health was excellent eight years ago, only 9% said the same last year.
The study also revealed that more pastors are suffering from loneliness, with 7% saying last year they are poor when it comes to having true friends, compared to only 2% in 2015. In 2022, 20% of them ranked themselves as below average with regard to friendship while 10% said the same in 2015.
Meanwhile, those on the other side of the culture war appear to be thriving.
Millions of Americans have turned out for the pride parades that have been happening all over North America this month.
And in some cases, those attending these events are getting more of a show than they anticipated.
As I mentioned yesterday, fully naked men were openly riding down the street during the pride parade in Seattle…
In Seattle, the explicit footage posted by a Post Millennial staffer showed naked men with pride flags painted on their bodies riding down the street and waving to crowds of people, including many children.
Children and their parents can be seen on the sidelines, clapping and cheering for the naked gang.
And in Toronto, there were fully naked men “standing around and riding bicycles in clear view of children”…
Bud Light is serving as an official sponsor of the Toronto Pride parade, where video footage shows naked men standing around and riding bicycles in clear view of children attending the event.
The footage, captured by Beth Baisch of the Post Millennial, shows dozens of attendees riding past a large cheering crowd. The fully naked bikers, some covered in paint or tattoos, wave back at the crowd. One naked man high-fives an onlooker while another peddles a recumbent bike with a gold blow-up swan adorned around his neck.
A second video shows a group of naked men with hats standing in a circle amidst the crowd. Several children walk past the group of men with their families.
Since when did it become legal to expose yourself in front of children? Why wasn’t anyone arrested? I don’t expect to get an answer to either of those questions.
At this point, we are what we are. And nobody can deny it.
If we stay on this path, there is no future for the United States. So I hope that the country will wake up very soon.
Making the right choices leads to positive consequences, and making the wrong choices leads to negative consequences.
Choose wisely America.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
