A person could be forgiven for thinking that an outbreak of a deadly disease causing serious social disruption might lead people to turn to God for help, or that a period of a year or more when attending houses of worship seemed dangerous might lead congregants to return to churches, synagogues, and mosques with renewed appreciation. Unfortunately, recent surveys point to the opposite conclusion, as Mark Silk writes:

The great influenza pandemic, which carried off an estimated 675,000 Americans after World War I, did nothing to reverse the secularization of American culture that had been underway since the late 19th century. Indeed, the 1920s and 1930s were a period of religious depression in the U.S.

A century later, the COVID-19 pandemic swept over America amid a decades-long religious decline as the percentage of adults who claim no religious identity—the nones—rose from the single digits in the 1980s to a quarter of the population. In a just-released survey, the Public Religion Research Institute reports that between 2020 and 2022 the proportion of nones jumped 15 percent, from 23.3 percent to 26.8 percent. That’s the largest two-year increase registered by PRRI since it began measuring in 2006.

Correlation is not causality, of course, but when it comes to the gold standard of religious commitment—in-person worship attendance—COVID-19 was most definitely the causal factor. Whether voluntarily or under orders from their governments or simply because their churches had closed, a large number of Americans stopped attending after the pandemic hit—and many have not returned.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.