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Contradictions are inherent in societal trends. CRCC looks at the up, down and sideways movement across our 10 years of trend analysis.

CRCC 2025 trends focus on the wildfires affecting Los Angeles County and what will be a multi-year recovery effort. Across the various issues, a central theme emerged: Solidarity.

In CRCC’s annual trends post last year, we wrote about surviving, if not thriving. We write this year’s trends with a special place in our hearts for CRCC’s senior editor Nick Street, who took a significant role in compiling these trends each year, always balancing a sense of cynicism and optimism.

Will congregations recover after the trauma of the pandemic? 

Will Twitter survive Elon Musk? Or will alternative social media platforms provide a better home for thriving communities? 

What will become of all the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts spurred by the murder of George Floyd, now that racial justice is not making headlines? 

Locally, can progressive movements use newfound positions of power to make a dent in the social issues that plague Los Angeles?

Since 2016, CRCC has shared the trends in religion and society that we see shaping the coming year. What started as light-hearted predictions has grown more ominous over the years.

As we do around this time each new year, we at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) are going to make some predictions for 2021. Even though the world seems pretty unpredictable of late. Well, actually, that doesn’t sound quite right. It was possible to foresee the political incompetence and malfeasance of the blessedly now-previous presidential administration, an outburst of racially inflected fundamentalist violence, resistance to science and the rise of American fascism. In fact, we predicted these events and phenomena last year, when we saw the early trends of the 2020s mirroring many of the cultural currents of the 1920s. Still, the dismal depth and shocking scope of those forces in 2020 (and the first days of 2021) were beyond our forecasting. 

As we enter the 2020s, we are seeing equally formidable challenges ahead.

Many of the ominous signs on the horizon are similar to portents that marked the beginning of the 1920s—rising nationalism, antisemitism, racial polarization, anti-immigrant sentiment, tensions between scientific knowledge and religious belief, and potentially globe-shaking consequences of unchecked capitalism. The recent bout of violent chest-thumping between the governments of Iran and the United States highlights our main headline for the new decade: The Present Echoes the Past.

So we sat down again to come up with some snarky and some serious predictions for the coming year. As we look across the trends, we can see a new battle of the sexes developing in 2019. We start with marketers catching up with some of the trends we’ve identified in the past.

In our 2017 religion trends to watch, one of our snarky headlines read: "New Species of Evangelicals Discovered." As we pointed out under the headline, the divisions in Evangelicalism have long existed. We also predicted, quite correctly, that journalists and pundits would finally realize that not all "evangelicals" are the same.