By RAY WADDLE

At first glance, the latest religious statistics look as dismaying and nerve-wracked as the financial markets.

Christian identity in America (now 76 percent) is falling, and the number of people who claim no religion (now 15 percent) is climbing.

There’s a scramble to make sense of the numbers, which were produced by a poll of 54,400 Americans conducted recently by the American Religious Identification Survey.

One theory says mainstream churchgoers aren’t having enough kids, a demographic trend guaranteeing decline. Another says conservative churches are not teaching the Bible to the youngsters, giving them less reason to believe. Or, perhaps Darwinian skepticism is finally killing faith.

The drift of these gloomy arguments implies religion itself is helplessly fading. Perhaps human beings will reinvent themselves, this time without an old-fashioned need for religious awe and grandeur.

So goes the usual suspect conventional wisdom. In other words, the opposite conclusion probably makes more sense: spiritual revival is as plausible a prediction today as glum decline, and more likely. How so?

These peculiar times are witnessing the play of powerful trends and pressures on the psyche. One is the erosion of the authority of book culture and denominationalism and truths associated with them.

But authority never disappears. It just shifts to other delivery systems of information. Wireless technology is an unquestioned authority of our moment, giving individuals dazzling ways to customize their web-based world of news, music and networking, turning personal life into a self-dramatizing blog for the entire planet to see. How can organized religion possibly compete with daily experiences now so aggressive, so compelling?

But this giddy force is charting a strange flight path. High-velocity, unrestrained technology intensifies individualism, which breeds exhibitionism, which breeds public triviality and fraudulence, which then will breed a new yearning for community, restraint and truth-telling – old-fashioned religious values.

Some economic ideas that reinforce this turbo-techno culture and which seemed so authoritative just last summer are already in ruins – for instance, the infinite growth of real estate values, and the low ethics of high-flying financiers.

On the personal front, despite invincible cell phone coverage and nonstop caffeination, patterns of private life suggest a lack of sacred or ceremonial glow. A new book, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century, by Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, argues that people feel increasingly alone, left out, even with every heroic new technical way of staying connected.

Writer G.K. Chesterton once calculated that the Christian church has resuscitated itself five times in history. “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave," he wrote. I’d adjust his numbers to five times a day, or five million.

Places of worship will revive by connecting people again to ancient materials of human feeling – candlelight, bread, wine, sacred scroll and poetry, exchanges of the peace, occasions for hearing God or conscience speak, pragmatic neighborhood help. In crazy times, church must make this claim: be the place where people can imagine holiness, listen and pray, not Twitter.