We’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story about Christianity in the United States.
Since surveys began showing a surge in nonreligious adults in the mid-1990s, many have assumed the Christian population was headed downhill with no brakes.
Organized religion was out of favor, “none of the above” was in, and houses of worship across the country were too busy dealing with aging congregations and rising building costs to find successful ways to bring new people in.
To be clear, the U.S. Christian population did indeed shrink over the past 30 years, but a major new religion survey shows the trend line unexpectedly leveled off around 2019.
For the past five years, the share of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has hovered between 60% and 64%, while the share who identify as unaffiliated has similarly stalled around 29%, according to Pew Research Center.
Many questions remain about whether this recent stabilization is sustainable, but religion scholars say we should be ready for more plot twists.
“I was quite surprised by the data, but in a broader sense, I wasn’t surprised,” said John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who consulted with Pew on the new study. “I’m always expecting the unexpected. That’s what it means to be in a dynamic religious landscape.”
Religious change in the U.S.
Pew’s new Religious Landscape Study offers an in-depth, authoritative look at religion in the U.S.
Think of it like a census focused on faith and spirituality, instead of your household makeup.
The latest survey, which was fielded in 2023 and 2024, builds on reports from 2007 and 2014. Not all questions from each report can be directly compared, but researchers built a variety of trend lines.
In summarizing those trends during a Feb. 19 press briefing, Greg Smith, the senior associate director of research at Pew, spoke about two different time periods.
Over the long term, organized religion has experienced a broad-based decline. The Christian share of the population fell from 78% in 2007 to 62% in the new study, while the unaffiliated share surged from 16% to 29% over the same 17-year period.
But in the short term, the numbers have held pretty steady, especially when compared to data collected from 2007 to 2019.
“After many years of decline, it’s striking … to have observed this recent period of stability," said Smith, who worked on all three religious landscape studies.
The recent stabilization stems from two key factors, according to Smith and other researchers.
First, beginning around 2019, religious Americans of all ages stuck with religion at higher rates than expected.
And second, young adults born from 2000 to 2006 have turned out to be about as religious as adults born in the 1990s. Researchers had been expecting a notable religious decline from one birth cohort to the next.
“Today’s youngest adults aren’t really less religious than the second youngest cohort and that limits how much the youngest cohort is tugging down on the nation’s overall religiousness,” Smith said.
Religion experts don’t know for sure what caused these two developments, but some believe the COVID-19 pandemic played a role.
Although COVID-19 forced temporary church closures, it also prompted congregations to boost their outreach efforts and their use of livestreaming technology.
Those shifts, along with the fact that tragedy often draws people closer to God, likely contributed to the religious landscape’s recent stabilization, Green said.
“The spiritual needs of people went up quite dramatically during the pandemic,” he said. “It could very well be that many people found what organized religion could offer them to be particularly rewarding.”
A lasting change?
Pew’s study is focused on the past and present of American religion, but it raises some important questions about the future.
The data suggests that the share of U.S. adults who identify as religious will begin to trend downward again soon, in part because the highly religious cohort of older Americans will shrink as its members die and in part because younger Americans are not expected to grow more religious as they age.
“If the religiousness of today’s young adults stays the same, and future generations look more like today’s young adults than like today’s older adults, then we’d expected to see a resumption of long-term secularization trends,” Smith said.
So what could flip the script?
To keep the trend line stable or even increase the share of Americans who identify as religious, faith groups will need to attract new members.
That’s easier said than done, but religion experts believe the new Pew study points to some potential strategies.
Most notably, the study identified the broad appeal of spiritual beliefs.
Eighty-six percent of U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to a physical body, 83% believe in God or a universal spirit and 79% believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, Pew found.
“When asked how their levels of spirituality may have changed over the course of their lifetimes, Americans who say they have become more spiritual outnumber those who say they have become less spiritual by a roughly four-to-one margin (43% vs. 11%)," researchers wrote.
During Pew’s Feb. 19 press briefing, Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who consulted on the report, described these figures as “remarkable” and said that religion scholars and others who care about the future of faith need to pay more attention to spiritual beliefs.
“I was trying to think of anything else that 86% of Americans agree on. That’s remarkably high,” she said.
Similarly, Green said the new data on spirituality presents an opportunity to religious organizations.
“To the extent that religious communities can address spiritual concerns, they may very well draw people back in. If that happens, the pause (in the decline of organized religion) will become a plateau and the plateau may ultimately become growth,” he said.
Another takeaway from the new study is that faith groups will have to make institution-level adjustments to spur growth, since the power of parents is declining.
Although kids raised in religious homes are still much more likely than their peers to become religious adults, the “stickiness” of childhood faith is declining, Smith said.
In other words, religious children today aren’t as likely to become religious adults as they were in the past.
Politics and religion
If Christian congregations don’t find a way to draw in religiously unaffiliated Americans, a couple things will likely happen over the next few decades.
First, as already noted, the trend line for U.S. adults who identify as Christians will start moving downward again.
Second, existing congregations will grow older and more conservative, since politically liberal adults are leaving Christianity at higher rates than politically conservative adults.
“The share of self-described political liberals who identify as Christians has fallen 25 percentage points since 2007, from 62% to 37%. Among self-described conservatives, the Christian share has declined 7 points, from 89% to 82%,” Pew reported.
Already, faith groups are less politically mixed — and less diverse in general — than they were in the past, Green said.
To people who see churches as a place where Americans build bridges across lines of difference, that’s a negative development, he noted. But homogeneity may actually help faith groups attract new members in the coming years.
“From the point of view of congregational stability, homogeneity is good because people don’t engage in arguments very much about things beyond the faith,” Green said.
More progressive congregations, in particular, may benefit from marketing themselves as a place where currently nonreligious — but politically active — liberals can find kindred spirits, Green added.
“One of biggest opportunities for growth would be among people who have more progressive views,” he said.
Other survey takeaways
If you include the appendixes, Pew’s new report is nearly 400 pages long. It includes much more data on religious beliefs and practices than what’s discussed above.
The Deseret News will do deeper dives on the report in the coming months. For now, here’s a quick overview of other key takeaways.
- The share of Americans who identify as Protestant has notably declined since 2007, but it’s been relatively stable since 2019 — the same pattern that appears if you look at the data for all Christians. But in recent years, Protestants have been gravitating toward nondenominational churches and away from established denominations, like the United Methodist Church.
- Two percent of respondents to the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study identified as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That figure is virtually unchanged since 2007, Pew reported.
- The share of U.S. adults who identify with a non-Christian religious group has been trending upward over the past two decades. In 2007, 4.7% of Americans identified as Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or part of some other non-Christian faith group. Now, that figure stands at 7.1%.
- Immigrants are driving the growth of non-Christian religious groups in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean there are more non-Christian immigrants than Christian immigrants, according to Smith. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. immigrants are Christian, while 14% identify with other religions.
- Historically, American women have been more religiously active than American men. That’s still true today, but the gender gap is small in younger generations. “Among the oldest adults in the new survey (ages 74 and older), the share of women who say they pray every day is 20 points higher than among men. By contrast, among the youngest adults (ages 18 to 24), the share of women who say they pray daily (30%) is similar to the share of men who say they do the same (26%); the 4-point gap is not statistically significant,” Pew reported.
To dive into the data yourself, check out the full survey report and the accompanying interactive website.
Pew’s methodology
The 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study was conducted from July 17, 2023, to March 4, 2024, in English and Spanish.
Pew used address-based sampling to create its nationally representative sample of 36,908 U.S. adults.
Most participants took the survey online, but they had the option of participating via paper form or phone conversation.
The 2007 and 2014 studies, on the other hand, were administered entirely by phone.
The “mode change” in 2023-24 explains why researchers weren’t always comfortable making direct comparisons between the earlier studies and the new data, according to Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion research.
The margin of error for the full sample in 2023-24 is plus or minus 0.8 percentage points.