The most persistent story about American religion in 2025 was the possibility of revival among Generation Z. It’s a narrative that has somehow made its way into the zeitgeist for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Still, it seems that a large segment of the American public is eager for any sign that the rise of the nones is over and that churches might begin to fill back up in the years to come.
Of course, Protestants and Catholics want this to be true. They would love to see the fortunes of their local congregations turn around after decades of slow, steady decline. Many have prayed fervently for God to move as during the First and Second Great Awakenings, when hundreds of thousands of Americans experienced dramatic conversions.
But a lot of media outlets also seem to be searching for this narrative. Stories about long-term trends suddenly reversing tend to spread quickly, and religion is no exception. As the share of adults with no religious affiliation climbed from just 6% in 1991 to nearly 30% in 2020, it would certainly make headlines if that march toward secularism suddenly stopped — and even more so if the ones leading a return to church were teens and 20-somethings.
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, many of his followers described him as a martyr for conservative Christianity and claimed that his death would spark millions to embrace his evangelical beliefs and lifestyle. That possibility received significant coverage from outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
However, as someone who looks at data on American religion nearly every day, I can say without equivocation that there’s no clear or compelling evidence that younger Americans are more religious than their parents or grandparents. In reality, many casual observers are overinterpreting some short-term shifts in survey data.
The General Social Survey, for instance, reported a steady rise in the “nones” between the early 1990s and 2020. In 2018, the figure was 23%, rising to 28% in 2021. The two most recent estimates are slightly lower — 27% in 2022 and 25% in 2024. Similarly, the “headline finding” from Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey was that both the decline of Christianity and the rise of the unaffiliated have paused in recent years.
But neither of these surveys suggest any real resurgence in American religion, for one simple reason: generational replacement. Every day, older Americans die and are replaced by young adults turning 18. This process unfolds slowly — almost imperceptibly — in the short term, but over five or 10 years, it can produce profound shifts in the overall landscape.
When you compare generations, the pattern is obvious. The youngest members of the Silent Generation were born in the early 1940s, and just 7% report no religious affiliation. In less than a decade, they — and a growing share of Baby Boomers (18% unaffiliated) — will disappear from survey samples.
Meanwhile, millennials are moving solidly into middle age, and 36% of them say they have no religion. Generation Z, all of whom will soon be adults, are even less religious: 43% are nones. That’s 25 points higher than the Boomers they’re replacing. So if the overall share of nones sits around 28% now, it will inevitably rise as generational turnover continues.
Could millennials and Gen Z find God in the years ahead? Possibly — but it would require a transformation unlike anything seen in modern times. Roughly 10 million millennials would have to reaffiliate with religion, followed by another 18 million Gen Zers. There’s no sign of that happening in any dataset.
To make this more concrete, consider a simple numerical exercise. About 25% of Americans report attending a house of worship on a typical weekend. If that rose by even three points — a small but noticeable increase — that would mean 10 to 12 million more people in church today than just six months ago.
That’s hard to imagine given that there are only about 350,000 houses of worship nationwide. Evenly distributed, those 12 million new attendees would add roughly 35 people to every congregation. And since the median church in America averages just 65 attendees, each one would have to grow by nearly 50% just to move the national number by three points.
And remember — that’s a modest increase.
The reality is that there hasn’t been a single event in the past 50 years that sparked a sustained, measurable rise in religious attendance in the United States. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, churchgoing did increase briefly, but by early 2002 it had returned to normal. Likewise, the Asbury University revival of February 2023 received wall-to-wall media coverage, but follow-up reporting showed no lasting change in local religiosity a year later.
That said, some aspects of Protestant Christianity have experienced noteworthy growth over the last several years. The Assemblies of God, a charismatic evangelical denomination, has recorded sustained growth for decades; since 2000, its membership is up nearly 19%. The Presbyterian Church in America, the more conservative cousin of the Presbyterian Church USA, is up about 31% during the same time period and has enjoyed an annual growth rate of 2.2% since 1980.
Additionally, the number of Americans identifying as non-denominational Protestants has grown from essentially a rounding error in the 1970s (about 3%), to nearly 15% of the population in more recent data. In numeric terms, there are likely 30-40 million non-denominational Christians in the United States, making this group three times the size of the Southern Baptist Convention. However, the sources of growth in American Christianity are still outweighed by the decline of older denominations like the United Methodist Church and The Episcopal Church.
People of faith will rightly say that true revival can’t be predicted or modeled — that it’s a movement of the Holy Spirit, not a statistical trend. And that’s fair. No regression equation can capture the divine.
Still, as Carl Sagan famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” As it stands now, there’s nothing extraordinary in the data, however much we might wish it were so.