America’s religious decline may have paused: new Pew research

Amid the chaos of American politics and higher education this month, I wanted to pause to note how one important, long-term trend has developed.

For a touch of background, I’ve been tracking the decline in American religiosity for some time (2017, 2019, 2021, 2022).  The big picture story is that while Americans were very religious by all measures throughout the twentieth century, belief and affiliation declined in the twenty-first by various metrics. There are many implications for this nation, including for its colleges and universities.  It’s also worth noting that many similar nations went through such a decline much earlier.

It now seems that the decline in American faith may have paused or bottomed out.  A new Pew Research study finds that its measures of religious adherence show little change over the past few years.

This plays out in several ways within the report. One is by asking people if they identify as Christian.  That number dropped, then hit a plateau:

Pew also identified a population which does not identify with any religion. That number grew to a significant size, and now seems to have stabilized:

Religiously unaffiliated adults – those who identify as atheists, agnostics or as “nothing in particular” when asked about their religion – account for 29% of the population in the new RLS. The size of the religiously unaffiliated population, which we sometimes call religious “nones,” has plateaued in recent years after a long period of sustained growth…

1.9% of U.S. adults identify religiously as something else, including 1.1% of respondents who identify with Unitarianism or other liberal faiths, and 0.7% who identify with New Age groups.

I’ll note 29% is a very large number, nearly one third of the entire nation.

Intergenerational differences remain strong, with younger Americans being much less religious than their elders:

At a smaller scale, the proportion of Americans who describe themselves as associating with a religion other than Christianity is quite small, about 7% all told, but also stable:

Pew slices this data in many ways, and I recommend the whole report.  I wanted to share a few of those here:

Gender differences remain stable, with women being more religious than men across the board:

there are still no birth cohorts in which men are significantly more religious than women. In every age group, women are at least as religious as men, and in many birth cohorts, women are significantly more religious than men. [emphases in original]

Although that gap might be narrowing:

Childhood religious upbringing and education is crucial to adult attitudes. Pew notes that

People who say they were raised in religious homes are much more likely to be religious as adults… People who grew up attending religious services regularly (at least once a month) are more than twice as likely as those who didn’t grow up attending services regularly to say they now attend religious services at least monthly.

This suggests a future decline in religiosity, because

[W]hile half of the oldest adults say that as children they received a lot of formal religious education (i.e., seven or more years), just 19% of today’s youngest adults say the same. People in the youngest age group are about twice as likely as those in the oldest age group to say they received no formal religious education at all (42% vs. 20%).

Further, “the persistence of a high level of religiousness from childhood into adulthood – the ‘stickiness’ of a religious upbringing – appears to be declining, while the stickiness of a nonreligious upbringing seems to be increasing.”

One more point: religious affiliation and politics remain strongly correlated.

In general, highly religious Americans tend to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party and express conservative views on a variety of social, political and economic questions at much higher rates than do the least religious Americans. Meanwhile, Americans with lower levels of religious engagement tend to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party and express liberal views on the same gamut of social, political and economic issues.

Let me close with a few observations.

First, Pew finds large majorities who hold spiritual or supernatural beliefs about life after death, the existence of a deity, etc. The persistent of such attitudes might be ways for people to connect with religions in the future.  As ever, I am watching for the emergence of schisms and new religions movements (NRMs) which could mobilize that population.

Second, I’ll repeat why I think this matters for higher education. A number of private colleges and universities are part of a religious organization, so a decline in faith can exert pressure on their sustainability. Moreover, the fields of religious study (theology, comparative religion, Biblical study, priestly preparation, etc) may experience declining student enrollment as well as graduate students entering those areas.

Third, it’s important to recognize what a shift this move away from religion means for American culture.  We’ve been deeply, unusually (in an international context) faithful for generations.  If we are more secular, that has implications for politics, storytelling, community ties, and more.

Again, I recommend the whole report.  Kudos to Pew for doing this hard work.