The Decline of Christianity Has Slowed
An extensive Pew Research Center survey finds that a decades-long drop in people identifying as Christians in the U.S. may have leveled off.
After many years of steady decline, the share of Americans who identify as Christians appears to have leveled off, at least temporarily, according to an extensive Pew Research Center survey.
The Center’s third Religious Landscape Study (RLS), released in February, found that the religiously unaffiliated—sometimes referred to as religious “nones”—also has plateaued after a long period of growth. The data further shows that rates of prayer and attendance at religious services have stabilized and that large majorities of Americans have a spiritual or supernatural outlook on the world.
Conducted over eight months in 2023-24, the survey of nearly 37,000 U.S. adults found that the Christian share of the adult population stood at about 62%—roughly what the Center’s researchers had been observing since 2021. What’s more, the youngest participants in the survey—those born between 2000 and 2006—appear to be no less religious than survey respondents born in the 1990s.
These were notable departures from the downward trend that Christian identity has seen since at least the 1990s, when about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. By 2007, when the Center released its first RLS, just 78% of U.S. adults identified as Christian. That number dropped to 71% in the Center’s next RLS, in 2014, an average decline of about one percentage point per year.
The 2023-24 data also showed that the portion of all adults who say they pray daily and attend religious services at least monthly has held steady in recent years at about 44% and 33%, respectively—all of which came as glad tidings to some Christian organizations. The First Liberty Institute, a legal organization that defends religious liberty, reported that “the findings offer significant hope for the future.”
Still, the Center’s researchers point to strong crosscurrents rippling through the data. Despite the recent signs of stabilization, “other indicators suggest we may see further declines in the American religious landscape in future years,” notes the report.
In particular, it points to the fact that younger Americans “remain far less religious” than the “older, highly religious, heavily Christian generations” now passing away. And while the youngest adults in the survey may be about as religious as their next oldest cohort, they “are significantly less likely than the oldest adults” to identify as Christian (46% vs. 80%), pray daily (27% vs. 58%), or attend religious services at least monthly (25% vs. 49%).
For lasting stability to take hold, the report states, “young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults more religious than their parents would have to emerge.”
So far, that hasn’t happened. There is “no evidence in our data that any generation or birth age group has become more religious—has become more Christian, or more likely to pray, or more likely to believe in God—as they’ve gotten older,” says Alan Cooperman, the Center’s director of religion research.
The RLS is the largest single survey Pew Research Center conducts and provides both nationwide data and information on every state, the District of Columbia, and 34 large metro areas. The Center’s survey received support from the Lilly Endowment Inc., Templeton Religion Trust, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.
Using NORC—a Chicago-based organization that also produces the respected General Social Survey—as its data collection partner, Pew Research Center randomly invited a representative sample of U.S. adults to complete the survey online, by mail, or by telephone with an interviewer. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish, with 36,908 respondents, between July 17, 2023, and March 4, 2024. The response rate was 20%, and the margin of sampling error for the full sample is less than 1 percentage point.
Because the U.S. Census Bureau does not collect data on the religious identities of Americans or their beliefs and practices, the massively scaled RLS seeks to fill that void “with very reliable, rigorously gathered and impartial data,” says Cooperman.
The scale of the study provides scholars with detailed and demographically specific data not available in any other sociological survey. “No other religion survey has as big a sample size or asks this many questions” says Mark Chaves, professor of sociology, religion, and divinity at Duke University.
Chaves, who read a draft of the report before it was published, also hails the Center’s decision to show in its report how its data compares with other major religion surveys, including religion data collected within the broader General Social Survey. “This enhances [scholars’] confidence that the results are accurate. And as time goes on, Pew’s data becomes more valuable because they’re tracking trends.”
Among the report’s other key findings:
- 40% of U.S. adults are Protestants, 19% are Catholics, and 3% are other Christians. Together, those groups add up to the 62% Christian share of the population.
- About 35% of U.S. adults identify with a different religious group or category than the one in which they were raised. Most of the movement is out of religion into the ranks of the unaffiliated.
- 29% of all adults are religiously unaffiliated: 5% are atheist, 6% are agnostic, and 19% identify religiously as “nothing in particular.”
- 7% belong to religions other than Christianity: 2% are Jewish, and about 1% each are Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu (all figures are rounded).
- 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 percentage points, from 89% to 82%.
- A majority of U.S. immigrants (58%) are Christian. About a quarter of foreign-born adults are unaffiliated, and 14% belong to other religions, including 4% who are Muslim, 4% who are Hindu, and 3% who are Buddhist.
Among the survey topics that Chaves found particularly valuable was the question of where in the religious spectrum the erosion of identity has been taking place. While the ranks of nonreligious Americans clearly have grown over the decades, what has happened to the most religious part of the population? Has it been stable or even growing, as some scholars have suggested?
If that were the case, says Gregory A. Smith, the Center’s senior associate director of religion research, “it might leave us with a group of highly religious people that’s stable in size, and a group of nonreligious people that’s growing, with shrinkage in the middle.” However, he says, “what we actually see is decline at the high end” of belief and observance, “growth at the low end” (the least religious part of the population), “and stability in the size of the religious middle.”
The once reliable “stickiness” of a religious upbringing also seems to be declining. Compared with older people, fewer young adults who had a highly religious upbringing are still highly religious as adults.
In the oldest cohort of U.S. adults (ages 74 and older), 51% of people who say they grew up attending religious services weekly, in families where religion was very important, still go to services weekly and say religion is very important in their lives.
In contrast, among the youngest U.S. adults in the survey (now ages 18 to 24), just 28% of those raised in highly religious homes are, today, highly religious themselves.
What, then, what might explain the recent leveling off after decades of decline? Cooperman says that the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-23—which delayed the scheduled start of the RLS by two years—might have “reinforced the importance of religion to people who were already religious.”
Nonreligious adults didn’t start flocking to churches and synagogues in large numbers, he says, but ‘“many people lost family members, jobs, income and certainly were fearful. And in a hard time like that, what do people do? For those who were religious, many turned to their religious communities. And I think that may have slowed the erosion.” (The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Bible sales increased from 9.7 million in 2019 to 14.2 million in 2023.)
Whether the anxieties of the pandemic explain the recent stabilization is “impossible to prove,” says Cooperman, “because we don’t know what would have happened if COVID had not come along.”
Only future polling, he says, will determine if the leveling holds.
David O’Reilly was the longtime religion reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and is a frequent contributor to Trust.
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