The decline of Christianity/religion in American life

Pew has a big new survey out, and the trend lines are more striking than the bottom line: (gift link)

According to Pew, since 2007, the share of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has dropped to 63 percent from 78 percent. But between 2020 and 2024, that figure hovered between 60 and 64 percent pretty consistently. The share of Americans who describe themselves as “nones” — a category that includes people who have no religion in particular, or who are atheist or agnostic — has leveled off at just below 30 percent, up from 16 percent in 2007.

But when you look at the numbers by generation, this plateau is temporary. As the Silent Generation, Boomers and Gen X become a smaller and smaller share of the population, there will simply not be enough religious young Americans to replace them. “The reality is that 20 percent of boomers are nonreligious and it’s at least 42 percent of Gen Z,” about the same as millennials, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist and the author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.”

Burge said of the Pew data: “For every six Christians who left the faith — one joined. It’s the exact opposite for the nones — six joiners for every leaver.” He added, “You can’t get away from those trend lines.” It is very unlikely that children raised without religion will later become religious, as “none” is becoming just as sticky a religious identity as any other. According to Pew, only 40 percent of American parents of minor children are giving their kids any kind of religious education. Only 26 percent go to religious services once a week. We will eventually become a country that is 40-to-45 percent “nones,” Burge said, though it will likely take a few more decades to get there.

The move away from organized religion among younger people isn’t just with their feet — it goes much deeper than church attendance. A new book, “Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America,” by Christian Smith argues that millennials created a “new zeitgeist” where religion is much less important to their overall worldview than it was to previous generations. Smith, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, told me, “I think culturally religion is in bigger trouble than a little plateau might suggest.”

For his book, Smith did over 200 interviews with 18- to 54-year-olds, and he also ran a 2023 survey he calls the “Millennial Zeitgeist Survey.” One question he asked in that survey was about religion’s relevance to daily life. “The bottom line is that two-thirds of the millennial generation view religion as either obsolete or not a matter they have an opinion about, which is arguably an indirect expression of obsolescence,” Smith wrote.

This is obviously a huge and important topic, and these trends are of great social and political significance.