The Share of Religious Americans Will Continue to Decline

New York Times

12-03-2025

My generation, millennials, has been blamed for ruining so much: cloth napkins, traditional marriage, American cheese. But in the long run, we might be credited with destroying American religion. We are not a particularly faithful generation, and there's evidence our offspring may be even less so.
Last month, a new edition of Pew Research's Religious Landscape Study came out. It's a huge survey — the organization polled more than 35,000 Americans — and the last one was released in 2014. Coverage of the survey focused on the fact that the fall in popularity of American Christianity has recently plateaued, after years of continuous decline. (Non-Christian faiths, which are a very small proportion of the American population, have gone up a bit since the survey started in 2007, but their relative size makes it tough to draw conclusions about them).
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.
Smith described organized religion to me as having become a 'polluted' idea in the American mainstream, because of the publicity around sex abuse scandals and financial malfeasance in many different faiths in the '80s and '90s as millennials came of age. 'The scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good,' Smith wrote. 'They demonstrated that religion did not make people moral, did not help its own leaders cope with life's challenges and temptations, did not promote social peace and harmony and did not model virtuous behavior for others.' Those scandals helped destroy religion's credibility — and led to millennials no longer believing that religion could be a 'glue' that held America together, Smith's research showed. And this appears in every facet of life for Americans in their 30s and 40s. Their friend groups are less likely to center religion, and they are more likely to believe that you can be a moral person without believing in God.
'The idea of obsolescence captures this sense that the old— the thing that's gone obsolete— can still be around and people can still use it. I mean, there's still people that type on electric typewriters,' Smith told me.
Part of why we're seeing a particularly virulent strain of Christian nationalists' fight for power in American society right now is because, deep down, they know that they're losing the long game. But the irony that Smith points out is that the more religious Christians tightly embrace electoral politics, the more they will continue to repel many of those they seek to attract.
Though there has been a lot of press about young men flocking to strict Christian denominations, their overall numbers are not significant to the big picture of American life that Pew paints. As of now, only 38 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds say that they believe in God or a 'universal spirit' with 'absolute certainty,' and only 27 percent 'pray daily' lower numbers than for any other age group.
As Smith puts it, 'the movement to save Christian America for God ended up pushing many Americans away from Christianity, God and the church.' I don't think that dynamic is changing soon.
End Notes
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