The US population has been gradually losing its faith in Christianity for many years, but a major new poll shows that the long-term decline may be starting to level off. Still, don’t expect the faith to stage a comeback just yet.
The Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study (RLS) has tracked trends in religious beliefs since 2007, a time when 78 percent of the people in the US identified as Christian. That percentage steadily crept downwards until 2019 when it reached a low of 63 percent. However, in recent years, there has been a small but notable uptick in Christianity.
The latest survey (published February 2025) of 36,908 US adults suggests the trend of long-term dwindling is over and the proportion of Christians in the US is remaining stable – at least for now.
From 2019 to 2024, the proportion of adults identifying as Christian has held steady, consistently landing between 60 and 64 percent. The latest RLS pegs that figure at 62 percent, right at the heart of this recent stability.
The share of “religiously unaffiliated” people – those who identify as atheists, agnostics, or as “nothing in particular” when asked about their religion – has also plateaued. In 2007, 16 percent of the US identified as religiously unaffiliated, but that figure slowly grew over the years and reached a peak in 2021. Between 2022 and 2024, it has hovered around 28 and 29 percent, and also appears to have temporarily tapered off.
Meanwhile, the share of people in the US who identify with a religion other than Christianity has been trending upward since 2007. The latest poll shows that 7.1 percent of the population follows a non-Christian religion, which includes Judaism (1.7 percent), Islam (1.2 percent), Buddhism (1.1 percent), and Hinduism (0.9 percent).
In terms of Christianity, the trend of long-term decline and recent stability is closely related to age and different generations: older, more religious generations are passing away, while younger, less religious cohorts take their place. Additionally, each generation seems to grow less religious as it ages, becoming less likely to pray daily, believe in God with certainty, or identify with any religion.
However, recent years have shown signs of stability. Since around 2020, the religious behaviors and beliefs of most birth cohorts haven’t changed much. Interestingly, the youngest adults born in the early 2000s are just as religious as the slightly older group born in the 1990s, clearly highlighting how the decline has halted.
While young adults are still less traditionally religious than older generations, their levels of spirituality remain surprisingly high. Most still believe in a soul or some spiritual reality beyond the physical world, suggesting that affiliations to organized religion may be declining, yet some sense of spirituality is persisting.
When the Pew Research Centre published a report on religiosity in the US back in 2022, adherence to Christianity was at its lowest. This led them to conclude that Christians could soon become a minority in the US within just a few decades if that downhill trend continued.
It turns out that the trend hasn’t continued. Their latest RLS shows that the trend is deeply complex and suggests that the story ahead will have many more surprises.
Source Link: Christianity’s Long-Term Decline In The US Has Halted – For Now
