Is Christianity No Longer in Decline?

A few weeks ago, the Pew Research Center released the results of its most recent Religious Landscape Survey. The survey is one of the most important data sources for people studying macro-level trends in American religion. The most prominent finding was that the share of Americans who identify as Christian has stopped declining the last several years, and the percentage of adults who have no religious affiliation has plateaued right around 30 percent. This is certainly a change of pace compared to the last thirty years. In 1991, just 5 percent of Americans were religiously unaffiliated. But that share rose about 25 points in just three decades—an unprecedented shift in the world of religious demography. Now we can say with some certainty that this period of rapid secularization is largely over. 

However, this does not mean that a religious revival is on the horizon. There is no reason to believe the portion of the population who identifies as Christian will increase in the near future, nor will the share of non-religious Americans decline. This period of American religious history is not so much a reversal of the large seismic shifts the country has been experiencing since the 1990s, but rather a brief pause. 

What we can expect to see in the next several decades is that the non-religious share of the public will continue to creep upward, albeit at a more modest rate than the prior few decades. We can know this simply by looking at the overall religiosity of each generation of Americans. Among Baby Boomers, 28 percent identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” while among Gen Z, it’s 42 percent. Each day in the United States, hundreds of Baby Boomers will reach the end of their lives. Simultaneously, a similar number Gen Z-ers will celebrate their eighteenth birthday and begin to be included in mainstream surveys like the ones conducted by Pew. 

In the world of demography, we call this process generational replacement. It’s an unmistakable and unrelenting force that drives the larger trends we see in society, and the primary reason why the United States will no longer be majority white in the next few decades. 

But generational replacement is a slow and often undetectable process when looking at a short timeframe. Instead of the nones rising rapidly, it will occur at a more glacial pace. The previous era was shaped not only by generational replacement but also by the religious deconversion of millions of adult Americans—a process that seems to have lost a lot of steam. We know this because the share of Millennials who are non-religious is similar to that of Gen Z. We have hit a ceiling when it comes to secularization. 

Another important consequence of this new report is that those who were concerned that the United States would go the way of Western Europe can breathe a sigh of relief. While nearly 60 percent of the United Kingdom and over 70 percent of the Dutch claim no religious affiliation, it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. will reach such a level of secularization. Given that even 55 percent of eighteen-year-olds in the U.S. identify with a religious tradition, it seems highly unlikely that a majority of Americans will be non-religious at any point in the near future. There is, for reasons that we cannot fully explain, a strong religious core in the United States that has proven itself to be able to withstand the storms of secularization.

That’s not to say this report is nothing but positive news for those who want religion to remain relevant in the U.S. There are certainly a lot of warning signs illuminating on the dashboard of American Christianity. For instance, the share of Americans who were born non-religious and have stayed a none in adulthood is now about 66 percent. In other words, the non-religious identity has become much stickier over time. The Pew data related to religious switching also paints a very bleak picture of what’s happening in the faith landscape. For every one person who converted to Christianity over the last few years, about six have left a Christian tradition. In terms of the nones, it’s exactly the opposite—for every one person who left the secular world, another six have joined the ranks of the nones. 

The Pew report and other survey data results from recent years clearly indicate that the United States is in a transition period between the trends from the last thirty years and what lies ahead in the near future. There are still many headwinds facing American Christianity, but for now, they seem to have died down.