Decline of Christianity in the U.S. has slowed, may have leveled off

A new study shows that after many years of steady decline, the share of Americans who identify as Christians shows signs of leveling off. According to a massive new Pew Research Center survey, slightly above 60 percent of Americans identify as Christian.

The Religious Landscape Study (RLS) is the largest single survey Pew Research conducts, aiming to provide authoritative figures on the size of U.S. religious. The survey involved 36,908 U.S. adults.

The first study, fielded in 2007, found that 78 percent of U.S. adults identified as Christians of one sort or another. That number steadily decreased in smaller surveys each year and was pegged at 71 percent in the second RLS, conducted in 2014.

The latest RLS, fielded over seven months in 2023-24, finds that 62 percent of U.S. adults identify as Christians. That is a decline of 9 percentage points since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007. But for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60 percent and 64 percent.

Protestants make up the largest subgroup of Christians in the U.S., at 40 percent of the general population. Catholics make up 19 percent. People who identify with all other Christian groups (including the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses and many others) total about 3 percent of U.S. adults.

Both Protestant and Catholic numbers are down significantly since 2007, though the Protestant share of the population has remained fairly level since 2019 and the Catholic share has been stable since 2014, with only small fluctuations in the annual surveys.

Today, 1.7 percent of U.S. adults say they are Jewish, while 1.2 percent of respondents in the new survey are Muslim, 1.1 percent are Buddhist, and 0.9 percent are Hindu.

Religiously unaffiliated adults – those who identify as atheists, agnostics or as “nothing in particular” when asked about their religion – account for 29 percent of the population in the new study. The size of the religiously unaffiliated population, which some call religious “nones,” has plateaued in recent years after a long period of sustained growth.

Standard survey measures contribute to this emerging picture of stability:

• Though down significantly since 2007, the share of Americans who say they pray daily has consistently held between 44 percent and 46 percent since 2021. In the new RLS, 44 percent say they pray at least once a day.
• Similarly, since 2020, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they attend religious services monthly has hovered in the low 30s. In the new RLS, 33 percent say they go to religious services at least once a month.

Moreover, the survey shows that large majorities of Americans have a spiritual or supernatural outlook on the world.

For example:

• 86 percent believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.
• 83 percent believe in God or a universal spirit.
• 79 percent believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can’t see it.
• 70 percent believe in an afterlife (heaven, hell or both).

But, despite these signs of recent stabilization and abiding spirituality, other indicators suggest further declines may be seen in the future. Namely, younger Americans remain far less religious than older adults. For example, the youngest adults in the survey (ages 18 to 24) are less likely than today’s oldest adults (ages 74 and older) to:

• Identify as Christian (46 percent vs. 80 percent)
• Pray daily (27 percent vs. 58 percent)
• Say they attend religious services at least monthly (25 percent vs. 49 percent)

And the youngest adults are more likely than the oldest Americans to be religiously unaffiliated (43 percent vs. 13 percent).

Also, younger Americans are less likely than older adults to say they were raised in religious households. And, compared with older adults, fewer young people who were raised in religious households have remained religious after reaching adulthood.

In addition, the landscape surveys show that between 2007 and 2023-24, each birth cohort has become less religious, by several measures, as it has aged.

(Findings from the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study by Gregory A. Smith, Alan Cooperman, Becka A. Alper, Besheer Mohamed, Michael Rotolo, Patricia Tevington, Justin Nortey, Asta Kallo, Jeff Diamant and Dalia Fahmy)