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Young people contributed to the shift. “If you’re a young white male these days and you think of yourself as conservative, then being religious is a part of that.”
By Ruth Graham
Ruth Graham, who attended Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, has covered religion and faith for more than a decade.
Feb. 26, 2025, 6:20 a.m. ET
For decades, social scientists, demographers and Christians themselves have told a familiar story about the state of Christianity in the United States: The country was rapidly secularizing. The Christian population was shrinking, on its way to becoming a minority religion. America may have been some years behind Europe in the process, but its pews were emptying steadily and inexorably.
Now, that narrative may be changing.
After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.
“We’re entering a new era of the American religious landscape,” said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who was not involved in the Pew survey. The “nones” — those in the American population who tell researchers they have no religious affiliation — have been growing for decades. “Now that growth has either slowed or stopped completely,” Dr. Burge said, “and that’s big deal.”
The findings come from the Religious Landscape Survey, a survey of more than 35,000 randomly selected adults from across the country conducted in 2023 and 2024. The last survey was published in 2014, making the new edition’s release a major update in the understanding of American spiritual beliefs and practice.
The survey finds that 62 percent of adults in the United States describe themselves as Christians, including 40 percent who identify as Protestant and 19 percent who are Catholic.
