in Featured World News Decades-Long Secularization of US Has Officially Reversed as Young People Turn to Christ, Major Study Finds
Attentive Americans suspected as much based on anecdotal evidence alone, and now, we can finally quantify it.
The 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, an enormous survey conducted three times in the past 17 years by the Pew Research Center, revealed that 62 percent of Americans identify as Christians, a significant drop-off since the first such a survey in 2007 but nonetheless a strong indication that the decades-long decline in American Christianity has finally begun to level off or even trend slightly upward.
Moreover, according to The New York Times, the reversal of that decline began with people born between 2000 and 2006.
PRC surveyed 36,908 U.S. adults.
That survey found “evidence both of a long-term decline in American religion and of relative stability in the last few years, since 2020 or so.”
First, one must acknowledge the bad news. Namely, the number of self-identified U.S. Christians fell from 78 percent in 2007, to 71 percent in 2014, and now to 62 percent.
Those of us who lived in the world since 2007 could have guessed as much.
However, we also could have guessed the leveling off of that trend since 2020.
“[F]or 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,” per PRC.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, described this as an epochal shift.
“We’re entering a new era of the American religious landscape,” Burge said, per the Times. The political scientist added that the slowing of the decline in religious affiliation constitutes “a big deal.”
Many factors contributed to the trend, but young people deserve substantial credit.