After decades of change, the U.S. religious landscape has stabilized. Will it last?

February 27, 2025

Photo: top, Credit: Zoe Petersen/Deseret News

The U.S. Christian population has shrunk over the past 30 years but a major new religion study appears to show that religion is far from disappearing.

The Deseret News reports that the Pew Research Center’s new Religious Landscape Study shows that the Christian population in the U.S. has stabilized over the past 5 years.

The nonreligious adult population began to surge in the mid-1990s as many churches became more occupied with tending to aging congregations and higher building costs rather than growth.

The percentage of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has remained between 60% and 64% over the past five years while those who identify as unaffiliated has stabilized at around 29%.

According to Greg Smith, the senior associate director of research at Pew, organized religion has seen a long term, broad-based decline with the Christian population falling from 78% in 2007 to 62% in the new study.

Over that same 17 year time period, the percentage of unaffiliated adults grew from 16% to 29%.

Smith explains that the short term numbers from 2019 to the present appear to be steady when compared to data collected between 2007 and 2019.

Smith said, “After many years of decline, it’s striking … to have observed this recent period of stability.”

The researcher pointed to two key factors that may explain the stabilization including, religious Americans of all ages sticking with religion at higher than expected rates starting in 2019.

The second factor Smith acknowledges is that young adults born between 2000 and 2006 appear to be about as religious as adults born in the 1990s.

According to Smith, “Today’s youngest adults aren’t really less religious than the second youngest cohort and that limits how much the youngest cohort is tugging down on the nation’s overall religiousness.”

For the study, Pew surveyed 36,908 U.S. adults using address-based sampling to create its nationally representative sample.