One of the most unexpected cultural developments in the U.S. has been the recent stabilization of religious affiliation. From 1972 until 2020, the percentage of American adults identifying as Christian dropped steadily from 90 percent to 63 percent, while those saying they did not belong to any faith tradition went from 5 percent to 29 percent. But in February of 2025, it suddenly became clear that this decades-long decline had actually been flat for some time.
That was when the Pew Research Center published its most recent Religious Landscape Study, the largest of the foundation’s ongoing surveys. Based on answers from more than 35,000 respondents, Pew had discovered that over the previous five years, from 2019 to 2024, the Christian share of the U.S. population had been “relatively stable, hovering between 60 percent and 64 percent” for both Catholics and Protestants, while the percentage of unaffiliated had also leveled off. (Mainline Protestants continued their decline, but other Protestant denominations balanced them out.)
With the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the U.S. Religious Census recently confirming the Pew findings, a number of religious podcasters, social media influencers, and otherwise reliable news outlets have taken to exaggerating the data, declaring a modern Great Awakening, especially among young men. But even a “mere leveling” of religious affiliation is a dramatic enough development for more serious observers to try and explain it.
The reason originally given by Pew’s own analysts was that the decreasing strength in religious affiliation from one generation to the next had finally begun to narrow. In other words, while each generation since World War II has been less interested in communal worship than the one before it, the most recent gaps have shrunk to the point where each new cohort no longer impacts the overall percentages in a significant way.
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