Young Americans Are Slamming Brakes On Christianity’s Freefall
A yearslong “steady decline” in Americans embracing Christianity has halted due to increases among younger people, national polling released Wednesday shows.
A Pew Research study found that 62% of Americans call themselves Christian in some form and the American Christian population has stayed “relatively stable” in the past five years. The decline was stopped in part by an increase in Generation Z and older millennial Americans identifying with Christianity from 2023 to 2024.
Six percent more Americans aged 18 to 24 called themselves Christians in the poll compared to 2023 at 51%, while Americans aged 33 to 44 reached the highest for their group since 2020 at 56%, the survey shows.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans in Pew Research Center’s 2007 poll said they were Christian before the rate dropped to 71% in 2014 and 62% today. The overall Christian population has been “hovering between 60% and 64%” since 2019, the organization said.
Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who “pray daily” and “attend religious services [at least] monthly” has stayed in the mid-forties and low thirties, respectively, in the past few years. But among Generation Z, daily prayer increased by eight points to 28% and “religiously unaffiliated” Americans in that age group decreased by five points.
The survey also showed American Christians adopting less traditional positions on some social issues. More than half agreed that “homosexuality should be accepted by society,” “same-sex marriage should be legal” and that abortion should be allowed “in most/all cases. These results all represent a socially liberal shift over the past decade.
However, a plurality of American Christians in the poll said society’s acceptance of transgenderism has been a “change for the worse” at 47%, with evangelical Protestants opposing it most strongly at 64%. More than half of Mormons, half of Orthodox Christians and 35% of Catholics said the same.
Pew Research said younger Americans are generally less likely to have grown up “in religious households” and to identify with Christianity than older ones, meaning that “we may see further declines in the American religious landscape in future years” if the growth seen among young people in the latest poll does not hold.
The survey included 36,908 U.S. adults and has an overall 0.8% margin of error.
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