Reports of religion’s decline in America have been exaggerated. You’ve heard the story: Churchgoers are dwindling in number while “Nones”—those who tell pollsters they have no religious affiliation—are multiplying as people abandon their faith and join the ranks of atheists and agnostics. Headlines declare that the U.S. is secularizing along the lines of Europe. From Britain’s Daily Mail in 2013: “Religion could disappear by 2041 because people will have replaced God with possessions, claims leading psychologist.”
These conclusions are based on analyses that are so flawed as to be close to worthless. In a new study with our colleagues
Matt Bradshaw
and
Rodney Stark,
we seek to set the record straight.
Data from five recent U.S. population surveys point to the vibrancy, ubiquity and growth of religion in the U.S. Americans are becoming more religious, and religious institutions are thriving. Consistent with some previous studies but contrary to widely held assumptions, many people who report no religious affiliation—and even many self-identified atheists and agnostics—exhibit substantial levels of religious practice and belief.
(Our sources are the University of Chicago’s 2018 General Social Survey, Baylor’s 2017 Values and Beliefs of the American Public Survey, the Association of Religious Data Archives’ 2012 Portrait of American Life Study, the 2017-2020 World Values Survey and the 2018 Chapman University Survey of American Fears.)
The religious landscape in the U.S. is changing but not in the ways that draw headlines. Hundreds of new denominations have quietly appeared, as have thousands of church plants (new congregations) and numerous non-Christian religious imports. These more than make up for losses from mainline Protestant denominations, which are indeed in free fall and have been for decades. But the decline of established institutions is easier to track than the formation and growth of new ones.
Adherents of these new denominations and congregations might be classified as “Others,” along with members of the burgeoning Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist communities throughout the U.S. and the baal t’shuvah movement among young formerly secular Jews turning to Orthodox observance.
But large databases on American religion often lump Others in with the Nones. Respondents who…
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