While the amount of Americans who identify as Christian has lowered by nearly 10% over the last 10 years, the decline is beginning to level off.
Pew Research Center recently conducted The Religious Landscape Study where they found 62% of Americans in 2023-24 identified as Christian compared to 71% in 2014 and 78% in 2007 when they started collecting data.
Despite this, the number of Christians in America has remained relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%.
"If you look to the long term, it's a story of decline in American religion. But it's a completely different story if you look at the short term, which is a story of stability over the last four or five years,” Pew Research senior associate director of research, Gregory Smith, told the New York Times.
The denominations that have seen the sharpest drops are Protestants and Catholics.
The dip in Christians is coupled with a rise in Americans identifying with other religions.
In 2014, the amount of Americans who identified with non-Christian religions sat at 5.9% and rose to 7.1% in 2023-24. The amount of Americans who don’t identify with any religion is 29%.
The report also found that younger Americans aged between 18 to 24 are more likely to identify as non-religious than those over the age of 74.
Despite the decline in religious affiliation, many Americans have a spiritual outlook, with 86% believing in god or some other equivalent spirit and 76% believing there is something spiritual beyond the natural world.
The majority of Americans also believe in the afterlife.
NYU Professor of Religious Studies, German, Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy, Hunt de Vries, told Newsweek that data-driven studies may not capture the full extent of religion influences our lives.
"A reduction in active participation in forms of organisational religion may, paradoxically, very well go hand in hand with a deepened and broadened awareness of existential and political questions and concerns for which the so-called archives of historical religion continue to provide the most profound normative and imaginative resources,” he said.
"I do think that the depth and historical weight of religious doctrine and spiritual practices will continue to inform public opinion, national and global politics, for both good and ill.”
