Templeton Religion Trust
What if America’s spirituality is being redefined?
What if spiritual decline isn’t a given?
What if understanding our differences can make our religions stronger?
Holding steady ….. at least for now.
Overall, that’s the status of America’s religious landscape today. After years of decline, the Christian share of the U.S. population has stabilized at slightly more than 60%. The religiously unaffiliated population, after rising rapidly for decades, also shows signs of having leveled off at 29%. And the percentage of Americans who identify with a religion other than Christianity, though trending slightly upward in recent years, remains in single digits.
These are among the major findings from the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS), a survey of a representative sampling of 36,908 Americans by the Pew Research Center. As Pew’s largest survey, the RLS aims to provide authoritative data on U.S. religious groups. (The U.S. Census Bureau does not collect that information.) This was the third RLS study conducted by the Center over the past 17 years, yielding a wealth of comparative data. Templeton Religion Trust was one of four major donors that made the study possible.
Like its predecessors, this newest survey has produced extensive and detailed information on what Americans believe and how they practice a wide variety of religions. The results were released by the Pew Research Center in late February 2025 in a 389-page report. In addition to big-picture summaries and analysis, the report includes hundreds of detailed charts and tables, information on methodology, and appendixes. Additionally, an interactive online version supports drilling down into data for each of the 50 states as well as 34 major metropolitan areas.
Among the report’s headline-making findings are data showing that 62% of U.S. adults now identify as Christians — a 9percentage-point decline since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007. However, for the years 2019 – 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%. Comparatively, 1.7% of U.S. adults say they are Jewish, while 1.2% of respondents in the new survey are Muslim, 1.1% are Buddhist, and 0.9% are Hindu.
What’s more, the newest RLS results show that large percentages of U.S. adults have a spiritual or supernatural outlook on the world. Notably, 86% believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body and 83% believe in God or a universal spirit.
But there’s also data that suggests the current state of religious life in America may be short-lived.
According to the RLS report’s executive summary, “…despite these signs of recent stabilization and abiding spirituality, other indicators suggest we may see further declines in the American religious landscape in future years. Namely, younger Americans remain far less religious than older adults. For example, the youngest adults in the survey (ages 18-24) are more likely than the oldest Americans to be religiously unaffiliated (43% vs. 13%).”
Other signs of change underway: The study also reveals that younger Americans are less likely than older adults to say they were raised in a religious household. And fewer of those raised in a religious household have remained religious as they aged.
“Time will tell whether the recent stability in measures of religious commitment is the beginning of a lasting shift in America’s religious trajectory,” the report states. “But it is inevitable that older generations will decline in size as their members gradually die. We also know that the younger cohorts succeeding them are much less religious. This means that, for lasting stability to take hold in the U.S. religious landscape, something would need to change. For example, today’s young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults who are more religious than their parents would have to emerge.”
How does religion affect how people think about immigration? Environmental regulations? Science? Homosexuality? Abortion?
In addition to providing in-depth data about religious affiliations, the RLS report also presents a fascinating look at the role of religion in many aspects of American life. There are chapters devoted to topics such as religion and family life, beliefs and practices, social and political views, and religion’s place in society.
According to the report, “The U.S. is politically polarized, and religion is closely associated with the country’s political divisions. But the new Religious Landscape Study – which was conducted mostly in 2023 and the early part of 2024, before the 2024 presidential election – also finds that the connections between religion and political partisanship vary a lot by race and ethnicity.”
For example, highly religious Hispanic respondents are, on average, more likely than the least
religious Hispanic surveyed to identify with the Republican Party. However, the gap between them is 22 points, much smaller than the 49-point gap among the highly religious and least religious White adults.
In its massive totality, the RLS report is a powerful reminder that understanding America’s broad-swathed religious diversity rests on understanding the nitty-gritty similarities and differences that define and shape individuals. For now, the future of religion in America appears to be an open question. Where it evolves from here — toward more tolerant pluralism or more intolerant divisiveness – is up to us. Represented for now as data points in a survey, we each have agency over what we believe and how we live going forward. And that’s how trends get created.
