Since 2007, there has been a steady decline in the number of people who identify as Christians according to surveys of British religious beliefs. At that time, a Religious Landscape Study ( RLS ) found that 78 % of Americans identified as Christians.
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The RLS is a massive study involving 35, 000 arbitrarily sampled respondents. ” That’s sufficient to paint a quantitative portrait of church not only nationwide, but also in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as in 34 large rail areas”, reports the Pew Research Center, which conducted the study.
The RLS found that the number of American Christians dropped to 71 % in 2014 and 62 % in 2023-24. However, the last four years have seen the number of Christians hold steady, hovering between 60 % and 64 %.
There appears to be a considerable delay in the reduction, given the steep 16-point cut in Christians since 2007. It’s unclear whether it will be lasting.
Fresh conventional men are embracing Christianity as part of their traditional identity, while young Americans continue to reject faith. David Campbell, a social scientist at the University of Notre Dame, told the New York Times,” If you’re a young white men these days and you think of yourself as liberal, then being religious is a part of that”.
Likewise, the proportion of liberals who identify as Christian has dropped by 25 items since 2007. ” Just over a third of democrats then identify as Christian, and more than half say they have no religion”, reports the New York Times.
Researchers are concerned that the findings do not suggest a mountain may be reached in the drop of Christianity, or even that the plain will remain. Young people will eventually reduce the average level of spirituality because they still practice much less religion than older people. The latest generation of young adults is unlikely to become more catholic as they get older.
However, some experts believe that the majority of people who were going to stop practicing religions do so now, which raises the possibility that the data may give a hint as to the country’s natural sky of nonreligiosity.
” The’ nones ‘ have run through the simple parts of the business, and then they’re hitting the core of dedicated evangelicals” and religious reactionaries in different denominations, said Dr. Burge, who was also priest of an American Baptist church for 17 times. Going forward, “if you’re going to make advances, you have to make advances with conservatives”.
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Some of the cross-tabs in this survey offer fascinating insights into how people view spirituality.  ,
- In addition to their physical appearance, 86 percent of people think they have a soul or spirit.
- 83 % believe in God or a universal spirit.
- 79 % believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can’t see it.
- 70 % believe in an afterlife ( heaven, hell, or both ).
Of those born between 2000 and 2006, just 46 % identify as Christians, while 43 % claim to be religiously unaffiliated.  ,
In addition to a gap in generations, there’s also a gender gap among the young, although it’s smaller than other age groups.
The youngest survey respondents also excelled in other ways. The gender gender gap in religiosity is much smaller than it is in the older generations. Typically, women are more religious than men on a variety of measures. It’s a pattern that is so pervasive throughout history, geography, and culture that some scholars consider it to be a fact of human existence. The pattern shows up in Pew’s oldest cohorts, where, for example, women are 20 points more likely than men to say they pray every day.
Considering the full-scale assault on Christianity by the dominant culture, these numbers are hardly surprising. Given the non-religiosity of the youngest cohort of Americans, it doesn’t seem likely at this time, but the pause in the decline will lead to a Christian revival.  ,
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