The Pew report and other survey data results from recent years clearly indicate that the United States is in a transition period between the trends from the last thirty years and what lies ahead in the near future. 

A few weeks ago, the Pew Research Center released the results of its most recent Religious Landscape Survey. The survey is one of the most important data sources for people studying macro-level trends in American religion. The most prominent finding was that the share of Americans who identify as Christian has stopped declining the last several years, and the percentage of adults who have no religious affiliation has plateaued right around 30 percent. This is certainly a change of pace compared to the last thirty years. In 1991, just 5 percent of Americans were religiously unaffiliated. But that share rose about 25 points in just three decades—an unprecedented shift in the world of religious demography. Now we can say with some certainty that this period of rapid secularization is largely over.

However, this does not mean that a religious revival is on the horizon. There is no reason to believe the portion of the population who identifies as Christian will increase in the near future, nor will the share of non-religious Americans decline. This period of American religious history is not so much a reversal of the large seismic shifts the country has been experiencing since the 1990s, but rather a brief pause.

What we can expect to see in the next several decades is that the non-religious share of the public will continue to creep upward, albeit at a more modest rate than the prior few decades. We can know this simply by looking at the overall religiosity of each generation of Americans. Among Baby Boomers, 28 percent identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” while among Gen Z, it’s 42 percent. Each day in the United States, hundreds of Baby Boomers will reach the end of their lives. Simultaneously, a similar number Gen Z-ers will celebrate their eighteenth birthday and begin to be included in mainstream surveys like the ones conducted by Pew.

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