Christianity’s Decline in America Has Halted, and May Now Have Reversed
One year ago, Pew showed the decline had ceased. Now, new data suggest the secular surge may be going into reverse — and young men are helping lead the turn.
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by Rod D. Martin
April 26, 2026
The rumors of Christianity’s demise were not merely exaggerated. They may have been exactly backward.
A year ago, Pew Research Center released one of the largest surveys of American religion ever conducted, finding that after decades of decline, the Christian share of the country had stabilized. Christianity was no longer in freefall. The “Nones” — atheists, agnostics, and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” — had stopped their long march upward.
The secularization story every elite institution treated as inevitable had hit a wall.
Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of American adults still identified as Christian, 29 percent were religiously unaffiliated, and 7 percent belonged to non-Christian religions. More importantly, Pew found that the Christian share had been relatively stable for five solid years, since around 2019.
Now the story has advanced.
Ryan Burge, statistician and professor at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, finds that the secular surge may not merely have stalled. It may be going into reverse. His numbers, based in part on the newly released 2025 Cooperative Election Study, show that the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular fell from 36.2 percent in 2022 to 35.6 percent in 2023, 34.1 percent in 2024, and 31.8 percent in 2025.
Burge notes that the decline is statistically significant, and that the General Social Survey points in the same direction, with religious “Nones” down to just 25.2 percent in 2024.
That doesn’t prove a full-scale revival. Not yet, anyway. But it does prove that the old story is dead.
For decades, it seemed America was following Europe’s path toward a post-Christian society: churches emptying, traditional belief systems collapsing, and no end in sight. The media, academia, and Democrat policymakers gleefully anticipated the day when Christianity would be an afterthought, a relic of an outdated era.
Meanwhile, a “Third Way” movement within the church, led by popular figures like Tim Keller and Russell Moore, sought to be “winsome” to people whose beliefs were not merely non-Christian but actively anti-Christian — sort of like begging a bully not to hurt you.
Every bit of that was wrong.
The Numbers Have Stabilized. There’s a Reason.
Last year’s Pew study surveyed over 35,000 American adults across all 50 states, making it one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. Its results were striking:
62 percent of American adults still identified as Christian, including 40 percent Protestants and 19 percent Catholics.
The religiously unaffiliated — the “Nones”, or those identifying as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” — held at 28 percent, virtually unchanged from multiple previous surveys.
7 percent of respondents identified with a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism.
The percentage of Christians remained stable over the five years from 2019-2024, marking the first time in decades that the decline had stalled.
Christianity experienced a severe decline in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 1990, roughly 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian. By 2007, Pew found that number had already dropped to 78 percent. By 2014 it was 71 percent. In the latest Pew Religious Landscape Study, it stood at just 62 percent. It is not insignificant that the steepest declines took place in the Obama years.
That sounds grim until you notice the trend line. The plunge has stopped.
Now the secular side of the ledger appears to be shrinking. The “Nones” have not merely hit a plateau. They appear to be retreating:
36.2 percent nonreligious in 2022.
35.6 percent in 2023.
34.1 percent in 2024.
31.8 percent in 2025.
Burge calls that decline statistically significant. He also notes that the General Social Survey points the same way, with the religiously unaffiliated falling to 25.2 percent. In other words, this is not just one odd data point. It is a pattern.
But why? Why would it stop? If the problem is that Christianity is outdated or offensive to our culture, why wouldn’t we continue to collapse?
The answer is simple, as I’ve been telling you for decades. The people who were leaving Christianity were not leaving because conservatives were “mean,” or because Christians “lacked winsomeness,” or because the church failed to wrap historic orthodoxy in the therapeutic language of NPR.
They left because they were leftists. The belief system of the modern Democrat Party is anathema to the Christian faith.
Or let me put that another way: the fakers have left.
There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.
And they don’t.
So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.
Good.
The Left’s Exodus from Christianity
Why does Woke Socialism repel Christian belief? Because the left’s worldview is completely incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.
Progressivism champions moral relativism. Christianity demands objective moral law.
Progressivism deconstructs the family unit, asserts the right to murder children, and claims that all sorts of sins are “love.” Christianity actively opposes all these things.
Progressivism says objective truth is impossible, that “math is racist” and “2 + 2 = whatever the Party tells you.” Christianity asserts not merely objective truth but precisely one such truth.
Progressivism defines you by your skin color, sexual preferences, or other superficial or behavioral characteristics, asserting that there are oppressors and oppressed, and that the latter cannot sin and the former cannot repent. Christianity says we’re all one race, all descended from Adam, and that all who believe are adopted into one family whose Father is God. It also says that deviant behavior is not your “identity”: you are not a prisoner of your sins, you are not defined by them, and there is both escape and redemption in Christ.
Progressivism worships the state, because its adherents can control the state and “become like God.” Christianity acknowledges not just a higher but an absolute and sovereign Authority Whose laws are above any enacted by mere men, and cannot be changed by their whims.
But let’s put that another way. Have you ever met anyone who converted to orthodox Christianity and, as a result, suddenly started advocating for Drag Queen Story Hour, or abortion-on-demand, or the abolition of the nuclear family, or the deconstruction of the faith?
Of course not.
Typically, new converts leave progressivism behind and embrace the values and the issues generally considered “conservative” in our debased cultural moment. As Machen pointed out a century ago, Christianity and theological/political liberalism are completely different religions, even when they share the same terms. They cannot coexist in harmony, certainly not within a single person.
The Pew survey confirms what many of us have known for years — leftists are running from Christianity because their politics demand it.
Consider these statistics:
61 percent of self-identified liberals identified as Christian as recently as 2007; that’s now just 36 percent.
More than half (52 percent) of liberals now identify as religiously unaffiliated, compared to just 16 percent of conservatives.
Among Democrats, Christian identification has fallen from 74 percent in 2007 to 52 percent in 2024. Without African Americans, it would be a small fraction of that.
Republicans remain overwhelmingly Christian (82 percent), with only 14 percent identifying as religiously unaffiliated.
Christianity’s decline was never simply about intellectual skepticism or an embrace of “science over faith.” Lots of so-called “Christians” never truly were. Now that Democrats feel emboldened to seize control of society, the modern left has openly treated traditional religion as an obstacle to its ambitions, not as a positive or even a neutral institution.
From attempts to coerce churches into endorsing same-sex marriage and abortion to outright hostility toward public displays of Christian faith, the message has been clear: Christianity must conform to Woke ideology, or it must be dismantled.
Hence, for most white Democrats, church affiliation is a lot of effort for no reward. If anything, it makes you suspect or outright unacceptable to your peers. And if you truly believe in transgenderism, abortion on demand, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (not to mention ESG, DEI, SEL, etc.), why would you waste a perfectly good Sunday morning in a church?
Unless you just really like singing in the choir, you have better things to do.
Bottom line, particularly for white liberals, it has become much more socially acceptable to make snarky comments deriding “Sky Daddy” than to continue to feign belief.
Conservative values act as an on-ramp to Christian belief, while Woke ideology functions as an off-ramp. Since 2007, the percentage of self-identified liberals who claim to be Christian has plummeted by nearly half. Among conservatives, that decline has been minimal, from 89 percent in 2007 to 82 percent today.
The Pew data dismantles the tired claim that Christianity has suffered due to its perceived entanglement with conservative politics. If anything, it proves the opposite.
Young conservative men helped drive the stabilization, and they may now be helping drive the reversal. They are embracing Christianity as part of a broader rejection of leftist ideology, secular despair, and the cultural war against masculinity itself.
And that portends a much greater societal and cultural upheaval to come.
Young Men Are Finding Faith
Now the newer data make that point even sharper.
Gallup’s newest data show a remarkable shift among young men ages 18–29. In 2024–25, 42 percent of young men said religion is “very important” in their lives, up from 28 percent just two years earlier. Young women, by contrast, remained roughly flat at about 30 percent. Gallup says young men now surpass young women on this measure by a statistically significant margin, a stunning reversal of the long-standing pattern in which young women were more religious than young men.
Let’s put that in perspective. For the first time in 300 years, among young adults aged 18-24, the gender gap in religiosity has flipped. Historically, women have long been 15-20 percentage points more religious than men (which accounts for much of the church and the clergy’s feminization). But among Generation Z, those days are over.
This is a very, very big deal.
For generations, churches have been feminized. So has education. So has HR. So has corporate life. So has almost every “respectable” institution in America. Boys and young men have spent their entire lives being told that masculinity is toxic, ambition is suspect, leadership is oppression, and strength is dangerous unless it can be harnessed for the left’s political ends.
They were told to apologize for existing.
Christianity tells them something very different.
Christianity tells men they are sinners, yes. But it also tells them they are made in the image of God. It gives them a Father. It gives them a mission. It gives them discipline, hierarchy, purpose, sacrifice, courage, repentance, forgiveness, and ordered liberty. It tells them to become husbands, fathers, builders, protectors, providers, and leaders. It tells them that their strength is not a pathology. It is a stewardship.
No wonder they are listening.
The secular regime has produced loneliness, sterility, addiction, pornography, despair, broken families, cowardice, and an entire generation of young men who were told there was no higher purpose than self-expression and consumption. Then COVID came along and revealed the moral hollowness of the whole thing. The experts lied. The bureaucrats bullied. The schools closed. The churches too often complied. The media demanded fear. The state demanded obedience.
And millions of young people learned a lesson they will not soon forget: a life without God does not produce courage. It produces cowering compliance.
Those who obey a higher authority than government are harder to control. That was obvious during the pandemic. It remains obvious now.
If you are a young conservative man in America today, odds are increasingly good that you also identify as religious, and probably Christian. Why? Because the war on Christian values, the war on masculinity, and the war on national identity have all been fought on the same battlefield. To be a conservative today is to reject the nihilism and moral relativism that Wokeness has imposed.
So suddenly, Christianity is a lot more attractive.
But not the “seeker sensitive” kind. Not the lukewarm, focus-grouped, skinny-jeans-and-fog-machine version. Not the “let’s apologize for everything the Bible teaches and hope the left likes us” version.
If you’re not getting the real thing, you have better things to do.
Not Just Identity, But Practice
There are other signs as well.
Barna’s 2025 State of the Church data show weekly Bible reading among American adults rising to 42 percent, up 12 points from a 15-year low in 2024. Among self-identified Christians, the number reaches 50 percent, the highest level in over a decade. Millennials rose to 50 percent, while Gen Z rose from 30 percent to 49 percent in a single year. And like the others, Barna also reports that younger men are now outpacing younger women in Scripture engagement.
This is all incredibly surprising, but it really shouldn’t surprise us. Materialism does not answer the questions human beings actually ask. It cannot tell a young man why he exists. It cannot tell him why he should marry, have children, tell the truth, master his appetites, or die for something greater than himself. Secularism promises liberation and delivers chaos leading to tyranny. It promises autonomy and delivers loneliness. It promises pleasure and delivers despair.
Christianity tells the truth about the world as it actually is.
That is why it endures.
The Future of Faith in America
Is Christianity in America experiencing a full-scale revival? It’s too soon to tell.
But what is clear is that the once-unstoppable march toward secularism has hit a wall. The easy deconversions are over. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. What remains are those whose beliefs run deep, who have weathered the cultural storm, and who are now finding strength in the very faith the elites told them was fading.
Ironically, the very people who’ve long decried “cultural Christianity” have gotten what they said they wanted, even while doing their level best to drag the Church to the left.
The battle for America’s soul is not over. Indeed, as the Book of Judges shows us, it is never over, not until Christ comes. But for the first time in a long time, Christianity is no longer retreating. And if history tells us anything, it’s that faith doesn’t just survive adversity — it thrives in it. What Aaron Renn calls “negative world” may be just the tonic the faith in America needs.
The church may have been battered, but it is far from broken. In fact, it may be on the brink of something extraordinary.
