It's mixed news from the USA which had looked as though it was following Europe, albeit a generation behind, in rejecting religion and becoming a substantially secular society with non-believers and non-affiliated 'spiritual' people in the clear majority. Even formerly strongly Catholic countries such as Spain and Ireland have experienced a massive haemorrhage of members since the clerical child sexual abuse scandals of recent decades broke.
However, according to the latest Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study Report, the steep decline in American adults identify as Christian appears to have stalled, having remained statistically level for the last four years, having declined from 78% to 63% between 2007 and 2019.
The good news is that this stall is almost certainly only temporary; the decline is due to pick up and even accelerate over the next few years, as the current younger age-group move through the demographic profile and the older cohort drops off it. As this graphic shows, there is a massive gulf between the younger and older age groups in terms of religious belief and affiliation to any particular religion.
Something this chart doesn't pick up is the effect of up-and-coming people who are currently below the age of 18. The younger age-group are also, or soon will be, the parents of the next cohort of younger people. Previous studies have shown that the children of non-believers and unaffiliated are very unlikely to become believers or to affiliate to any particular religion, and, if anything are likely to be even less inclined to religious belief, so, while 46% of 18-14 year-olds currently identify as Christian, only some 25% of their children are likely to do so.
Something this chart doesn't pick up is the effect of up-and-coming people who are currently below the age of 18. The younger age-group are also, or soon will be, the parents of the next cohort of younger people. Previous studies have shown that the children of non-believers and unaffiliated are very unlikely to become believers or to affiliate to any particular religion, and, if anything are likely to be even less inclined to religious belief, so, while 46% of 18-14 year-olds currently identify as Christian, only some 25% of their children are likely to do so.
Currently, 46% of 18-24 years-old Americans self-identify as Christians while 80% of 74+ year-olds so identify, with an overall average of 63% Christian for all adults* Is it possible to project forward over the next 25 years to see the change in Christan affiliation in the USA? Yes, it's possible to project future Christian affiliation in the U.S. based on current trends in religious disaffiliation. A simple projection can be made using demographic replacement (younger, less religious cohorts aging into the population) and the rate of religious switching (people leaving or joining Christianity over time).
Key Factors for Projection:Based on a simple extrapolation assuming a 1% annual decline in Christian affiliation, the percentage of U.S. adults identifying as Christian would decrease as follows (non-linear projection):
- Cohort Replacement: As older, more Christian generations pass away and younger, less religious ones take their place, the overall percentage of Christians declines.
- Religious Switching: Some Christians leave the faith (e.g., becoming religiously unaffiliated), while some unaffiliated may convert to Christianity. However, in the U.S., the trend has overwhelmingly favoured disaffiliation.
- Migration Patterns: Immigration could contribute to Christian affiliation, but many new immigrants are also religiously unaffiliated.
- Birth Rates: More religious groups tend to have slightly higher birth rates, but this effect is weaker than the secularization trend.
Key Takeaways:This is a linear projection. In reality, trends may slow down or accelerate due to social, political, and cultural shifts. Let me know if you'd like a more complex model!
- Christianity is projected to fall below 50% by 2037.
- By 2050, only about 37% of U.S. adults may identify as Christian.
- If the trend continues, Christians could become a minority before 2070.
Taking these Pew Research Figure as the starting point, AI ChatGPT has projected forward to 2025 when Christian affiliation in the USA is projected to fall to 37%, having dipped below 50% in 2037.
A further factor in this projected religious decline is the marked tendency for people to become less religious (on all measure of religiosity) as they age:
According to Pew Research, time will tell whether the recent stability in measures of religious commitment is the beginning of a lasting shift in America’s religious trajectory. 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.
However, there is nothing to suggest such a change:
It might at first sight seem surprising that, with the craven abandonment of everything that is normally associated with Christian values by evangelical Christian churches in their support for Donald Trump's Repugnican Party, in return for the promise of political influence, the move away from fundamentalist Christianity hasn't been much higher. However, although the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest single Protestant denomination, it nevertheless accounts only for single figure percentages of those Americans self-identifying as Christian, so the fall from 6.7% in 2007 to 4.4% in 2024 (i.e., some 33%) has had only a minor impact on the overall figures.
Now the same evangelical Christian churches are in bed with what is shaping up to be a far right Trump regime in which compassion and inclusivity are seen as unpatriotic and weak and greed and selfishness, the antithesis of Christian values, are elevated to the status of a moral crusade, it will be interesting to see if revulsion for all they stand for affects the overall affiliation with Christianity, or whether Christianity aligns itself with the far right as it did in the 1930's.
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