Is Religion Obsolete?

According to a massive new Pew Research Center survey released in February 2025 (The Religious Landscape Study of U.S. Adults conducted July 17, 2023-March 4, 2024).

religiously unaffiliated adults – those who identify as atheists, agnostics or as “nothing in particular” when asked about their religion – account for 29% of the population. This rise of the "nones" appears to have leveled off and people are no longer leaving churches en masse as they have for the past several decades.

The latest RLS, fielded over seven months in 2023-24, finds that 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christians. That is a decline of 9 percentage points since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007. After many years of steady decline, the share of Americans who identify as Christians shows signs of leveling off – at least temporarily. 1.7% of U.S. adults identify religiously as Jewish. Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus each make up roughly 1% of Americans and 1.9% of U.S. adults identify religiously as "something else", including 1.1% of respondents who identify with Unitarianism or other liberal faiths, and 0.7% who identify with New Age groups.

But the New York Times reported on February 23, 2025, "Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they have a spiritual belief in one or more of the following:

• 86% believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.

• 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).

"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." This is because younger Americans are less religious that their elders."

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If you want to understand not just the what, but "why" religion has declined since the 1990's, check out University of Notre Dame socialogist Christian Smith's provocative 2025 book,Why Religion Went Obsolete, The book goes beyond the metrics of organizational indices and individual beliefs and practices to descibe the milieu or zeitheist (the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era) - complex cultural changes, particularly generational differences - larger social forces that have crowded out traditional religion. It is more a matter of obsolence than the tug and pull between religious and secularization forces. As Smith posits: it's more that younger people are just leaving the stadium where that game was being played.

Richard Ostling's April 22, 2025 article in Religion Unplugged offers a quick summary of Christian Smith's new book. For an informative, but much longer exposition watch Tripp Fuller's April 21, 2025 podcast interview with Christian Smith.