The Slow Grind of Change: What the 2024 GSS Tells Us About American Religion

Association of Religion Data Archives ^ | Dec 4, 2025 | Ryan Burge

[daniel1212]

One of the most important cyclical events in my life as a data analyst of American religion is the semi-regular release of the General Social Survey.... I was more than pleased that the Association of Religion Data Archives had already managed to upload the 2024 General Social Survey to their website...

I wanted to do a really tight “zoom in” on the changes in the religious composition of the GSS before the pandemic and then in the 2024 data. So, here’s how things have shifted since 2016.

...

You can see some really significant swings in these figures from 2018. For evangelicals, they dropped 4 percentage points. Meanwhile, the nones rose about the same share. ...

the share of young adults who were evangelical in 2018 was 14.8%. It was 15% in 2024. The share who were nones went from 40.5% to 41.8%..

That’s not the case for the 30-44 year old crowd, though. The evangelical numbers dropped big time during this six year window from 26% to 20% and the nones rose a commensurate amount (7.5 points). I think that this is THE takeaway from this analysis because the other age groups just show a whole lot of stasis between 2018 and 2024...

about 42-43% of Generation Z are non-religious...Where did the nones come from? Two groups: Catholics and those of other faith traditions. Both dropped by double digits...The real movement is in middle adulthood, not youth

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TOPICS: Daily Prayer; History; Religion; Society
KEYWORDS: atheism; boomers; catholic; evangelical; genx; genz; millennial; religionstats; youth

[daniel1212]

excerpts of https://www.thearda.com/categories/ahead-of-the-trend/the-slow-grind-of-change-what-the-2024-gss-tells-us-about-american-religion

[daniel1212]

Ping interest:

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[daniel1212]

Notice (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Yl-C!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F00da41c6-83e8-4fb9-b085-fdf402d8ee81_1600x1066.png) that in 2024:

43% of the growing "No Religion" class are liberal, vs. 7% of Black Protestants (in profession, but not in voting) 9% of Evangelical; 10% of Mainline; 13% of Other faiths and 21% of Catholics;

And skipping the "Moderate' category, then 34% of Evangelicals rank as Conservative; as do 24% of Catholics; and 15% of "No Religion" and 11% of "Other faiths" likewise Black Protestants.

[Tell It Right]

My take. I'll be happy for anyone else's input.

The blue and red bars are bad. Red = nonbelievers. Blue = "mainline" = hedonist promoting leftist churches.

The other colors are good. Orange = "evangelical" = Protestants that aren't leftists. Same with purple = Black Protestant (for the most part not Hedonist promoting). Green = Catholic = also not Hedonist leftists. Yellow = "Other faiths" which I assume is non-denominational. I'm cool with that one too because most of them aren't hedonist fake Christian promoting leftists. At least if I understand the groups correctly.

Put that altogether and I read it like 2018 had 45.5% bad (red + yellow) that shrunk to 44.7% bad by 2024. A decrease in the bad and increase in the good groups (yay!). But I agree with the author that this change is small: "There’s just nothing to write home about there".

[Tell It Right]

The graph above but shrunk to fit (at least on my screen).

[Tell It Right]

My bad. I looked at the colors and numbers again. It's a slight increase in the bad.

2018: 32.2% (red no religion + blue "mainline)
2024: 33.9% (red + blue)

So a slight increase in the "bad" groups (thus slight decrease in the good ones). But still slight enough to not write home about.

[SunkenCiv]

Thx.

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[UnwashedPeasant]

The last two popes have been hard Left kooks. That probably drives a lot of normies out of the Catholic Church.

[Elsie]

Let's make this fit a little better.

[Elsie]

OTHER? (Muslim?)

[Elsie]

Looks like Mainline losing to Other.

down from high of 11.7% total to  8.7% is a -26% change

up  from  low  of  8.2% total to 11.3% is a +37% change

[daniel1212]

"There’s just nothing to write home about there".

Excerpt the middle aged heading South more any other demographic.

[daniel1212]

I see! I have tried to manually adjust such, but it is trial and error. And as about every third word I type is a typo due to stiff arthritic typo-fingers, is there a site that adjust images for you?

[Tell It Right]

The way I do it is to type this image tag (or copy/paste it somewhere):

<img width=400 src="">

And then I just copy/paste the web address of the image between the quotes. Almost always, a width of 400 is fine. Every now and then I stretch it out if the graphic is short and wide (like if I'm posting one of the climate change graphs from https://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/8/8f/Ice_ages2.gif).

[daniel1212]

The way I do it is to type this image tag (or copy/paste it somewhere): And then I just copy/paste the web address of the image between the quotes. Almost always, a width of 400 is fine. Every now and then I stretch it out if the graphic is short and wide (like if I'm posting one of the climate change graphs from https://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/8/8f/Ice_ages2.gif).

Works:

I can save your code to QuickPaste and hot key it.

Try another fav from my collection:

That works, but I though the height had to correspond. Try another:

That looks skewed.