What if America’s religious decline has been overstated?

Over the past decade, the secular media has told us incessantly that American Christianity is in its death throes. The number one news story on religion in recent years has been the rise of the “Nones,” or people who say they have no religion.

So, is it finally the end for American faith? No. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll see why it’s not.

More people tell pollsters today that they have no religion. The total number of Nones, agnostics, and atheists rose from about 16% to 28% of respondents between 2007 and 2023, according to Pew Research.

A generation ago, cultural Christianity had a stronger hold in America. People then were likelier to say they were Christians, even if they never went to church. Today such people often just concede that they don’t have any formal religion.

The growing number of Nones has made America less superficially Christian. But from the Church’s perspective, this presents an opportunity. If a None visits your Church, they will not be confused about whether they’re a real Christian, unlike many nominal Christians in the Bible Belt.

Most polls do not ask follow-up questions about a person’s religious identity. When they do ask Nones about their specific beliefs, however, we see that they overwhelmingly believe in God (or a “higher power”), and they think people have souls.

The media regularly lumps Nones together with atheists and agnostics. However, the number of atheists and agnostics is not growing. Only the Nones have seen a significant leap in the past two decades.

Nones also display surprisingly high rates of spiritual practices and experiences. Some have been “born again.” Many Nones pray at least occasionally; some pray regularly. A small but significant number of Nones even attend church.

Whatever the reason for the Nones’ ascent in polls between about 2007 and 2023, their growth appears to have stopped. Even the Pew Research Center, the chief promoter of the Nones narrative, conceded that the Nones plateaued at around 29% of respondents by 2025. Again, Pew conflates atheists and agnostics with those who believe in “nothing in particular.” They label them all as Nones. In our view, this is a distortion of the data.

However you interpret the Nones, though, more than 60% of Americans still identify as Christians. This is a notable decline since 2007, when about 78% of respondents said they were Christians. But it doesn’t reflect a tidal wave of unbelief, either.

More intriguing for the future, however, are religious “switchers,” as well as a large cohort we call the “Others.”

Americans regularly switch religious affiliations. Perhaps you know someone who grew up Pentecostal, stopped attending church in their late teens, and then became a Catholic (or some other denominational transition) after getting married.

Some news stories tell us that this person has left “their childhood religion.” But that headline leaves out the most important part, which is that they end their journey by choosing another Christian group.

Even some conservative Christians tout the leaving theme and warn about how many children “leave the faith” after high school. To be sure, some youth group kids do “deconstruct,” leave Christianity, and never return to church.

But the data tell us little about how many people switch denominations versus how many leave religion altogether. Most polls only capture snapshots about random people at a moment in time. The next group of polling snapshots is not the same people. We don’t see the longer trajectory or where they settle religiously.

For many young adults, leaving your “childhood religion” ultimately means choosing a new Christian denomination and staying there. This type of switching makes American religion stronger, not weaker.

Unlike switchers, the massive group of Others is simply absent from public discussions of religion. These are the millions of Americans who attend church regularly but who are never counted in standard surveys of congregational life. Why aren’t they counted? Because surveyors don’t know the Others exist, or they are unable to get congregational data from them.

The Others are often non-denominational, or their church is part of a relatively new denomination. Their congregations tend to be largely African American, Latino, and/or immigrant-focused. Some of these churches meet in storefronts or in another congregation’s building. But some are prominent megachurches.

What the Others mainly have in common is that the Congregational Census (CC), the standard survey of American congregations, does not include them. County-level studies in diverse parts of the U.S. show that the CC undercounts the total number of religious congregations by at least 25%, and sometimes as much as 40%.

This means there are tens of thousands of congregations, and perhaps tens of millions of Others, who are unknown and uncounted in surveys of the state of Christianity.

Thus, sensational reports about the Nones are overblown. Meanwhile, there are tens of millions of Bible-believing Christians who are simply absent from the coverage of Christianity’s alleged demise. American religion is changing, for sure. But we don’t buy the headlines about its massive decline.

Predictions about the death of religion are as old as America itself. Don’t take the latest doom-and-gloom reports at face value. Look more closely, and you will find that American Christianity is surprising, dynamic, and always underestimated.

We went for years without going to church, but were Christians all along. There are also a lot of Christians who watch church services on tv. It’s not as obedient as attending church, but it’s still worship.

Hi... I’m van see the disaster in lumping nones, agnostics, and atheists in one dog pile.

I suggest the nones choose that, to get the pollster to shut up, go away and leave me alone.

The agnostics agree there is something bigger than ourselves, but cannot come to s common consensus of what that should be.

The atheists, from what I have witnessed, look at everybody of every other belief system, (including “moose limbs”), as straight bat guano nuts.

So, the lumping does a disservice in misrepresenting the first two groups, while accepting the premise of the third, outright.

I do think, with enough credible information
to to redress any ‘yeah, but”, you might again an agnostic’s acceptance.

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