For most of the last 30 years, the story of religion in America has been a pretty steady one: a constant, and consistent, drop in religious affiliation every year.
Starting in the 1990s, the share of Americans who identified as Christian, or identified with any religion at all, began to drop precipitously. At the same time, those with no religious affiliation — nicknamed “nones” — began to spike.
Americans have been steadily losing their religion entirely. They haven’t been converting to other religions, or getting religion later in life.
That trend might be ending. Over the last five years, the share of Americans who are “nones” has stabilized at roughly 30 percent, across multiple tracking surveys — largely because of one group: zoomers.
Sometime around or after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, young Americans began to find, or at least retain, religious belief at higher rates than previous generations. The numbers tell this story quite cleanly. While the share of “nones” jumped by about 40 percent from 2008 to 2013, the rise began to slow between 2013 and 2018.
Then, in 2020, it stagnated.
According to associate professor of political science and data analyst Ryan Burge, who has been tracking this trend over the last few years, that stagnation can largely be traced to younger generations now losing their religion at slower rates than older generations.
“From a pure statistical standpoint, I don’t know if we can say with any certainty whether there’s a larger share of nones in the United States today than there was in 2019,” he wrote in 2024.
Gen Z seems to be the key. Recently, The Economist analyzed findings from the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, and found that zoomers are the only generation not losing their religious affiliation. Why? There’s no unifying explanation for this trend, but it extends beyond the United States. And that suggests that there might be some structural reasons Gen Z is rediscovering faith. Something about post-Covid seems to be bringing youth back to Christianity, specifically, but also to religion in general.
There are three potential explanations:
A response to the loneliness epidemic?
That Gen Z, and younger Americans in general, feels more lonely and isolated from each other and society in general is one of the defining stories of the 2020s. Anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of Gen Z reports feeling isolated, alone, or disconnected from the world, a dynamic that has bled into the way they socialize, date, get married, or find community in general.
Some have attributed this dynamic to the rise of social media, and of smartphones, in the pandemic lockdown period that defined the adolescence of so much of Gen Z, and a resulting “mental health crisis” in response.
Just how unique these are to Gen Z (as opposed to how any generation might have felt during these tumultuous years of life), is up for debate still, but it still follows that some members of this generation who do feel isolated or lost might be finding community and friendship in organized religion.
This social aspect to religion, and the idea of a third space or community created through churches, is an oft-repeated explanation in the reporting and surveying of zoomers who are returning to church. Church offers “solace,” and young newcomers report attending services “to feel less ‘lost’.” As one Massachusetts zoomer told The Economist, though friends and family may come and go, “people in church don’t get to reject you.”
A response to loss of trust in the establishment?
Relatedly, religiosity and spirituality becoming less taboo among Gen Z might be a part of a countercultural, counter-status quo, anti-incumbency energy that has swept many Western democracies since the pandemic’s outbreak. It might seem odd to think of religion as countercultural, but at least for many of the youngest Americans, growing religious disaffiliation has been the popular narrative and posturing of their elders.
In that way, it makes sense that religious unaffiliation might have hit a ceiling at the start of the Covid-era, as Western societies — and particularly younger people — began to question orthodoxies, political and secular institutions, and conventional political parties and leaders.
Some young respondents to surveys and journalists report that atheism, agnosticism, and indifference to religion became a kind of status-quo, mainstream opinion, boosted in particular by the quick religious dissociation of the millennial generation — the cohort of Americans who seem to have had the strongest liberal and secular bend. At least in the United Kingdom and in the United States, some degree of Gen Z’s slowing religious dissociation is related to an increase in anti-mainstream, anti-status quo religious fervor: In the United Kingdom, for example, where Anglicanism has long been the mainstream, Catholicism has recently fueled the the rise in religious identification. In the United States, where various types of Protestantism used to be associated with elite culture, Catholicism has risen on the right, while various evangelical, and both Catholicism more tolerant nondenominational Christian churches, have grown, as opposed to more popular atheism or agnosticism.
A response — or cause — of younger people’s rightward political and social shift?
There’s a sharp gender divide in who is driving the Gen Z religious shift. Young Gen Z men are becoming much more religious, while young women keeping a religious affiliation are shifting to more politically liberal and tolerant faith traditions, particularly in the US.
This gender divide is quite dramatic: Gen Z men are significantly more likely to attend religious services than Gen Z women, a reversal from what the norm was in the US. And young women are leaving American churches en masse, largely because of political and ideological cross-pressures on what these churches teach about gender norms, sexual identity, and gender equality, as well as the roles they offer women in religious institutions and the political leanings of some churches, according to research from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life.
One Survey Center study, for example, found that about two-thirds of young women believe “most churches and religious congregations” don’t treat men and women equally, while the Public Religion Research Institute has consistently found that the “negative treatment of gay and lesbian people” has been key driver of young women away from organized religions. That might be amplified by the fact that high rates of Gen Z women, some three in 10, now identify as LGBTQ.
At the same time, the subtle integration of religious traits into the teachings and preachings of some alt-right, manosphere-adjacent content creators who have a particular reach with young men, might be amplifying this tension. The result is a generation of men finding community and belonging in religion, that reinforces their existing political preferences, and causes a further rightward lurch (as was seen in the 2024 election).
Whether these trends continue doesn’t seem guaranteed. If anything the data suggests we may have reached a temporary equilibrium in religious affiliation and belief that might change as older, more religious Americans, continue to pass away. The strongest social research suggests that biggest driver and predictor of continued religious identification is how religious your parents were — so if a more religious and faithful Gen Z ends up keeping that faith, and raising their children with the same norms, what looked like an inevitable and endless decline in American religiosity may have been less drastic than it appeared.
