Half of Americans say they witness a miracle at least a few times a year: study

About half of Americans say they experience or witness a miracle at least a few times a year even as they hold a variety of views about organized religion and the afterlife, according to a new study.

The findings come from part one of the four-part Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University's "Survey of Lived Religion," released Thursday. Researchers say the survey paints a more nuanced picture of religious life in America than standard measures of church attendance capture.

While several studies have suggested the growth in the religiously unaffiliated reflects increased secularization, the Wheatley Institute found a changing but thriving spiritual life among Americans in its survey of 2,005 adults across major religious traditions.

“American religion is changing, not disappearing. The doom-and-gloom headlines capture something real about declining affiliation, but they miss the deeper story: Americans still live in a spiritually charged world,” researchers concluded. “They pray, give thanks, sense God’s presence, mark life with ritual, and face death with hope. Even many who claim no religion have not become flatly secular; they remain open to belief in God, spiritual experiences, sacred meaning, and life beyond this one.”

The researchers found that about three-quarters of Americans place at least some importance on religion. About 43% thank God multiple times a day, and only about a quarter of the religiously unaffiliated believe death is simply the end.

“The religious and spiritual lives of Americans are clearly not reducible to whether they attend services once a week or not; there is an internal spiritual dimension that can be easily missed. A large majority of Americans (76%) say they have experienced or witnessed a miracle, and about half experience one a few times a year or more,” researchers noted.

About 10% of respondents say they experience or witness what they consider a miracle more than once a week. Another 9% say they do so once a week, 11% once or twice a month and 20% a few times a year. About a quarter (26%) said they "seldom" experience a miracle, while 24% said they "never" have experienced a miracle. 

Americans also regularly thank God for their blessings, the survey found.

“Americans do not just believe that God speaks to them — they speak back. Seventy-seven percent thank God at least once a month, and four in ten do so multiple times each day, a higher share than those who regularly express gratitude to another person,” researchers said. “For many Americans, it would not be an exaggeration to posit that God is their primary outlet for gratitude. In a country routinely described as secularizing, the most common recipient of American gratitude remains the divine.”

A Gallup analysis from 2021 previously found that while America remains a highly religious nation, with seven in 10 Americans claiming affiliation with some kind of organized religion, fewer than half reported having formal membership in a specific house of worship, the first time in eight decades.

Americans with no formal religious identity, popularly known as the “nones,” also reached a record share of the population in 2025, according to Gallup. The same data shows fewer than 50% of adults say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Despite those findings, researchers said the boundary between “religious” and “none” is “far more porous than our categories imply.”

“The unaffiliated are not a secular bloc. Most believe in God or a higher power. Roughly half think people, places, or objects can hold spiritual power. Four in ten believe the universe can guide a person. Only about a quarter think death is simply the end, and a larger share say they are unsure what happens after death,” Wheatley Institute researchers noted. 

“‘None’ is an answer about institutional belonging that has been widely misread as an answer about metaphysics. Any analysis — journalistic, academic, or governmental — that categorically treats the growth of the ‘nones’ as the growth of secularism has already made a substantial error.”

According to the report, 68% of Americans say they have had a spiritual experience, including 46% who had one within the past month. Organized religious practice remains the most common form of worship, but researchers found that much of Americans’ spiritual life takes place outside churches and in solitude.

“Religious affiliation remains an important part of American life, but it captures only one dimension of our religious experience,” Paul Lambert, religion initiative director at the Wheatley Institute, said in a statement to CP.

“With this survey, we wanted to determine how spiritual beliefs transcend the boundaries of religious affiliation. What we found is that most Americans have an interior religious life that is robust and active, with many praying, thanking, reading, and listening — often daily and often alone.”