Religious identification, service attendance remains steady after years of decline: Pew
Religious identification and practice in the United States are holding steady after years of reported decline, according to new Pew Research Center data.
In a report published Wednesday citing data from its “Comparing Results Across Religious Landscape Studies," Pew found 70% of Americans surveyed in 2026 said they identify with a religion, compared with 71% in 2020.
While that is below the 83% who said the same in 2007 and the 77% in 2014, researchers say the results in the last six years show that "steady percentages” of Americans “identify with a religion, pray daily, consider religion to be very important in their lives and attend religious services at least monthly."
The share who said they pray remained steady from 48% in 2020 to 47% in 2026, while the share who said religion is “very important” in their lives remained steady at 45% in 2020 and 44% in 2026.
The data show that about one-third of respondents in 2026 (34%) reported attending religious services in person in the last month, while 45% said they either attended in person, online or watched on TV. In 2020, during the pandemic closures, 13% said they attended in person, while 41% said they either attended in person, online or through TV.
When it comes to young adults, however, researchers say the data found "mixed signals" amid reports suggesting a religious resurgence could be underway in the demographic, "especially young conservative men.”
“On the one hand, as the very youngest adults (born from 2004 to 2008, now roughly ages 18 to 22) come of age, they are reporting relatively high rates of attendance at religious services,” Pew said.
“On the other hand, young adults who are only slightly older (born from 2000 to 2003, now roughly 23 to 26) are the least religious age group when it comes to how often they pray, how important religion is in their lives and how many of them identify with a religion.”
In 2015, Pew released an extensive study that found a sharp rise in the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion, commonly known as religious “nones.”
While Christians remained the largest religious group in the country, Pew reported at the time that their share of the population fell from 78.4% to 70% from 2007 to 2014.
“The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics,” the research group reported in 2015.
“Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately 3 percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share of the U.S. population also has dipped, but at a slower rate, falling by about 1 percentage point since 2007.”
More recently, several reports have indicated that the share of religious nones in the U.S. has plateaued and may even be starting to shrink, including among young people.
A 2021 report from the Public Religion Research Institute’s (PRRI) Census of American Religion found that 25.5% of Americans identified as nones in 2018, but that figure dipped to 23.3% in 2020.
