This once fast-growing religious group may have hit its upper limit — for now

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The seasons changed. The Utah Jazz broke fans’ hearts. And the number of Americans cutting loose from organized religion grew like alfalfa under the summer sun.

So it went, as inevitable as rush-hour traffic on Interstate 15, for 30 years.

Summer still follows spring, and the Utah Jazz are still “rebuilding,” but a massive dump of new data on religion in America suggests that the fastest-growing religious group from 1991 to 2021 may have run out of gas, at least for now.

This was the conclusion that Ryan Burge, associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, reached after combing through the findings of Harvard University’s 2023 Cooperative Election Survey (CES).

The report, released this month and based on more than 24,500 respondents nationwide, prompted the stats-loving Burge to declare in his latest newsletter: “It has become crystal clear to me now: The share of nonreligious Americans has stopped rising in any meaningful way.”

Understanding America’s nonreligious

America’s “nones” — atheists, agnostics and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” — are younger and more liberal than the country’s religiously affiliated, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.

Based on responses from more than 3,300 participants, the report found that most in this group believe in God or some higher power but reject the concepts of heaven and hell. Strict nonbelievers — those who don’t believe in God or a higher power, the human soul or any kind of life after death — made up about 20% of respondents.

The group is not uniformly anti-religion, with many expressing a belief that institutions of faith do good while also causing some harm.

Education levels, meanwhile, are mixed between the more educated atheists and agnostics, versus the “nothing in particular” crowd, who tend to have less schooling than the average religious adult in the United States.

What the numbers show

Between 1991 and 2021, the number of the country’s religiously unaffiliated shot up from 5% to “about” 30%, Burge, a pastor in the American Baptist Church, explained in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune.

Some of the greatest growth took place between 2008 and 2013, when it rocketed from 21% to 30%, according to the CES.

“That’s a massive shift in such a short window of time,” Burge wrote in his newsletter, “really stunning for anyone who studies demographics.”

Since 2020, however, that number has waffled between 34% and 36% — some years gaining and some years losing, but never budging more than a percentage point.

CES isn’t the only survey to observe a slowdown, either.

Pew pegged the number of “nones” at 28% in 2019 and 2023, with some minor fluctuation in between.

And while the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey found a jump from 23% in 2018 to 29% in 2021, its most recent study recorded a dip to 27% in 2022.

“On its own, this one data point does not an argument make,” Burge acknowledged in his newsletter. But pair it with the other studies, he continued, and “it feels like the polling data is converging on the same reality.”

More data may be needed

Ryan Cragun, a professor of sociology at the University of Tampa in Florida and co-author of “Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society,” is skeptical of Burge’s conclusions.

“From my perspective,” he said, “it’s way too early to say we’re seeing a plateauing.”

For an observation to rise to the level of an actual trend, Cragun said, it would need to be repeated for a minimum of five years and ideally as many as 10. Anything short of that is “noise in the data,” he said, and well within the kind of fluctuations researchers expect in year-to-year sampling.

Pew researchers agree with this assessment. In a write-up discussing their findings, they acknowledge that, while it’s “possible” the group has stalled out, “it’s also possible that their growth has continued, but at a gradual pace.”

Such possible trends, they explained, “are best assessed over the long haul, based on many survey readings.”

‘Religious polarization’

Burge doesn’t just offer data, however. He provides a theory for this possible plateau.

“In some ways,” he told The Tribune, “this speaks to the continuing religious polarization facing America.”

In the past, “a whole lot of people were marginally attached Christians,” he explained. These were the ones who showed up some years for Christmas, maybe Easter.

Burge believes these individuals have shaken loose the identifier of “Christian” (and it does appear to be Christianity, and in particular Protestant Christianity, taking the hit) in recent years.

“Now,” he said, “we are at the place where Christians are much more comfortable with that label — so are ‘nones.’”

The result: “We are getting a more accurate picture of what American religion actually looks like now,” he said. “People aren’t afraid to say what they really believe on surveys.”

Put another way, Burge wrote in his newsletter: “The loose topsoil has been scooped off and hauled away, leaving nothing but hard bedrock underneath.”

That’s not to say the number will remain completely flat for the foreseeable future.

“Older people will not live forever,” he wrote. “Instead, they will be leaving this Earth and their replacements will be a whole lot of members of Gen Z, who tend to be less religious than their grandparents.”

Critically, however, “the generational gap between those groups,” he observed, “may be smaller now than many initially thought.”

Reasons for skepticism

Cragun cast doubt on Burge’s thinking here as well, pushing back against the idea that religions are merely sloughing off the uncommitted.

“There’s definitely a mass deconstruction of religiosity going on,” he said, including among previously devout members of so-called “strict” religions.

“There’s been some debate if it’s [the Christmas and Easter Christians] or the devout Mormons who served missions going to church each week who are leaving,” he said. “Turns out, it’s everybody.”

The data is clear, he said: “There’s no subset that’s not affected by secularization.”

Cragun also isn’t convinced that, extending Burge’s metaphor, the “loose topsoil” has been totally removed.

“We’ve known for almost 30 years that only about 20% of Americans regularly attend religious services,” he said. “I have data that suggests it’s substantially lower than that. You just have to do a little bit of basic math … to know we haven’t scratched the surface of that bedrock.”

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