Tre’ Giles heard a lot about different spiritualities from young people in Portland, Oregon. The Bridgetown Church minister met teenagers and young adults who had faith in astrology, of course, but also crystals, aliens, Native American ideas about nature, paganism, pantheism, assorted wellness-focused mysticisms, and even, he told Christianity Today, a floating pizza in the sky.
Often they believed all of it, all at once.
“It’s playful, and it’s kind of like a charcuterie board,” said Giles, who left Bridgetown last fall and now serves as national director of campus engagement for Alpha USA. “You can sample it. You can taste it. But you don’t have to have a whole meal of it.”
Eclectic and esoteric spirituality is not just a “keep Portland weird” thing, either. A massive study of the American religious landscape from Pew Research Center, released today, found that few 18- to 29-year-olds consider themselves religious. A majority—54 percent—never attend religious services of any kind, and another 21 percent say they only attend once or twice a year.
Most young adults, however, say that they are spiritual. More than 70 percent of people born between 2000 and 2006 believe there is something beyond the natural world, Pew’s survey found. Eighty-two percent believe people have souls, 76 percent believe in God or a universal spirit, and nearly 60 percent report feeling a supernatural presence several times a year or more.
Researchers collected data from more than 36,000 people for this study, with representative samples from all 50 states and Washington, DC. The extensive survey attempts to offer “authoritative estimates of the U.S. population’s religious composition, beliefs and practices,” according to Pew, and it is widely seen as the most comprehensive study of American religion today.
Two previous Pew studies charted the sharp decline of Christianity in America. The number of people identifying as Christian dropped by about 5 million over seven years, while the percentage saying they had no religious affiliation, the group that sociologists call “nones,” rose to include nearly one-quarter of all adults in America.
The new study confirms the country has become markedly less religious in the 21st century. About a third of people say religion is not as important to them as it was to their parents. Only 5 percent say they go to church more now than they did when they were children. Nearly half of people say they never attend religious services, not even on Christmas or Easter.
The study also found that roughly six people have left Christianity for every one who has joined. More have abandoned Catholicism than Protestantism, but even Protestants in America have seen nearly twice as many leave the faith as join it, according to Pew. Less than half the people raised in Christian homes in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s still consider themselves believers.
That doesn’t appear to be changing as people get older, either. Seventy-three percent of Americans report that they’ve not become more religious as they’ve aged.
The decline of Christianity has slowed, though—and maybe even leveled off, according to the study released Wednesday. The percentage of Protestants in America hasn’t gone down significantly since 2019, and Catholic numbers have remained steady since 2014. The percentage of people who pray every day (44%) and go to church on a regular basis (33%) has also remained relatively stable. The nones seem to have plateaued at about 29 percent of the population.
But Pew researchers don’t expect this to last long. They project that Christianity in America will start to decline again soon and probably go quite rapidly.
“Older, highly religious, heavily Christian generations are passing away,” the study reports. “The younger generations succeeding them are much less religious, with smaller percentages of Christians.”
Seventy-eight percent of Americans over the age of 65 are Christian, according to Pew. And nearly three-quarters of people that age say that their religion is important to them.
Most Americans between the ages of 18 and 29, by contrast, do not identify as Christians.
Only 8 out of every 100 young adults are Baptist. Another 6 are nondenominational. Another 2, Pentecostal and 14 are Catholic. Less than 1 percent of young adults identify as Reformed, Anabaptist, or Anglican, respectively. One out of 100 are Eastern Orthodox. Slightly more than that are Methodist, if you count 18- to 29-year-olds in the United Methodist Church, the Global Methodist Church, the three historically Black Methodist churches, the Free Methodist Church, and all the holiness denominations combined.
Roughly half of young adults who are religious, further, tell Pew their religion is not significant to them personally.
The largest “religious” group of young people is actually those who say they don’t have a religious identity. Forty-four percent are nones.
But this isn’t the future that New Atheists dreamed of, either. Americans remain quite spiritual, and many believe in the supernatural.
Seventy-nine percent say there is a spiritual reality beyond nature, and 61 percent say they sense the presence of something supernatural at least several times per year. Eighty-six percent believe people have spirits, and 70 percent say they think there’s an afterlife—either heaven, hell, or both.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans say they’ve felt spiritual peace in the last year. More than 60 percent report thinking about God a lot.
Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who consulted with Pew on the study, said that in a time of division and polarization, the consensus on spirituality is remarkable.
“Religious affiliation is now just optional; it’s not taken for granted,” Edgell said. “But spirituality is not declining. … I think it’s a story of spirituality and diffusion, spirituality becoming diffuse outside of religious institutions.”
The new Pew study also found that spirituality is increasing as people age. More than 4o percent say they’ve gotten more religious as they’ve grown older, compared to just 11 percdent who say they’ve become less spiritual. The people who’ve gotten more spiritual report feeling a strong sense of gratitude or thankfulness with increased frequency. They find themselves praying more often, and say that they regularly experience “the presence of something from beyond this world.”
Researchers don’t expect spirituality to drop off dramatically in the coming years, because the study found that younger people are quite spiritual too. According to Pew, most people born between 2000 and 2006 believe in heaven (61%) and hell (54%). Sixty-six percent report regular feelings of deep wonder at the universe. Fifty-six percent pray on a regular basis.
For Christians like Giles, who want to engage young people in deeper conversations about God and the gospel, that’s a positive sign.
“Prayer is so easy to talk about,” Giles told CT. “Everyone I talked to in Portland was open to it. Maybe they had different ideas or names for it, maybe they believed in meditation, but they’re exploring and curious about how, like, our bodies might connect to the earth, and beauty, and something beyond what you can just see and hear.”
The Alpha USA minister said young people across the country seem increasingly open to spiritual questions and open to hearing that the answer to their longings can be found in Jesus.
“I believe in the bone of my bones, like deep inside of my body, that God is doing something big,” Giles said, pointing to the Asbury University outpouring as one example. “There’s this expectation, and there’s this hunger. Everyone has something rumbling.”
Keithen Schwahn, the young-adult pastor at Church of the City in New York City, has the same feeling. He’s seen his church’s teenage discipleship group grow from about 5 young people to more than 100 in a few years. College students are starting prayer groups and Bible studies on their own at schools like Pace University and New York University and are seeing them blossom and grow.
The decline of Christianity can feel palpable in the city, Schwahn told CT, like they’re living on the front end of an irreversible trend. But then there’s this ohter thing that seems to be happening. Young people are interested in all kinds of spiritualities and discover, in their exploration, the very Spirit bearing witnessing with their spirits that they are children of God and joint heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:16–17).
“The moment when it feels like the church is in decline is the kind of moment where God could grab a new apostle Paul,” Schwahn said. “I’ve been seeing God raise up apostles—the least likely—who are on the other side of surrender to Jesus.”
The post Pew: America Is Spiritual but Not Religious appeared first on Christianity Today.