On a Sunday morning in January, 20- and 30-somethings packed the chapel inside Temple Ohabei Shalom, a historic synagogue on the main thoroughfare of a quiet residential neighborhood near Boston. Stained-glass windows and stage lights cast a kaleidoscope of colors across the dimly lit space. The congregants were part of Grace City, a nondenominational church that began meeting in the synagogue last fall after outgrowing their previous meeting spot at a coworking space downtown. The church started in 2019 with just 50 people, but after Covid, attendance surged.
The service opened with a Christian worship song backed by drums and guitar, and people kept trickling in, scanning for open seats. Volunteers hurried to set up an extra row of folding chairs. At the entrance, attendees picked up small hourglass-shaped containers of grape juice and crackers for “bread and cup,” a contemporary take on communion. Some sat cross-legged on the floor, notebooks and Bibles propped open; others stood, cradling coffee mugs. As the band got louder, a dad slipped noise-canceling headphones onto his baby’s head.
In Boston — “a secular wasteland,” as one service attendee put it — a 9:30 a.m. gathering of young Christians, who could otherwise be at brunch or at the gym, felt countercultural. “There is no social pathos in being a Christian,” says Pastor Brian Owen, a boyish 40-year-old with a mustache. He moved to Boston from Tennessee with his wife and two children to establish Grace City church. “You’re seen as a weirdo. You’re actually seen as (culturally) dangerous,” he says. It’s partly why Owen saw Boston’s transient urban setting as fertile ground for his work as a church planter. Now, over 300 people gather at one of two services offered every Sunday.
On the morning I visited, Owen preached about the “Christian ethic of love,” then announced the kickoff of a 40-day digital fast — a collective effort to cut screen time — and a potluck to be held after the service.
I asked him how he explained the growth of his church, especially in what’s considered to be one of the most godless parts of the country. “I think that this generation in particular — so Gen X and millennials — they’ve been the most marketed-to generation. They have access to everything. But that access has not equated to satisfaction; it has not equated to more joy,” says Owen. “They’re figuring out there must be something more to life than what I see and I feel. I think that’s drawing people back to spirituality. They’re drawn to the unseen because they have experienced what the seen has to offer, and they still find it lacking.”
The vibrancy at Grace City is striking, because so many Americans have stopped going to church. Congregations across the country have been dwindling for decades. Research has found that nearly 86 churches close every week. A third of Americans attend religious services in person once a month. In 2021, U.S. church membership fell below 50 percent for the first time in recorded history, according to Gallup, down from 70 percent in 1999. The share of Americans who identify as Christians dropped from 78 percent to 71 percent between 2007 and 2014, according to Pew Research Center.
As Christians shed their religious identity and practice, another religious group — the religiously unaffiliated “nones,” as they’ve come to be known — soared in growth. Between 1991 and 2020, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans skyrocketed from about 5 to nearly 30 percent, making this group the largest and the fastest-growing religious demographic in the country.
But since 2020, the rapid ascent has leveled off, signaling that the meteoric trajectory of secularization has hit a ceiling. Today, the 29 percent of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated include 5 percent of self-described atheists, 6 percent of agnostics and 19 percent who say they’re “nothing in particular,” according to Pew’s new 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study. Alongside the plateau among the nones, the drop in Christianity has leveled off at 62 percent. The study, the third of its kind following those in 2007 and 2014, surveyed close to 37,000 Americans.
The growth of the religiously unaffiliated and the decline of Christianity are “the flip sides of the same coin,” says Gregory Smith, senior associate director of research at Pew, who worked on the study. “It’s very striking that over the last five years, both of those trends have leveled off.”
Two possible reasons explain the plateau. Unlike the long-term decline, religiousness across all ages — measured by factors such as prayer frequency and Christian identity — has remained relatively stable since 2020. Pew also found that the gap in religiosity between the youngest generation surveyed and those just ahead of them is much more narrow. That is to say, those between 18 to 24 are not significantly less religious or less Christian than adults ages 25 to 34. The youngest adults are just as likely to pray daily and identify as Christian than their slightly older counterparts, Pew found. In fact, the percentage of those young adults among all nones has declined from 34 percent in 2014 to 28 percent today.
Yet, the factors driving the long-term downward trajectory of religion still persist. For instance, the younger generations are still significantly less religious than their elders. They neither pray nor attend religious services as often and fewer identify as Christians than the oldest adults, who are in their 70s. Only 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 years old attend religious services at least monthly. Adults between 30 and 49 years old make up 41 percent of the nones, followed by the youngest adults (18-24) at 28 percent. This means that 7 in 10 of religiously unaffiliated adults in the U.S. are under the age of 50.
Evolving beliefs
The social scientists I spoke with are cautious about interpreting this recent leveling off of the nones as a long-term reversal of growing secularization — let alone a religious revival. The nones are likely going to continue to rise, Pew predicts, just at a slower pace. Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, likened the 30-year surge of the nones to an early internet startup phase of explosive growth, now settling into a more “methodical” and “controlled” pace of long-term growth driven primarily by the demographic replacement: The more religious generations will gradually give way to younger, less religiously affiliated ones. “The rise of the nones will be more based on generational replacement than people leaving religion,” Burge says.
But alongside these demographic shifts, the beliefs of Americans are evolving, too. A large majority of Americans, 86 percent, believe they have a soul or spirit inhabiting the physical body and 83 percent believe in God or a universal spirit. Among the youngest adults, 63 percent say they feel a “deep sense of wonder about the universe at least monthly,” according to Pew. Weekly, 63 percent of Americans engage in activities like listening to music, meditating, visiting nature or “centering” themselves — for a spiritual purpose. Pew also found that religion and spirituality are not at odds with each other: Those who identify with a religion are more likely than those who are nonreligious to be spiritual.
While traditionally nonreligious, nones are still a believing group, the data show, just in a different way. Fifty-seven percent of religiously unaffiliated, across all age groups, believe in a spiritual dimension beyond the material world and 69 percent affirm the existence of a soul or spirit in the body.
And they’re not antagonistic toward religion: 19 percent of the religiously unaffiliated say religion is very or somewhat important to them, and among the “nothing in particular,” 69 percent believe in God or a universal spirit. Rather than rejecting belief and spirituality outright, many are reshaping those concepts on their own terms, crafting individualized frameworks in place of traditional religious structures. If religious identity was once seen as a binary — either religious or secular — a third category has emerged. “It’s neither hardcore secular nor traditionally religious,” says Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame. “It shares with religion; it believes in spiritual realities.”
The shift isn’t confined to America, either. Globally, many are still clinging to belief of some sort. Eighty-two percent of people worldwide consider themselves religious or spiritual, or they would describe themselves as a person of faith, according to a 2022 survey conducted by HarrisX and the Faith & Media Initiative. Also, 72 percent believe in God and other deities.
But for religion to take hold long term, something would have to change, the Pew report concluded: “ For example, today’s young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults who are more religious than their parents would have to emerge.”
“They’ve been the most marketed-to generation. They have access to everything. But that access has not equated to satisfaction; it has not equated to more joy,”
One of Ashley Fitzgerald’s most vivid memories of growing up in the Lutheran church was walking down the aisle as Santa Lucia, an Italian saint celebrated during Christmastime. She wore a flowing white dress with a red sash and a crown of candles on her head. Fitzgerald, who is now an environmental sociologist in Chicago, went on to attend a Catholic high school — while not a deeply religious experience, still one that was shaped by tradition.
But in college, on the liberal campus of the University of Chicago in the early 2000s, when the ideas of the New Atheism movement were taking hold, being religious was a sign of intellectual inferiority or, as Fitzgerald put it, it meant you were “dumb.” So she stopped going to church. It didn’t help that her Lutheran church on campus was poorly attended. “(Religion) just wasn’t part of my life. I didn’t think about it much,” she says. As she had kids, she “didn’t explicitly feel called to go to church.”
Smith describes a complex cluster of reasons that have accelerated the secularization of people like Fitzgerald since 1991 as “convergence of multiple perfect storms.” After the Cold War, Americans no longer felt compelled to embrace Christianity as a national identity in opposition to communist atheism. Mounting sexual abuse scandals and failures to address them in Catholic and evangelical churches eroded trust in organized religion, fueling broader disillusionment with American institutions. The religious underpinnings of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the digital revolution’s widespread dissemination of information and postmodernist relativism led many to withdraw from institutional faith.
Religion also became entangled in the growing political divisions. More than ever before, particularly among white Americans, the more religious tend to align with the Republican Party and lean conservative, while those who are less religious more often lean liberal. This shift is especially pronounced on the left, Pew found. Among the liberals in the U.S., 37 percent consider themselves Christian, which is a 25-point drop from 62 percent in 2007, according to the survey. While conservatives for the most part identify as Christian, there are now more religious nones than Christians among the liberals, the study noted. “ The cultural status of religion has been put on the defensive. It’s characterized as authoritarian and it’s patriarchal,” says Smith, who is the author of the book “Why Religion Went Obsolete.” “These complaints have always been around, but now they’ve become much more dominant.”
As societal fragmentation deepened, political polarization, institutional distrust and the erosion of shared narratives left many feeling unmoored. Anxiety and depression have surged, and loneliness has been declared the epidemic of our time. “It’s not just religion, there’s a growing individualization and distrust of anything involving power, money and authority,” says Smith.
Seeking a solid footing
Institutions have plenty of flaws, but “how does society instill morals in people without any kind of moral framework?” That was the question Fitzgerald, 39, began wrestling with the past three years, as her three children got older. “At the same time, these are the institutions that have evolved over centuries to develop a moral framework, and that moral framework can’t really just be plucked out of individual families’ brains,” she says. “ I think it’s a little bit unfair in some ways that my parents and my husband’s parents took the time to get us acquainted with our ancestral religions, and I’m not giving that same gift to my kids,” says Fitzgerald. She tells me she’s watched her friends cycle through attempts at finding purpose and belonging — Buddhism, yoga, psychedelics. “It’s just a really painful process if you don’t have any guidance at all,” she says. “It’s a huge cultural barrier to get baptized as an adult and to get started again and you don’t even know where to start.”
As more people enter adulthood without religious affiliation, the question looms: What, if anything, can replace the communal structure and moral frameworks that religious institutions used to provide? “There is a definite lostness — and I don’t mean that in theological terms, but I mean who are we as a people? Where are we going? What is life about? What do I want my life to be? What can you rely on? What’s true?” says Smith, who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism 15 years ago. “There is this smoldering resentment and not feeling attached to the standard mainstream American way of life in which they’ve always understood religion to be part of.”
Research suggests that religion could benefit from better representation in the media and entertainment to help people sort out those questions. The Faith & Media Initiative’s Global Faith and Entertainment Study in 2023 found that 63 percent believe that the entertainment industry reinforces religious stereotypes and 80 percent say it’s important to make portrayals of faith on screen more accurate.
As I’ve talked to believers, and skeptics, about what’s driving people to — and away — from religion, a recurring theme emerged: In a fluid world of impersonal connections, where few things are unmediated by technology, people are seeking a solid footing, an honest and genuine connection. People are “toying with new ways of wrestling with the language surrounding these spiritual beliefs,” says Ryan Cragun, a sociologist of religion at the University of Tampa. In reassessing their relationship with the broader sources of meaning, belonging and transcendence, for many, religious belief is emerging as a viable option.
“There is this narrative that the institution of religion is dying, but I think that the desire for Jesus is more prevalent than ever,” says 23-year-old Tucker Thomas, a Grace City worshipper, who grew up nonreligious in Colorado, but converted to Christianity after a friend invited him to take an introductory course on the basics of Christian belief.
“Both at the individual level and at the cultural level, people had to go through an experience of separation from religion before they were ready to consider some of its arguments afresh,” says Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, whose latest book, “Believe,” makes a case for why religious belief makes rational sense. “And now I think we’re in a different moment.”
There are other signs of vitality across other faith communities. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has one of the highest portions of younger people among its congregants
When choosing a church to join with her family, it ultimately came down to community for Fitzgerald. The family tried the Lutheran church, but much like her congregation in college, it was small and lacked energy. But the parish in Fitzgerald’s Irish Catholic neighborhood — where her husband grew up — felt vibrant, filled with boisterous singing and young families.
Mainline Protestant denominations, including the Lutheran church, have been in decline for decades, losing over half of their members since the 1960s. Today, Lutherans make up 3 percent of the population in the U.S., according to the Pew Research survey.
Fitzgerald’s experiences sync with Pew’s finding that the religiosity of Americans is closely tied to their upbringing — about 74 percent of people who grew up attending religious services have stuck with their childhood faith, while 15 percent, despite growing up observant, reported having no religion. The “stickiness” of religious upbringing is lower among the youngest generation — only 28 percent of those raised religious are still religious, according to Pew. Fitzgerald is also among 35 percent of Americans who have switched from the religion they grew up in to another one, although Pew showed that for every new convert to Christianity, the tradition loses six.
“Kind of dead” is how Bri Pedersen, a Grace City attendee, describes the more traditional churches she checked out with her husband when they first moved to Boston. “No one was really talking, no one was excited that you were there,” says Pedersen, 27, as she bounced her three-month-old, strapped to her chest, after the service at Grace City. Pedersen, who grew up in the evangelical church, ended up staying at Grace City, where she and her husband felt embraced — people helped them move and set up a meal train when Pedersen had a baby. “That’s rare these days for the culture to have a community and people that would sacrifice to help you.”
The nondenominational Protestant churches are a unique exception to the trend of shrinking congregations across the country. Since 2007, the share of nondenominational Protestants grew 58 percent, according to Pew. Today, 7 percent of Americans identify as nondenominational — an uptick from 6.2 percent in 2014.
There are other signs of vitality across other faith communities. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has one of the highest portions of younger people among its congregants: The share of adults between ages 18 and 29 make up 25 percent of the church’s members, while that age cohort represents 14 percent of evangelical Protestants and Catholics. Large families, robust youth programs and mission service may be part of the explanation, according to David Dollahite, social scientist and professor of family life at Brigham Young University. “The fact that the family tends to be involved in home-based worship means that youth are able to see the faith alive in their own homes,” he says.
The Latter-day Saints, along with members of historically Black Protestant churches and evangelical Protestants, score high levels of observance in practice and belief. For instance, Latter-day Saints attend church at higher numbers: 69 percent compared to 25 percent of other Americans; and 72 percent say that religion is very important to them, which is significantly higher than 53 percent of religiously affiliated Americans overall.
A shrinking gender gap
Across the river from Grace City is St. Paul’s Parish, a Catholic congregation that meets in a red brick Romanesque building with a rose window framed in the center of the facade, and it too has recently seen a new wave of vibrancy with an influx of converts. I’ve gotten to know the community because my son attends the parish school and sings in the church’s choir. Located next to Harvard University, St. Paul’s has long attracted students and young professionals who sought a more intellectual approach to faith and were eager to reason through their doubts and questions, the Rev. William Kelly, the priest of the parish, tells me. In the aftermath of the sex abuse scandals revealed in Boston in 2002, the church lost about half of its members. But in the past three years, the number of converts at St. Paul’s doubled each year from about 15 to 30 — many of them men.
Although women still report to be more religious than men, the religious gender gap has been shrinking, Pew found. And the gap is narrowing, especially among the youngest generation — in the 18 to 24 age group, 30 percent of women and 26 percent of men pray daily. That gap is much wider among older adults: About 20 percent of women pray more than men. “We’ve known forever since social science existed that women tend to be slightly more religious than men — and that’s not true anymore,” Burge says. “Young men and young women are as religious as each other.”
Among the Latter-day Saints, the gender gap has reversed: 52 percent are men and 47 percent are women, compared with 46 percent men and 54 percent women in 2014, according to Pew. The men also outnumber women in Orthodox Christianity, comprising 61 percent of its adherents, according to the latest survey.
The Rev. Kelly partly attributes this gender shift to the absence of a blueprint for what it means to be a man today. “If you hear the word ‘masculinity,’ the word you’d automatically put with it is ‘toxic,‘” he says. “And that has been drilled into men on the secular side.”
It’s perhaps why, for many, the church has become a refuge from the progressive left. In a so-called “vibe shift,” many have turned away from what they see as the excesses of progressive politics toward more conservative and traditional expressions. Traditional Catholic churches have seen more women wearing veils, an interest in Gregorian chant and in classical church architecture. “The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete,” wrote venture capitalist and Christian writer Santiago Pliego.
Nathanael Ginn, a 31-year-old account manager at a tech company from Indianapolis, Indiana, tells me he discovered a more rigorous and “masculine” form of worship in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. “There is this element of the call to action, of going and living a holy life and participating in the energies of God that really draws men in — that you can impact things,” says Ginn. After growing up in Baptist and evangelical churches, he went through a period of “wandering years,” when he was introduced to neo-paganism and the occult by friends and began diving into the literature about those alternatives. But over time, he found that it was “just new ageism with what I would call an edgy veneer,” a way to “cling to the old ways of our ancestors” for people who were angry at Christians, he says. Ginn describes his first Eastern Orthodox service over Christmas in Fishers, Indiana, as “the most transcendental experience” he’s had at church. He’s not alone. In 2022, a study of Orthodox Christian converts showed a surge in adult converts, with the largest increase seen among single men.
The decline of stable jobs, rising costs of living and the crumbling of traditional pathways to success have left some men questioning the systems they once believed they could rely on. Ginn continues: “The economic uncertainty and the broken promises of the social contract that Americans believed in are causing men, in particular, to look for something different.”
Young believers crave something deeper and more substantial: a blend of more expressive, energetic and “charismatic” worship with “contemplative” elements like prayer, scripture reading and liturgy.
As young people drift away from organized religion, albeit at a slowing rate, churches are up against a critical challenge — and an opportunity: how to stay relevant and attract young believers who appear to be open to a religious experience. “ We’re not merely in an era of decline and decay, but of reimagining and renewal,” says Raymond Chang, executive director of the Tenx10 Collaboration, an initiative focused on bringing young people to faith.
Spiritual openness among young people demands soul-searching from religious institutions, Smith at Notre Dame tells me, taking an honest assessment of which traditions and beliefs are essential and which ones are merely cultural artifacts. For instance, as more people delay or forgo marriage and children, churches might rethink how they frame family values without compromising core beliefs. “At some point, religion shouldn’t just mimic the culture — they have to be themselves; they have to have some integrity with their traditions,” Smith says. “But do we think certain things are essential that are not essential?”
Part of the solution
What once attracted seekers — a massive social media following, a charismatic pastor, a podcast — is no longer sufficient, Grace City’s Owen tells me. Young believers crave something deeper and more substantial: a blend of more expressive, energetic and “charismatic” worship with “contemplative” elements like prayer, scripture reading and liturgy. “We don’t just want loud music with lights and fog. It’s not what’s attractive to this younger generation,” he says. “They want authentic. But we also don’t just want smoke and bells. We want both.”
For Elvis Morara, a 24-year-old from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the worshippers at Grace City are “real people” bonded by their shared faith and challenges in a city that can be cutthroat professionally and hostile to religious viewpoints. “A lot of people here made a very conscious decision to leave where they came from, where it was comfortable, to come to an environment…where they want to grow in their faith,” he says.
What young people want isn’t a “country club Christianity,” Chang says, but a bold, mission-driven faith that’s engaged in “healing” the world rather than just serving its own members. And one that also mirrors the diversity of the younger population. “ Young people expect this diversity because they’re experiencing it in almost every other setting within their life outside of the church.”
Douthat describes his vision for a path forward as “traditionalism/orthodoxy without litmus tests.” He believes churches should embrace theological and liturgical distinctiveness while remaining open to those who aren’t fully on board with every doctrine. “Having a kind of zone of uncertainty and agnosticism as you enter into religion is an inevitable part of the human condition and something that churches should welcome and respect,” he says. In a malleable world, young people are ready to be shaped by something, even maybe the demands of a religious tradition.
Progressive churches, particularly mainline Protestant denominations, have struggled to retain members, while conservative churches retain members more effectively — by offering a distinct, countercultural identity. While the progressive churches may provide a community, “ you’re not going to get a lot of validation for who you are in a progressive church that you wouldn’t get from outside that,” said Cragun.
Outside of the walls of a church, there is a lot that family can do, too. Dollahite urged older generations within families to recognize that disaffiliation is often tied to broader distrust in institutions, not necessarily a rejection of faith. “(Parents and siblings) need to show understanding and compassion and not make snap judgments and be dismissive or patronizing toward a person who decides to disaffiliate for a time,” he says. Youth are eager for meaningful intergenerational connections and the wisdom, advice and mentorship that comes with them. “They also want to know that older people … aren’t simply trying to tell them what to do, but walk and journey with them,” Chang says.
This erosion of shared religious language and identity poses a serious challenge to American democracy. Burge predicts the decline of what he calls “polite religion” — a middle-of-the-road, pluralistic approach that once held broad appeal. In its place, he foresees a growing divide: Conservative churches will become more doctrinally rigid, particularly on tenets around sexual morality, while the non-religious and atheists will also grow more ideologically orthodox, but in the opposite direction. “We’re going to have a harder time functioning as a democracy when we don’t have these spaces where people interact with each other from different political and economic backgrounds,” Burge says. “And that makes it really hard to make a democracy function.” Or, as Jonathan Rauch put it in his recent book, “Cross Purposes,” “the crisis for Christianity has turned out to be a crisis for democracy.”
But the question of what happens to society without religion is even more existential, Douthat argues. With birth and marriage rates declining and artificial intelligence reshaping industries and daily life, an unsettling question hangs over the future: How will human societies sustain themselves in the face of these transformative forces? While religion may not be a cure-all, Douthat says, it’s part of the solution. “I think clearly religion and religious perspective on the world has to be part of whatever answer there is to this challenge,” he says. But ultimately, to revive religion, its social benefits may not be enough: “The only thing that can revive religion is actual belief that it’s true.”
This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.
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