The 17-point drop in the percentage of U.S. adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life — from 66% in 2015 to 49% today — ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any 10-year period since 2007.
About half of Americans now say religion is not an important part of their daily life. They remain as divided on the question today as they were last year.
Such large declines in religiosity are rare. Since 2007, only 14 out of more than 160 countries in the World Poll have experienced drops of over 15 percentage points in religious importance over any 10-year period.
Only a small number of mostly wealthy nations have experienced larger losses in religiosity, including Greece from 2013-2023 (28 points), Italy from 2012-2022 (23 points), and Poland from 2013-2023 (22 points). Other countries, including Chile, Türkiye and Portugal, have seen declines similar in magnitude to the U.S. decline.
The long-term decline in religiosity places the U.S. in a unique position on the global religious landscape. Most countries fall into one of four patterns: high religiosity with Christian identity; high religiosity with another religious identity (often Muslim majority, although there are several countries in the Middle East where Gallup does not ask religious identity questions); low religiosity with Christian identity; or low religiosity with no religious identity.
The U.S. no longer fits neatly into any of these categories, having a medium-high Christian identity but middling religiosity. In terms of religious identity, the percentage of Americans now identifying as Christian is similar to those of Western and Northern European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Denmark, nations with strong Protestant traditions. Yet religion continues to play a larger role in daily life for Americans than for people in those countries.
Axios frames it this way:
Fewer than half of Americans now say religion is an important part of their daily lives, a 17 percentage point drop since 2015, which ranks among the largest declines in the world, according to a new Gallup poll.
Why it matters: The U.S. was once exceptional for its high religiosity among wealthy nations. The shift reflects profound cultural changes that could reshape politics, social ties and even national identity.
“Such large declines are rare,” Gallup researchers Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray wrote.
Vigers and Ray said that only 14 out of more than 160 countries have seen drops of over 15 percentage points in religious importance over the past decade.”The U.S. increasingly stands as an outlier: less religious than much of the world, but still more devout than most of its economic peers.”
An unprecedented 15,000 churches in the U.S. are estimated to shut their doors this year, far more than the few thousand expected to open, according to denominational reports and church consultants.
A record number of Americans (29%) also are identifying as religiously unaffiliated, and 62% identify as Christians, down from 78% in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.
Yes, but: While fewer Americans identify as Christian, faith-based communities and institutions remain profoundly influential in politics, social networks and philanthropy.
President Trump took 85% of the white evangelical vote and 57% of the white mainline/non-evangelical Protestant vote in 2024, according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey.
Image: via Unsplash
