America “will most likely be majority non-Christian” within the next 50 years, a professor at Johns Hopkins wrote recently in the New York Times.
“Big if true,” as the saying goes. A Christian decline to less than a majority would have significant and potentially profound implications on culture and politics on topics ranging from class warfare to Middle East foreign policy. Attitudes toward Jewish presence in the land of Israel, for example, are frequently founded in the Bible, and the biblical commandments against stealing and against envy have implications for property rights and the conversation about inequality.
Europe and Great Britain have already seen such steep declines, with political ripple effects. Fewer than half of people in England and Wales identified themselves as Christian in the 2021 census, and the New York Times also reported recently on the planned repurposing of tens of thousands of churches across Western Europe “expected to become vacant in the coming years as their societies’ connection to Christianity wanes.” In New York City, a Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has credited his fellow Muslims—many, like him, immigrants—with contributing to his 2025 electoral victory.
America overall isn’t there—yet. A 2023 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey pegged the U.S. at 64 percent Christian, and Pew Research Center polling between 2020 and 2025 found the share of U.S. adults identifying with Christianity holding “fairly stable” between 64 percent and 62 percent.
But some surveys in the U.S. are already detecting Christian minority status, at least in certain places and in certain younger age demographics.
A Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Survey conducted in 2023 and 2024 found that among 18 to 29 year olds, 45 percent identify as Christians, while 44 percent are religiously unaffiliated and 9 percent identify with other religions.
A poll of 2,096 18-to-29-year-olds in the United States, the Spring 2025 Harvard Kennedy School IOP Youth Survey, using data collected from Ipsos Public Affairs, found Catholic, Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian, Protestant, and LDS/Mormon respondents summing to 40 percent of respondents, with no religious preference, not sure, refused, and decline to answer adding up to 49 percent.
A survey of 3,204 young people aged 14 to 22 fielded in April and May 2026 by the Harris Poll for Unicef USA found 33 percent had ever been a member of a religious group or organization, fewer than the 43 percent that had participated in athletics, the actual opiate of the masses.
Less scientific polls conducted at specific institutions show similar indications.
A senior survey by the Daily Princetonian of Princeton University’s Class of 2026 had Catholic, Protestant, Other Christian, and Orthodox Christian categories adding up to 32.1 percent, less than the 41.6 percent total who reported “agnostic” or “atheist.”
At Brown University, where President Christina Paxson has spoken openly about recruiting students at religious day schools and from “tight-knit Christian communities,” a survey of the freshman class of 2030 by the Brown Daily Herald counted “not religious,” agnosticism, and atheism at a total of 54.1 percent, Christianity at 24.6 percent.
At Yale, the Yale Daily News’s survey of the class of 2030 had agnostic, atheist, and no religion at 43 percent, with Catholic, Christian, Protestant, Orthodox, and non-denominational Christian totaling 30.4 percent. The Yale chaplain’s office has data for the Yale classes of 2024-2027 that put atheist, agnostic, and unaffiliated at 29.8 percent and various Christian denominations at 45.96 percent. It notes, “The current voluntary survey has a 32% response rate.”
The theory is that if today’s youth remain as irreligious as they age and if they eventually transmit their own beliefs or lack of them to their children, U.S. Christianity will dwindle. Factors suspected of contributing to the decline include the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, an influx to the U.S. of non-Christian immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, church-state litigation that has driven religion out of public schools and spaces based on an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause that is now being viewed as mistaken, pandemic-era restrictions against in-person church attendance, the rise of politics as a functional substitute for religion, and a general fraying of the social fabric of the sort documented in books such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.
But so far, it’s only a theory. The Johns Hopkins professor who floated the forecast in the New York Times, Exceptional Hatred author James Loeffler, hyperlinked to a September 2022 Pew Research Center report with the subheadline, “If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades.” Yet subsequent Pew research found what the center describes as a five year period of “relative stability” in the religious composition of the U.S. public. A 2025 Pew report was headlined, “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.”
I checked with Pew and asked if they agree that “within the next half-century” the U.S. “will most likely be majority non-Christian.” A communications specialist there, DeVonte Smith, got back to me: “We checked with our research team, and we can’t quantify the likelihood of any future outcome for this.” While the 2022 Pew analysis was based on the trends then, the most recent research shows Christianity stable, not declining.
There are even some other signs hinting at a potential religious revival. In April of 2026, the Gallup Poll reported a surge in church attendance and religious identity among young men. “The percentage of young men reporting monthly or more frequent attendance at religious services rose seven points between 2022-2023 and 2024-2025, reaching 40% — its highest level since 2012-2013,” Gallup found. “The percentage of young men saying religion is very important to them is now similar to the percentage for men aged 30-49 and only slightly lower than for senior men.” Some are describing a religious revival as a “Charlie Kirk effect” after the assassinated Turning Point USA leader.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics collects the American Time Use Survey, which asks how people spend their time. Its number for the percent of the population aged 15 years and up participating in religious services on an average weekend or holiday day hit a recent high in 2025. It doesn’t measure what religion, so it’s possible some of the uptick could be newly arrived devout Muslim immigrants engaging in daily prayers.
The history of Christianity—and of religious demography, more generally—dictates caution for anyone making long-term forecasts. Who could have predicted the rise of Christianity itself before the birth of Jesus, the rise of Protestantism before Martin Luther, the Great Awakening in America before the arrival of George Whitefield?
One of my teachers on these matters has been the political scientist James Q. Wilson. In a 2005 lecture he observed, “Though there has been a growth in the proportion of nonreligious or secular voters in the United States, that growth is nothing like what has occurred in most of Europe.”
As context, Wilson described what he called the “secularization theory,” which is that “modernization … leads to a decline in the social significance of religion.” As he summarized the theory, “If factories teach technical skills, if public schools provide nondenominational education, if health and welfare agencies care for the sick and the deprived, if people live mixed together in large cities that display the benefits of a consumer society, and if science seeks only naturalistic explanations for everything from the nature of life to the origins of the cosmos, what can religion possibly offer?”
Wilson’s view then was that the U.S. differs from Europe because here, the lack of a government-established church forces religious institutions, free-market-style, to compete and provide value. He concluded, “the United States, perhaps the most modern society in the world, is filled with people who believe in God, go to church or synagogue, and pray to the almighty. The secularization theory may be in some trouble.” In other words, thank God for the First Amendment.
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