(OSV News) — Results of two national surveys of American adults released in 2025 indicated contrasting trends — more belief in God and spirituality, but no indication of any organized religious revival.
Last February, a Pew Research Center report said that an astonishing 92% of American adults say they hold one or more spiritual beliefs that Pew asked about: the existence of a soul, God or a universal spirit, something spiritual beyond the natural world, and an afterlife containing heaven, hell or both.
This has not created a stampede to church pews, however. But the long-feared trend of secularization appears to be, for now, in retreat.
Religious affiliation ‘holding steady’
In December, Pew’s analysis from its third Religious Landscape Study, which polled more than 35,000 randomly selected adults, said only that religious affiliation in the United States is “holding steady,” with recent steep declines leveling off. However, there’s no evidence a religious revival is underway and, furthermore, that Christianity continues to lose more members than it gains.
This apparent paradox in the perception of a religious revival in the West was explored in the panel discussion “Hungry for Belonging?” at the annual New York Encounter, held Feb. 13-15 and organized by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation.
The discussion, moderated by Brandon Vaidyanathan, professor of sociology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, included British writer and podcaster Justin Brierley, whose books include 2023’s “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God” and whose wife is a minister in the United Reformed denomination; The New York Times religion journalist and podcaster Lauren Jackson, who grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints but said she is no longer a practicing member; and Chip Rotolo, a research associate at the Pew Research Center with a doctorate in sociology from the University of Notre Dame.
Number of ‘nones’ plateauing
Vaidyanathan noted that the decline in religious identification exemplified by the “nones” — those who have no religious affiliation — “seems to be at an end, or maybe plateaued.” A 2024 Pew report estimated that 28% of American adults identify as “nones.”
Rotolo outlined the picture found in three Pew Religious Landscape Surveys. The first one in 2007 found that 78% of U.S. adults identified as Christians “of one sort or another.” In 2014, the number was 71%, and the latest one, conducted over seven months in 2023-24, found that 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christians.
Between 2019 and 2024, he observed, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%.
A ‘remarkable stability’
And the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 did not “accelerate religious decline,” he said. “We’ve seen this remarkable stability. That has drawn a lot of attention, curiosity and hope.”
“Something is definitely shifting in American religious life,” he added. “We can disagree and have to continue figuring out exactly what that is. It’s definitely an interesting time to study religion.”
Jackson focused on that 92% statistic. “That research is so huge. Really, it has been so transformative in this space.”
She called the overall increase in belief after years of decline “one of the biggest shifts we’ve experienced in American life, and definitely in American religious history.”
Films with religious themes
She also pointed out the recent spate of films with religious themes, including “Eternity,” in which souls are given one week to decide where to spend eternity; “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” which addresses Catholic beliefs within the structure of a murder mystery; and “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a musical biopic of the founder of the Shakers in the 18th century.
“I think people are interested to see how these trends … are integrated into American religiosity,” she said.
Brierley expressed his belief that the so-called “New Atheism” in Britain is on the decline after hitting a peak in 2006 when Richard Dawkins published “The God Delusion” and signs on buses proclaimed, “There Is No God. Now, Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.”
He said he’s found a “new appreciation of the value of faith.”
Church service and human community
A church service “in its very simple form, meeting once a week,” is “one of the few places where you can find human community on a regular basis.”
And for young people whose parents and even grandparents have never expressed a faith, “it’s actually more cool to investigate religion now,” he said.
Communion and Liberation was started by Msgr. Luigi Giussani. The Italian priest and educator founded the movement — originally for students — in the 1950s in Milan. He died in February 2005, and his sainthood cause was officially opened in 2012, giving him the title “servant of God.”
Communion and Liberation, which stresses the “experience” of one’s encounter with Jesus Christ and a subsequent transformation into knowing one’s public purpose, was a particular favorite of Pope Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger celebrated Msgr. Giussani’s funeral Mass in 2005.
Kurt Jensen writes for OSV News from Washington.
