Christianity's Decline in America Has Halted
In fact, the church may be on the upswing. Why? Because most of the leftist fakers have moved on.
by Rod D. Martin
March 2, 2025
The rumors of Christianity’s demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated.
A groundbreaking Pew Research Center survey finds that after years of decline, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has stabilized. Not only that, but young adults — a demographic expected to be on the front lines of secularization — are fueling this halt.
The rise of the religiously unaffiliated, the so-called “Nones,” has also stalled out.
For decades, it seemed America was following Europe’s path toward a post-Christian society: churches emptying, traditional belief systems crumbling, and no end in sight. The media, academia, and Democrat policymakers gleefully anticipated the day when Christianity would be an afterthought, a relic of an outdated era.
Meanwhile, a “Third Way” movement within the church, exemplified by Tim Keller and Russell Moore, sought to be “winsome” to those with anti-Biblical beliefs, sort of like begging a bully not to hurt them.
Every bit of that was wrong.
The Numbers Have Stabilized. There’s a Reason.
The Pew study surveyed over 35,000 American adults across all 50 states, making it one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. The results are striking:
62% of American adults still identify as Christian, including 40% Protestants and 19% Catholics.
The religiously unaffiliated — those identifying as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” — has held at 28%, virtually unchanged from multiple previous surveys.
7% of respondents identified with a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism.
The percentage of Christians has remained stable over the last five years, marking the first time in decades that the decline has stalled.
Christianity experienced a severe decline in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. In 1990, roughly 90% of Americans identified as Christian. By 2007, that number had already dropped to 78%. The last major Pew survey in 2014 recorded Christians at 65%. It is not insignificant that the steepest declines took place in the Obama years.
But instead of continuing to freefall, the rate of Christian identification has steadied, suggesting that secularization may have hit its natural limit.
But why? Why would it stop? If the problem is that Christianity is outdated or offensive to our culture, why wouldn’t we continue to collapse?
The answer is simple, as I’ve been telling you for decades. And the numbers now bear it out. You left the faith if you were a leftist. And not because conservatives were “mean” or “lacked winsomeness”, but because the belief system of the modern Democrat Party is anathema to the Christian faith.
Or let me put that another way: the fakers have left. There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to mean it, or you’d never bother at all.
And they don’t.
The Left’s Exodus from Christianity
Why does Woke Socialism repel Christian belief? The answer is simple: the left’s worldview is completely incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.
Progressivism champions moral relativism; Christianity demands objective moral law.
Progressivism deconstructs the family unit, asserts the right to murder children, and claims that all sorts of sins are “love”; Christianity actively opposes all these things.
Progressivism says objective truth is impossible, that “math is racist” and “2 + 2 = whatever the Party tells you”; Christianity asserts not merely objective truth but precisely one such truth.
Progressivism defines you by your skin color, sexual preferences, or other superficial or behavioral characteristics, asserting that there are oppressors and oppressed, and that the latter cannot sin and the former cannot repent; Christianity says we’re all one race, all descended from Adam, and that all who believe are adopted into one family whose Father is God. It also says that deviant behavior is not your “identity”: you are not a prisoner of your sins, you are not defined by them, and there is both escape and redemption in Christ.
Progressivism worships the state, because its adherents can control the state and “become like God”; Christianity acknowledges not just a higher but an absolute and sovereign Authority Whose laws are higher than any enacted by mere men, and cannot be changed by their whims.
But let’s put that another way. Have you ever met anyone who converted to orthodox Christianity and, as a result, suddenly started advocating for Drag Queen Story Hour, or abortion-on-demand, or the abolition of the nuclear family, or the deconstruction of the faith?
Likely not. Typically, new converts leave progressivism behind and embrace the values and the issues generally considered “conservative” in our debased cultural moment.
As Machen pointed out a century ago, Christianity and theological/political progressivism are completely different religions even when they share the same terms. They cannot coexist in harmony, certainly not within a single person.
The Pew survey confirms what many of us have known for years — liberals are running from Christianity because their politics demand it.
Consider these statistics:
61% of self-identified liberals identified as Christian as recently as 2007; that’s now just 36%.
More than half (52%) of liberals now identify as religiously unaffiliated, compared to just 16% of conservatives.
Among Democrats, Christian identification has fallen from 74% in 2007 to 52% today. But for African Americans, it would be a small fraction of that.
Republicans remain overwhelmingly Christian (82%), with only 14% identifying as religiously unaffiliated.
Christianity’s decline was never simply about intellectual skepticism or an embrace of “science over faith.” Lots of so-called “Christians” never really were. Now that Democrats feel emboldened to seize control of society, the modern left has openly treated traditional religion as an obstacle to its ambitions, not as a positive or even a neutral institution.
From attempts to coerce churches into endorsing same-sex marriage and abortion to outright hostility toward public displays of Christian faith, the message has been clear: Christianity must conform to Woke ideology, or it must be dismantled.
Hence, for most white Democrats, church affiliation is a lot of effort for no reward: if anything, it makes you suspect to the point of unacceptable among your peers. And if you truly believe in transgenderism, abortion on demand, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (not to mention ESG, DEI, SEL, etc.), why would you waste a perfectly good Sunday morning in a church? Unless you just really like singing in the choir, you have better things to do.
Bottom line, particularly for white liberals, it has become much more socially acceptable to make snarky comments deriding “Sky Daddy” than to continue to feign belief.
Young Men Are Finding Faith
If you’re a young, white, male conservative in America today, odds are you also identify as religious, and probably Christian. Why? Because the war on Christian values, the war on masculinity, and the war on national identity have all been fought on the same battlefield. To be a conservative today is to reject the nihilism and moral relativism that Wokeness has imposed.
So suddenly, Christianity is a lot more attractive. But not the “seeker sensitive” kind: again, if you’re not getting the full-on faith, there are better things to do.
The Pew data dismantles the tired claim that Christianity has suffered due to its perceived entanglement with conservative politics. If anything, it proves the opposite.
Conservative values act as an on-ramp to Christian belief, while Woke ideology functions as an off-ramp. Since 2007, the percentage of self-identified liberals who claim to be Christian has plummeted by nearly half. Among conservatives, that decline has been minimal, from 89% in 2007 to 82% today.
Not only that: for the first time in 300 years, among young adults aged 18-24, the gender gap in religiosity has disappeared. Historically, women have long been 15-20 percentage points more religious than men (which accounts for much of the church and the clergy’s feminization). But among Generation Z, that gap is virtually nonexistent, with men slightly ahead of women.
Young conservative men are driving the stabilization Pew finds, embracing Christianity as part of a broader rejection of leftist ideology. And that portends a much greater societal and cultural upheaval to come.
The Future of Faith in America
Is Christianity in America experiencing a full-scale revival? It’s too soon to tell. But what is clear is that the once-unstoppable march toward secularism has hit a wall. The easy deconversions are over. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. What remains are those whose beliefs run deep, who have weathered the cultural storm, and who are now finding strength in the very faith the elites told them was fading.
Ironically, the very people who’ve long decried “cultural Christianity” have gotten what they said they wanted, even while doing their level best to drag the Church to the left.
The battle for America’s soul is not over. Indeed, as the Book of Judges shows us, it is never over, not until Christ comes. But for the first time in a long time, Christianity is no longer retreating. And if history tells us anything, it’s that faith doesn’t just survive adversity — it thrives in it. What Aaron Renn calls “negative world” may be just the tonic the faith in America needs.
The church may have been battered, but it is far from broken. In fact, it may be on the brink of something extraordinary.
What good news!! The pull away from Christianity has only brought us a break down in the nuclear family, transgenderism and a debauched version homosexuality. Life is not valued and obscene treatments and surgeries are perpetrated on gender confused children. The moral teachings of Christ are what has been needed and was rejected by the left. Thank God there is hope. I think the groundswell began because people were seeing the evil that was visited on us with COVID-19, the exposure of censorship in the Twitter files and the extreme persecution of Donald Trump and conservatives. I have never prayed so hard as I did for someone to save the America I knew existed. God sent Trump, an imperfect man who understands what America needs to do. I think the need was there to embrace Christianity, and President Trump showed the world that he did. Hallelujah!
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