Pew Research Center has revealed the decline of religious interest in America is leveling off. The U.S. Census Bureau does not collect information about religion, so the purpose of the Religious Landscape Study is to take a big-picture look at Christianity in the United States.
"We hope this can help fill that gap," Greg Smith, senior associate director at Pew Research, told Washington Watch Thursday.
Based off the responses to roughly 100 questions about people's religious beliefs and practices, the new data brings as many questions as answers.
Will the stability become a lasting feature in the nation's religious landscape?
What should be the response of the Church moving forward?
There are harbingers of future religious decline. Most notably, Pew found a huge age gap, with 46% of the youngest American adults identifying as Christian compared to 80% of the oldest adults. The youngest adults are also three times more likely than the oldest group to be religiously unaffiliated, The Associated Press notes.
Michele Margolis, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist not affiliated with the Pew survey, has studied how religious involvement changes over a lifetime.
Young adults frequently move away from religion, but "when you get married and have kids, this is a time where scholars have noted that religion is more likely to become important," she told AP.
Margolis said another question going forward is whether the youngest American adults firmly reject organized religion, or if some of them will return to the religious fold as they age.
Smith agrees that the decline has been about age differences, or "generational replacement," as he calls it, but he is hopeful that the bottom rung of the ladder has been identified.
"You have older groups of people who by and large are quite religious, and as they have passed away, they have been replaced by new generations of young adults who are simply far less religious than their parents and grandparents before them," he told show host Tony Perkins.
That generational gap has increased over time, but the widening has stabilized over the last 4-5 years.
"Furthermore, the data shows that the youngest Americans – those between the ages of 18 and 24 today – they're not really much less religious than the second-youngest group," Smith noted. "So, the youngest Americans are tugging down on the nation's overall religiousness, but not as much as they would be if they were substantially less religious than the group that immediately preceded them."
Responding to the data
Dr. Andrew Walker, an associate dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Perkins that moving ahead, the Church needs to find a way to build something from this "small momentum."
That means answering hard questions from nonbelievers who are trying to process events like violence, war, disease, and oppression.
"We observe time and again that material explanations for the world don't satisfy human beings," Walker relayed. "Secularism just cannot answer the deepest questions plaguing human existence, that we're going to have to go outside of ourselves for those things, and that's where religion comes in.
The place to begin to understand world events, the data suggests, is God's word.
The number of survey respondents who identified as both politically liberal and Christian has declined over time from 62% to 37% while support from the Left for extreme social causes like abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism has increased.
The data shows that Evangelicals have changed their views the least on these topics and that 82% say the Bible is very important to them.
"If you have been steeped in a biblical worldview grounded in objective truth and in a transcendent understanding of the universe – meaning truth does not change over time and is not in constant flux – you would hope that if there's any population in the United States that would have a stable and unchanging worldview, it would be Evangelicals," Walker said.
Will stability last?
If Smith's hope that decline has leveled off proves true, does the data suggest a coming revival in the U.S.?
"I would describe it more as stability than as a revival," he said.
Whether the stability holds or the decline in the significance of faith for Americans ramps up again remains to be seen. But the numbers do not look good.
"Either today's youngest adults are going to have to become a lot more religious as they get older, or there are going to have to be new generations of young adults that come onto the scene who are more religious than today's young adults," Smith said.
An outlier in the data, perhaps hope that stability could last, is a decline in the gender gap.
For years, women in the United States have been seen as more religious than men; though that gap is still there, it is not as large.
"It definitely shows signs of narrowing over time, and it's much smaller among the youngest adults than among the oldest adults," the Pew associate relayed.
Younger men seem more inclined than in years past to seek a closer relationship with their Creator.
"Among young people in the United States, women are only a tad more likely than men to say they pray regularly, whereas among the oldest people in the United States, women are like 20 points more likely than men to say they pray every day," Smith said.
That shows the gender gap in American religion does appear to be shrinking.
