How America's Youth Lost Its Religion in the 1990s

Possibly the most oft-repeated statistic in American religion is the rise of the religiously unaffiliated from just 5% of the population in the early 1970s to about 30% of adults in 2022. In a field where shifts typically move at a glacial pace, that demographic factoid may represent the most abrupt and most consequential shift in American society in the postwar period. But there is a more recent such phase shift, when American religion changed incredibly quickly, in whose aftermath we feel even today.