Afew weeks ago, the Pew Research Center released the results of its most recent Religious Landscape Survey. The survey is one of the most important data sources for people studying macro-level trends in American religion. The most prominent finding was that the share of Americans who identify as Christian has stopped declining the last several years, and the percentage of adults who have no religious affiliation has plateaued right around 30 percent. This is certainly a change of pace compared to the last thirty years. In 1991, just 5 percent of Americans were religiously unaffiliated. But that share rose about 25 points in just three decades—an unprecedented shift in the world of religious demography. Now we can say with some certainty that this period of rapid secularization is largely over.
However, this does not mean that a religious revival is on the horizon. There is no reason to believe the portion of the population who identifies as Christian will increase in the near future, nor will the share of non-religious Americans decline. This period of American religious history is not so much a reversal of the large seismic shifts the country has been experiencing since the 1990s, but rather a brief pause.
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