Post-Election Data Shows Nonreligious Population in U.S. has Plateaued

According to data from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES), the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion has largely stopped rising and has even slightly decreased among certain generations.

The Harvard-run CES is conducted before and after U.S. presidential and midterm elections and is then uploaded for analysis to Harvard’s “Dataverse” online repository. The study includes 60,000 American adults interviewed to survey how they vote.

Ryan Burge, the research director for the religious outreach initiative Faith Counts, said on X on Wednesday that the 2024 data reveals a plateau in the country’s population of “nonreligious” or “nones.”