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In 1992, 44% of Americans said they went to a religious service almost every week. Gallup’s newest numbers, released this March, put that figure at 31% — and the group doing the most to drag it down isn’t secular coastal elites. It’s everyone under 50.
The Number That Won’t Stop Falling
Gallup’s annual religion tracking, based on interviews with more than 13,000 U.S. adults across its 2025 surveys, found that 57% of Americans now say they seldom or never attend religious services, versus 31% who attend weekly or almost weekly and 10% who go about once a month. As recently as 2000, weekly-or-near-weekly attendance stood at 46%. The line has moved almost every year since, cutting through two recessions, a pandemic, and a supposed post-COVID “return to normal” that never fully arrived. Gallup reports attendance is still measurably below where it sat before 2020, with no sign of reverting to the trend line of the 1990s.
It’s Not a Blip — It’s a Generation
The age breakdown is the real story. Among adults 18 to 29, just 25% report attending services weekly or almost weekly, 13% go monthly, and 61% seldom or never go. Compare that to Americans 65 and older, where 37% attend weekly or almost weekly and only 24% seldom or never attend. That’s not a random dip — it’s a structural gap between generations that Gallup says is being driven by “generational replacement,” meaning older, more observant Americans are gradually being replaced in the population by younger adults who were never as attached to religious institutions to begin with.
Religion Itself Is Losing Its Grip
Attendance isn’t the only measure sliding. Only 47% of Americans now say religion is “very important” in their lives, down from 58% in 2012 and from 70% to 75% in the 1950s and 1960s. Meanwhile 28% say religion is “not very important” — the highest share Gallup has ever recorded on that question, more than double the rate from the early 2000s. And the share of Americans claiming no religious affiliation at all, the so-called religious “Nones,” hit a new high of 24% in 2025, up from just 2% in 1948. Among adults under 30, that number is 35%.
A third of young adults now say they belong to no religion at all — not lapsed, not searching, just unaffiliated.
Who’s Still Showing Up
The picture isn’t uniform collapse. Latter-day Saints, Republicans, Protestant and nondenominational Christians, Black Americans, adults 65 and older, and Southerners all still report that religion is very important to them at rates between 55% and 67%. Democrats and Black adults saw the steepest declines over the past two decades — down 23 and 22 percentage points respectively since the early 2000s — while Jewish Americans are the only group to have grown more religious over that stretch, up 10 points. Religion in America isn’t disappearing evenly; it’s consolidating into a smaller set of demographic strongholds while eroding almost everywhere else.
What This Means for the Index
Church attendance has historically been one of the most reliable predictors of civic participation, charitable giving, and local social trust in American life — congregations are where a huge share of Americans still meet their neighbors, organize mutual aid, and build the kind of face-to-face networks that don’t show up in a text thread. When weekly attendance falls by nearly a third in a generation and the youngest adults are three times more likely than seniors to have no religious affiliation at all, that’s not just a story about theology. It’s the quiet removal of one of the last mass institutions that regularly puts strangers in the same room, week after week, asking something of them beyond a transaction. The Index will keep watching whether anything else — civic groups, hobby communities, mutual aid networks — is actually filling that gap, or whether Americans are simply spending that hour alone.
Monday August 10th 2026
— David, The Moral Decay Index