You don't need religion to have morals. If you cannot tell right from wrong, then you lack empathy, not religion.
Self-identified Christians made up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 65% in 2019 and from 75% a decade ago, according to survey data released last month from the Pew Research Center.
Additionally, the same survey found that about three in 10 U.S. adults (29%) are religious “nones” — people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.” That is up from 16% in 2007, when the center’s researchers began asking about religious identity.Christians now outnumber “nones” by a ratio of just over two-to-one, the survey found, compared to five-to-one in 2007.
The Pew Research Center isn’t the only organization to note this change. A Gallup poll published last year found that in 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.
The 2020 numbers mark the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade history that less than 50% of poll respondents claimed membership in a house of worship.
The data also shows that church membership is “strongly correlated” with age: 66% of traditionalists (U.S. adults born before 1946) belong to a church, compared with 58% of baby boomers, 50% of Generation X and 36% of millennials.
In Utah, this shift away from religion can be seen through declining membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the state’s dominant faith. The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2021 that over the previous three years, the church had lost 17,174 members — the equivalent of losing the population of Bluffdale.
Salt Lake County has been minority Latter-day Saint since 2017. As of 2021, church members account for 46.89% of its population, the seventh year in a row to see that percentage dip.
Despite this, a 2021 survey by the Springtide Research Institute found that only one in four Latter-day Saints report that they never attend services, compared with one in 10 people nationally who say they never attend.
The institute also found that Latter-day Saints aged 18 to 25 reported the highest participation in youth group activities; and 57% of Latter-day Saint respondents said they trust organized religion “completely” or “a lot,” compared to only 35% of the national sample.
In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 24% of U.S. adults said their faith has become stronger due to the COVID-19 pandemic and 47% said it hadn’t changed much, while only 2% said it was weakened. (26% said the question didn’t apply to them.)