HARD DATA SHOWS CHURCH RESURGENCE, ATHEIST DECLINE: More data is showing up indicating that Christianity is no longer declining but rather growing among Americans, even as the atheist/agnostic/nones elements is moving downward, according to Rod Martin.
“Ryan Burge, statistician and professor at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, finds that the secular surge may not merely have stalled. It may be going into reverse. His numbers, based in part on the newly released 2025 Cooperative Election Study, show that the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular fell from 36.2 percent in 2022 to 35.6 percent in 2023, 34.1 percent in 2024, and 31.8 percent in 2025,” Martin writes.
“Burge notes that the decline is statistically significant, and that the General Social Survey points in the same direction, with religious “Nones” down to just 25.2 percent in 2024. That doesn’t prove a full-scale revival. Not yet, anyway. But it does prove that the old story is dead,” Martin continues.
And Martin offers this spirited observation about the churches:
“There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.
“And they don’t. So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The ‘Jesus was a socialist community organizer’ crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.
“So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.”
Much, much more in this excellent column.