Over the past three decades, the fastest-growing religious demographic in America hasn’t been evangelical Christians, Catholics, or Muslims. It’s the “nones”—people who claim to have “no religious affiliation.” In 1990, they made up about six percent of the U.S. population. By 2024, according to Pew Research Center, they’ve reached 28 percent of adults, making them the single largest “religious” demographic in the country.
That’s a seismic and unprecedented demographic shift in American history, and by virtually every measurable metric of human flourishing, it’s making us worse off. The data is not subtle. The social, mental, and physical well-being of those who remain committed to a traditional religious guiding story and community is, on average, substantially higher than that of their “non-religious” neighbors.
The Flourishing Gap
A 2020 study by researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that attending religious services at least once per week was associated with a 68 percent lower risk of death by despair (suicide, drug overdose, alcohol poisoning). A separate study followed over 74,000 women and found that those who attended services more than once per week had a 33 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality. Religious participation is associated with higher rates of life satisfaction, volunteerism, civic engagement, and meaning in life, while being associated with lower rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
Then there’s the “fertility crisis.” The fertility crisis refers to birth rates falling below the 2.1 children replacement rate required to keep a population stable, leading to rapidly aging societies and a shrinking workforce. Data from the National Survey of Family Growth and the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey show that the fertility gap between traditionally religious and secular Americans has widened to alarming levels. Weekly church-attending Americans remain well above the replacement rate. The religiously unaffiliated? They have children well below replacement rate. In fact, only one-third of “nones” under the age of 40 report wanting to have children at all. This presents not only an individual well-being crisis, but a potential civilizational crisis. This fertility crisis is really a religious crisis.
The decline of traditional religious participation has also coincided with the rise of what cognitive scientist and philosopher John Vervaeke has dubbed the “meaning crisis.” The meaning crisis is an existential and social phenomenon characterized by a widespread sense of nihilism, alienation, and the collapse of traditional frameworks that historically provided individuals with a sense of purpose in their lives. Psychologist Jean Twenge’s research has documented that as religious affiliation declined among young Americans, rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply. Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace demonstrated that religious Americans are measurably more generous, more civically engaged, and more embedded in social networks than their secular counterparts. Churches not only offer a meaningful shared story for people to navigate their lives within, but they also provide the institutional structure necessary for people to stay connected and build meaningful relationships across socioeconomic and even political boundaries.
The nones aren’t just losing faith. They’re losing community, ritual, shared moral vocabulary, intergenerational relationships, weekly embodied practice, and—perhaps most critically—a coherent story about what life is for that can be shared broadly.
Not Less Religious, Differently Religious
And here’s the twist: many who have emptied the pews clearly haven’t done so on the grounds that going to church is too “superstitious” or because they’ve become dogmatic materialists. They’re merely becoming differently religious. Archbridge’s Executive Vice President and COO, Clay Routledge, has well-documented research on a striking pattern he calls “religious substitution.” This published research on “religious substitution” revealed that the less people engage in traditional religious practices, the more inclined they are to embrace alternative supernatural and paranormal beliefs. Astrology, ufology, crystals, manifesting, and do-it-yourself spiritualities are just a few of the ways the “non-religious” continue to pursue experiences of spiritual transcendence.
As Routledge and I have written extensively about for years, these trends among even the “non-religious” are signs that humans are an inherently spiritual species that will either pursue traditional religions or substitute religions to satisfy their innate longing for the transcendent. But here’s the cruel irony: while “nones” often turn to these substitutes to find meaning, only traditional religious belief is consistently, positively associated with perceptions of life as meaningful.
What Religion Actually Is
But if you tell many “non-religious” Americans any of this, they might nod politely and say, “Sure, but I just don’t believe in an invisible man in the sky.” And this is where the real problem lives: it’s not in the data, but in the definition.
We have catastrophically misunderstood what religion even is.
The modern Western framing of the word “religion” treats it as a set of private intellectual beliefs about supernatural entities. Do you believe God exists? Check yes or no. This is religion as cosmic trivia—as though the thing that organized civilizations, built cathedrals, and held together the moral imagination of billions was reducible to a proposition about metaphysical furniture. This is why many cultures that did not undergo the same philosophical transformation that we did here in the West during the Enlightenment and into the age of modernism do not conceptually categorize “religion” as something distinct from what we might call “culture.” India is one great example of this, where the labeling of their ultimate civilizational story as “Hinduism” as a distinct religion was not native to their own way of thinking about their culture. It’s simply what being an Indian meant to them (until the British Empire’s influence in the 18th-19th centuries).
In this way, to borrow the language of Paul Tillich, religion is best thought of as the highest guiding story about what should be of “ultimate concern.” What is the highest value around which you organize your life, your identity, your community? The Latin root religio means “to bind together.” Religion was never primarily about getting all the answers correct on a metaphysical quiz. It was the guiding story that bound a people together—their rituals, ethics, calendar, art, and shared sense of the sacred. Medieval Christendom knew this. Hindu civilization knows this. Indigenous cultures worldwide still know this. The only people who don’t know this are modern Westerners, who have convinced themselves they could operate without a guiding story and believe in “nothing at all.”
But you cannot not have an ultimate concern. You cannot not be shaped by rituals—even if your ritual is the morning scroll through Instagram. Which means the real question was never, “Are you religious?” The real question is: Which religion is forming you right now?
Because some story is telling you what success means, what’s worth sacrificing for, and how you should live right now. Some guiding story—some religio—is holding civilization together. The one we’ve been veering toward over the past thirty years has offered us anxiety, isolation, plummeting birth rates, and the frantic search for meaning in horoscopes and Ancient Aliens reruns.
Even if you don’t know what to make of all the doctrines and beliefs, if you want a better America for your kids and grandkids, then you should be rooting for religious renewal.
