Lauren Jackson

in spirituality and in religiosity.

We've seen for the first time since Pew Research has been gathering data on religion that people have stopped leaving churches.

In essence, secularization is paused.

So it's not an uptick in churchgoing, but kind of a flattening out.

Yeah.

And that sounds like it's insignificant.

It's just a pause.

But it's a really big moment for people's personal relationships to religion and spirituality.

We know that in the early 90s, 90% of American adults identified as Christian, according to Pew.

That number dropped basically over my lifetime to be only about two-thirds of Americans.

It was called the Great Dechurching.

It was the largest and fastest shift in American religiosity on record.

And some people estimate that 40 million people left American churches.

So what demographers and sociologists had said for years was going to be the definitive decline of religiosity in America, that has stopped.

It has paused over the past five years.

Hmm.

And we actually got some new data in the last few weeks and months that really made this picture even more interesting.

How so?

We had expected that every cohort coming up, so every new group of young adults, would be less religious than their parents or their grandparents.

But Pew published a report that shows if you actually look at the youngest group of Americans, so 18 to 23 year olds, there are signs that that group is even more likely and it's slight, but it's it's more likely to attend religious services at least once a month than those just older than them.