Americans becoming less religious, especially young adults

US adults who continue to identify with a faith group, about 77 percent of all Americans, have largely stayed as religiously engaged as they were seven years ago, according to the Pew Research Center, evidence of a solid core of committed faithful who remain a bulwark against secularization. But, on average, the “nones” are far less religiously observant than Americans who identify with a specific faith. The overall number of evangelicals rose to 62 million people, or a quarter of the population, and evangelicals were the only major Christian group between 2007 and 2014 to gain more members than they lost, Pew researchers said.

“Respondents who say they meditate regularly may or may not do so in a religious sense”, Pew reported.

Generational replacement – the notion that younger Americans are swaying the statistics as they enter adulthood – appears to account for at least a few of these changes, according to the Pew report.

Young adults are also much less likely to attend religious services, the survey found.

Between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of Catholics who said they attend church weekly fell from 41% to 39%, and the percentage who attend once or twice a month declined from 19% to 18%. Those who claimed to be religiously unaffiliated increased from 16% to 23% over the seven year period, and among them the percentage of those who believe in God, dipped from 70% to 61%.

These trends make sense, said Andrew Walsh, a historian of American religion at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., in that religious affiliation in America today is “increasingly shaped by individual choice and less by inheritance from a family or community”.

The Pew study found that nationwide almost all major religious groups have become significantly more accepting of homosexuality in recent years – even groups, such as evangelicals and Mormons, that traditionally have expressed strong opposition to same-sex relationships.

More than half of poll participants, regardless of age, said they believe in hell.

Cooperman cautioned, however, against concluding such spirituality is replacing more traditional kinds of religious experiences, such as attending religious services.

The authors of the survey found out that millenials have played an important role in causing the shift in the American Christians’ attitude toward gays. Politics was also considered – the religiously unaffiliated form the largest percentage of Democrats, while Evangelical Protestants are the biggest religious subcategory among Republicans.

Likewise, mainline Protestants moved from 56 percent in 2007 to 66 percent in 2014, with historically black Protestants also increasing support from 39 percent in 2007 to 51 percent in 2014.

“There’s growing support of LGBT people and our families, often not in spite of people’s religions but because the very foundation of their faith encourages love, acceptance and support for their fellow human beings”.

These are among the key findings of the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, a follow-up to a 2007 survey on religion in America.

Even though the share of USA adults that still claim to believe in God is particularly high, especially when compared to other highly advanced and industrialized nations, the number has seen a modest decrease over the past eight years since the 2007 study.