Belief In An Afterlife Is Increasing In The United States
(ANALYSIS) Longtime readers of this newsletter know I write about the three B’s of religion fairly often. Those are religious belonging (which means if you say you are Catholic, Buddhist, atheist, etc.), religious behavior (things like church attendance and prayer frequency) and religious belief (how certain people are of the existence of God).
But here’s the thing: There’s a whole bunch of variation in the overall religiosity of an individual if they are just asked a slightly different set of questions. That’s especially true of religious beliefs.
In a prior bit of analysis, I restricted the sample to just adult Americans who said that they never attended religious services and then I looked at how they answered the question about a belief in God.
The most popular answer among these low attenders? “I believe in God without a doubt” (25% chose this one). Meanwhile, only 17% said that God didn’t exist, and 16% took an agnostic posture toward God.
It’s easy to label someone who never goes to church as nonreligious, but when you go one layer deeper, you can see that there’s still a whole lot of people with some level of religious belief.
I wanted to dig a bit deeper on the variations in those belief metrics today with a question that I haven’t really probed a whole lot. The General Social Survey, which is available on the Association of Religion Data Archives website, contains a really straightforward question: “Do you believe there is a life after death?”
And it has an even simpler set of response options: yes or no. It’s been asked with regularity since 1973, so we have nearly five decades of data on this one specific question.
Well, I have to admit that this graph is most certainly not going to go viral on social media. There is no dramatic upward or downward movement of any trend lines.
One of the biggest conundrums I had to deal with in creating this visualization was figuring out the proper scale of the y-axis. If I zoomed in too much, it made any movement look really dramatic. So, I compromised a bit, and the y-axis runs from 50% to 100%.
But I really don’t need that large of a scale — belief in an afterlife is incredibly robust here and almost completely unchanged over the entire time series.
In that first data collection in 1973, about 76% of folks believed in something beyond this life. But by 1990, that figure had crept up to just about 80%, and it continued to rise very slowly from there.
Really, from 2000 all the way through 2022, the estimates are all basically the same. Even today, the share of Americans who believe in life after death is 82%. When people ask me, “Is the United States a religious country?” this is the stat that I’m going to trot out.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.