The Generational Collapse Of American Religion
(ANALYSIS) Buckle up, readers, because we’re about to do a deep dive into an important but difficult-to-grasp concept in the social sciences. It’s called age-period-cohort (APC) effects. Let me start by showing you a simple graph.
All I’m doing here is comparing attendance in the first year of the General Social Survey (1972) to its most recently released data from 2024.
You can see that I’ve broken the sample down into five age buckets, ranging from 18–29 years old to those who are at least 75. What do you notice? Well, the first thing that jumps out to me is that religious attendance has dropped significantly in the 2024 data compared to the same age buckets in the survey from the early 1970s.
For instance, among 18–29 year olds in that early survey, just 19% said they attended religious services less than once a year. For that same group in the 2024 data, almost half were in the never/seldom category. An increase of thirty percentage points.
That’s a universal finding, by the way — no matter what age category you compare, the 2024 sample is significantly less religiously active.
But, of course, that’s not the only way to look at this graph. You could simply compare the age buckets in the 1972 data against each other and do the same with the results from 2024. What you find there is that younger folks are much less religiously engaged than older ones.
In 1972, a 75-year-old was about 20 points more likely to be a weekly attender than an 18–29-year-old. In the 2024 result, the gap was 23 percentage points.
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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.