A professor at Washington University has used Pew research data to argues that while US evangelicals take their faith more seriously than Christians of other traditions, they are still being secularised, albeit at a slower rate.
Looking at a “composite religiosity index” (CRI), which essentially merges together factors like the importance of religion in a person’s life, church attendance and certainty in God’s existence, Professor Ryan Burge reports that since at least 2007 evangelicals have been consistently more religious than other traditions by a large margin.
Evangelicals from the “Silent Generation” - those born around 1928 to 1945 - were found to be the most religious demographic, with a CRI score of 75 per cent in 2024. By contrast, members of the Silent Generation who belonged to other Christian traditions only scored 56 per cent on the CRI.
The youngest cohort, Gen Z, saw an evangelical CRI of 63 per cent, compared with a non-evangelical CRI of 40 per cent.
The sharp drop in religiosity between the Silent and Gen Z cohorts was by no means unique. The Silent Generation CRI in 2007 was 80 per cent among evangelicals and 67 per cent among non-evangelicals.
The data shows that from 2007 to 2024 the CRI of all age groups and of both evangelicals and non-evangelicals has declined. The only technical exception was Gen Z, as the only data point available for them was 2024, and hence no long term pattern could be recorded either way.
Burge said, “Evangelicals take their faith seriously, and it shows up consistently. The gaps are often pretty sizable, too. The average evangelical scores about twenty points higher on the religiosity index compared to other Christians.”
He added, however, “Every generation of evangelicals is less religious today than the same generation was a decade or two ago. Secularization isn’t skipping over them … Evangelicals are declining more slowly than other Christians, not staying flat while everyone else falls.
Evangelicals, Burge argued, “aren’t immune to secularization."
"They’re just secularizing more slowly than the Christians around them," he said.
Burge argued that this apparent decline was down to each successive generation being less religious than the last, but also to the trend of people becoming more secular as they get older.
