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America Becoming Less Christian Is a Problem for Everyone


By: John Daniel Davidson | March 14, 2025

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/14/america-becoming-less-christian-is-a-problem-for-everyone/

Abandoned church
A massive new Pew survey with a misleading headline tells the tale of America’s ongoing de-Christianization.

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A major survey on the religious landscape of America was just released by Pew Research Center, and what it reveals about the decline of Christianity should alarm every American, whether or not one is Christian.

Why should the de-Christianization of America worry us? Because, as I’ve argued before, if America loses the Christian faith from which our system of government is derived, we will lose everything that makes America what it is. All of the rights and freedoms we enjoy, the rule of law, the checks and balances on government power, all of that will disappear.

Suffice to say, the loss of America’s Christian identity has huge implications for everyone in the country, Christian or not. And the Pew study demonstrates just how pervasive and precipitous the decline of Christianity in America is right now.

It’s easy to misread the study, or misapprehend what’s important about it, which is that the de-Christianization of American society is not going to stop anytime soon, in part because it’s being driven by a younger, less Christian, increasingly neopagan cohort of Americas as older Christians die off without being replaced and aging Christian parents fail to pass the faith onto their children. Pew itself seems to misapprehend its own survey, giving it the rather optimistic headline, “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.”

This is true only in a narrow sense. Pew’s data indeed suggest that for the last five years, the share of the U.S. population that describes itself as Christian has wavered between 60 and 64 percent, and the new Religious Landscape Study (RLS) released earlier this month puts that figure right in the middle of that range, at 62 percent.

But the devil is in the details. Pew has done three RLS surveys over the past 17 years, each of which involved more than 35,000 adults. The first, in 2007, found 78 percent of U.S. adults identified as Christian. Smaller surveys in subsequent years showed this figure slowly ticking downward, and the second RLS, in 2014, found the total was just 71 percent. The most recent RLS in 2023-24 showed a 9-point drop since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007, which suggests the rate of our de-Christianization is accelerating.

When Pew says that the numbers are now “leveling off,” it means the smaller surveys conducted between 2019 and 2024 bucked the previous trend of a steadily shrinking Christian population in America, and instead of steady year-over-year decreases, it showed fluctuations within that narrow 60-64 percent range.

The overall trend, however, remains one of precipitous decline in Christianity over the past 17 years. And if one digs a little deeper into the RLS survey data, the picture that emerges is even more alarming. For example, the share of Americans who don’t identify with any religion—the “nones” — increased from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2014 to 29 percent in 2024. This increase isn’t limited to growing irreligiosity among any particular group but is “demographically broad-based,” says Pew. “There are fewer Christians and more ‘nones’ among men and women; people in every racial and ethnic category; college graduates and those with less education; and residents of all major regions of the country.”

It’s hard to overstate the effect of the rise of the “nones” on the American religious landscape. As Eric Sammons noted last week, “for every 100 people who leave the religious ‘nones’ (i.e., they join a religion), a full 590 become part of that irreligious cohort.” Sammons also observed that the Pew study shows Catholics are facing a sharper decline than Protestants: for every 100 people who become Catholic, 840 leave the Catholic Church. Whereas for every 100 people who become Protestants, only 180 leave.

But either way it’s a story of decline in the Christian faith across the board, while the overall number of “nones” continues to grow — as do the number of non-Christian religious adherents (Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.) whose share of the population went from 4.7 percent in 2007 to 7.1 percent today.

And it’s not just that the total number of Christians is declining. The practice of the Christian faith is deteriorating as well. Among the 62 percent who describe themselves as Christian, only a third of them say they attend religious services monthly, either in person or virtually (TV or online). Pew doesn’t compare church attendance figures in this new RLS survey with the results from 2014 or 2007 because it used a slightly different methodology (those earlier surveys were conducted entirely by telephone, whereas the new RLS was done with online and paper surveys). 

But Pew did note that the old telephone surveys were registering a decline in church attendance in the years before switching to online/paper surveys: “The share of Americans who reported attending religious services at least monthly dropped from 54% in 2007 to 50% in the 2014 RLS and had fallen to 45% by the time the Center transitioned away from phone surveys in 2018-19.”

For Catholics, the single largest cohort of Christians in America, who now make up just 19 percent of America’s Christian population (down from 24 percent in 2007), the attendance problem is even worse. Catholics are obligated to attend Mass weekly, yet less than a third of them (29 percent) say they fulfill this Sunday obligation. That means of America’s roughly 65 million Catholics, only 18.8 million could be considered “practicing”—and that’s not taking into account other Catholic obligations that are increasingly shirked, like going to confession at least once a year.

But one need not get lost in all this survey data to grasp the essential reality that the Pew study reveals: America is losing its Christian religion. Buried in Pew’s analysis is the critical observation that “it is inevitable that older generations will decline in size as their members gradually die. We also know that the younger cohorts succeeding them are much less religious.” That, in turn, means in order for the decline in Christianity to halt, “today’s young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults who are more religious than their parents would have to emerge.” Is that possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not unless something changes.

There’s much more to unpack in the Pew survey, like the decline of Christianity occurring simultaneously with a growth in “spirituality,” which suggests the future of the West will not be one of atheistic, secular materialism but of re-enchantment and neopaganism. But for now, it’s enough simply to be honest with ourselves, and with the data, and acknowledge that we are rapidly de-Christianizing. Once we accept that fact we can begin to think clearly about what it means for our country, and begin at last to fight back.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Biden’s Anti-Christian Easter Stunt Leaves No Doubt About Democrats’ Descent into Paganism


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | APRIL 01, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/01/bidens-anti-christian-easter-stunt-leaves-no-doubt-about-democrats-descent-into-paganism/

Joe Biden at Easter celebration.

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While millions of Christians throughout the world celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ this weekend, the Biden administration was busy hawking the demonic ideology of transgenderism.

On Good Friday, President Joe Biden, who claims to be a “devout Catholic,” issued a proclamation declaring March 31, 2024 — the same day as Easter Sunday — to be the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Because, as everyone knows, we don’t have enough faux holidays commemorating the rainbow mob, right?

“Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back,” Biden wrote.

Like clockwork, White House officials and prominent Democrat politicians celebrated the declaration. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul took her LGBT obsession a step further by issuing her own proclamation dubbing March 31 a “Transgender Day of Visibility” and illuminating 13 state landmarks in so-called “trans colors” in recognition of the made-up holiday.

Biden’s declaration came the same day it was revealed that children were prohibited from submitting Easter egg designs with “religious symbols” for the administration’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event. According to the guidelines, submissions “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”

An Anti-Christian Pattern

Make no mistake. The White House was sending a message to faithful Christians across America this Holy Week: Your beliefs are no longer welcomed here.

During his presidency, Biden has effectively declared war on Christianity. From prosecuting peaceful pro-lifers protesting outside abortion facilities to infiltrating and surveilling Catholic churches, he and his administration have gone to extreme lengths to persecute Americans who worship God instead of government.

Recall when a trans-identifying shooter murdered innocent Christians, including children, at a Nashville Christian school last year. It wasn’t the victims’ families or their Christian faith the White House and Democrats uplifted after the horrific attack, but the (reportedly anti-white) shooter and “transgender community.” In the weeks following the shooting, Democrats across America’s conquered institutions — from legacy media figures to “Saturday Night Live” — rushed to paint trans-identifying individuals as the victims of transphobic Republicans Why? Because transgenderism is one of the main tenets of Democrats’ pagan faith, meaning any narratives and facts undermining it must be stamped out.

The same worldview underlies the Biden administration’s “Transgender Day of Visibility” stunt, leading the neo-pagans to dismiss and desecrate the holiest day of the Christian calendar.

That’s because Christianity is antithetical to the pagan religion of leftism, which has all its own dogmas, sacraments, rituals, and judgments.

  • Child sacrifice is sacred.
  • Antiracism is a creed.
  • Wrong-sex hormones and mutilative surgeries are the way to (your) truth and life,
  • and neopronouns are regular recitations.
  • Faithful leftists give to the poor by giving to the state.
  • Affirmations of sin are daily expressions of self-worship.
  • “Pride” is a spiritual celebration.
  • And wrongthink is confessed through struggle sessions and punished through cancel culture.

The only religious element the left’s neo-paganism doesn’t offer is grace or hope. And unlike Christians, who worship a God who explicitly claims to be the Truth and thus defines it, leftism disregards the idea of objective truth altogether. That’s why, for example, Democrats insist people can change their sex by simple declaration.

Democrats Embrace Paganism

Without objective truth, however, there is no shared understanding of “right” and “wrong,” leading to the justification of immoral behaviors and actions. We see this with the normalization of pedophilia with terms like “minor-attracted persons.”

Or consider Democrats’ defense of surgically and chemically mutilating healthy bodies beyond repair. Similar to how they justify killing unwanted preborn children — and not only justify but celebrate with campaigns like “shout your abortion” — leftists employ subjective arguments like “my body, my choice.” They contend it’s good and compassionate for people to reject their God-given physical embodiment and remake themselves into their own image. Notice the left’s warped religious appeals — and implications.

My colleague John Daniel Davidson further examines these phenomena in his new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. According to Davidson, America’s devolution stems from its embrace of modern secularist ideals and simultaneous abdication of Christianity. He writes:

[T]he radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.

The modern Democrat Party champions all the pagan impulses of leftism. Its members regularly disregard objective truth and morality, all while touting their pain-inducing policies as “kind” and “compassionate” — and there’s no tolerance for beliefs that reject their paganism.

Christians must confront and defeat this unholy takeover of American society. Otherwise, they risk sacrificing what’s left of the country to the evil forces seeking to destroy it.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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THE BEST COMMENTARY I’VE READ IN MANY YEARS: The Conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Christianity Is a Dire Warning to the West


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | NOVEMBER 14, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/14/the-conversion-of-ayaan-hirsi-ali-to-christianity-is-a-dire-warning-to-the-west/

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades. 

Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end.

Ali is right, of course, although the reasons she gives for her conversion might raise some eyebrows. “Part of the answer is global,” she writes. Ali says the West is under threat from three different but related forces: “the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”

She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about.

Still, Ali’s conversion is instructive in an important way. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour noted on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, Ali was “the poster child of what the New Atheists promised Islam.” There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.

According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.

But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”

Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.

In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.

There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue. What commitment do our elites really have to liberal totems like science and rationality, after all, when they insist that a man can become a woman, or that children can consent to castration and sterilization? When a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court insists she cannot define what a woman is because she is not a biologist, we’ve stepped firmly into what C.S. Lewis called the void, where nothing is objectively true and all that matters is will and power.

“Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue,” writes Ali. “And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.”

Indeed it does, and it has given us all that is good in our civilization. Having first rejected the Christian faith, however, our secular elites are now rejecting all those other good things that sprang from it, and positing a very different sort of society. Instead of a society that embraces rationality and freedom and human rights, they offer something from the pagan past: a society that embraces power and violence and domination. If we’re honest with ourselves, we can already see, on the streets of London and New York and Paris, what that society will look like.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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