Study: US Nonreligious Population Plateaus

The nonreligious U.S. population appears to have plateaued, according to a new study.

In fact, Americans who do not identify with any religion has slightly decreased among certain generations, the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES) found.

The Harvard-run CES found that baby boomers experienced the greatest decrease (28% to 24%) in the number of nonreligious, referred to as "nones" in the survey, from 2023 to 2024.

This is the first year the percentage of nonreligious boomers has decreased. The 28% figure in 2023 represented the highest number of nonreligious boomers since the survey began.

Generation X, consisting of people born between 1965 and 1980, also showed a decrease in nonreligious, going from 34% to 31%, the group's lowest percentage since 2012.

The number (42%) of millennial "nones" did not change from 2023. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996.

The CES study found that the Silent Generation, consisting of people born between 1928 and 1945, had a nonreligious percentage of 19%, a 2 percentage-point drop. That group always has had the lowest number of "nones."

Generation Z, consisting of people born between 1997 and 2012, was the only generation that showed an increase in its number of nonreligious individuals. "Nones" in the group rose from 42% to 46%.

The study showed that the overall nonreligious in the U.S. has not grown in size.

"There's been no discernible change in size of the nones in this data over the last 5 years," Ryan Burge, research director for the religious outreach initiative Faith Counts, posted on X about CES. "The atheist/agnostic share of the population has been essentially unchanged since 2015."

Overall, the share of Americans who said they were nonreligious fell from 36% in 2019 to 34% in 2024.

As of 2024, 21% of Americans have no particular nonreligious identification, 6% were agnostics, and 7% were atheists. In 2023, 24% said they had no particular nonreligious identification.

The CES, conducted before and after U.S. presidential and midterm elections, was based on interviews with 60,000 American adults.

In February, the drop in the number of Americans who identify as Christian appears to be slowing down in recent years after a long period of a higher level of decreases, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

The extensive Religious Landscape Study (RLS) study found the number of people in the U.S. who identify as Christian has been stable since 2019 and that the number of those who are unaffiliated with a religion, after years of growing in number, has leveled off.