The Christian Chronicle Podcast
The Christian Chronicle Podcast explores the news and stories shaping Church of Christ congregations and members around the world.
The Christian Chronicle Podcast
Episode 140: How many Americans would allow Christian prayer in public schools? (Chip Rotolo)
A little more than half (52 percent) of Americans say they would allow public school teachers to lead their students in prayers to Jesus in taxpayer-funded public schools. This is according to the latest Religious Landscape Study from the Pew Research Center.
In this episode, that study's author, Chip Rotolo, reveals how Americans have changed in both religious and spiritual beliefs and practices since Pew started researching them in 2007. While it may come as no surprise that Americans' adherence to, and participation in, organized religion has declined, Pew's research shows that the newest generation of Americans is showing signs of more openness than preceding ones.
Rotolo unpacks this and more data from the Pew report. What might these trends mean to Church of Christ congregations, their leaders and their members?
Link to the Pew Research Center's Religious Life Survey
Link to Chip Rotolo's site (referenced in the interview)
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family and friends, neighbors and, most of all, strangers. Welcome to the christian chronicle podcast. We're bringing you the stories shaping church of christ, congregations and members around the world. I'm bt erwin, and what you are about to hear bless you and honor god. What place, if any, should the practices and teachings of Christianity have in taxpayer-funded institutions like public schools? This has been a debate since, well, at least when I wrote a thesis paper about it back in my high school advanced composition class. For Americans in general, the question turns on the meaning of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that, quote Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. End quote. So then, if public schools paid for by religious and non-religious taxpayers promote or teach religion of any kind, does that qualify as an quote establishment of religion end quote. That infringes on the liberties of non-religious students and their families? That infringes on the liberties of non-religious students and their families.
Speaker 1:What is more likely to be the motive behind the First Amendment is the founding framers' memories of the wars of religion that devastated Europe in the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries. Those were wars that Christ-claimers waged against Christ-claimers. You could call them Christian civil wars in which as many as 18 million people who claimed Christ died at the hands of other people who claimed Christ. Those wars were not about Christianity versus other religions, but which form of Christianity would amass the most power over all other forms of Christianity. It was these religious wars that led our Church of Christ ancestors to flee Europe, where they were often persecuted by fellow Christ claimers. They came to the North American frontier, where they could practice primitive Christianity without fear of oppression and persecution by Christ claimers who had more economic and political power than they did. So perhaps they thanked God when the founding framers of the US federal government forbid Congress from establishing a state religion. That establishment clause protected our Church of Christ ancestors from the federal government establishing what surely would have been a Christian state religion, one that could have used state power to force our ancestors to comply with the federal form of Christianity. Or else Imagine how things could have turned out different for the United States and the Church of Christ if the founding framers chose to allow the federal government to establish as the state religion a certain form of Christianity other than what our ancestors practiced.
Speaker 1:However, those who claim that the United States is a Christian nation are not all wrong. Since the beginning, the vast majority of Americans claim Christianity as their religion and system of beliefs, and Christian customs, images and language permeate our civil institutions because for so long Christianity was just kind of assumed. The founding framers did believe that Americans must be a moral people in order for their experiment and self-government to succeed and to be a moral people. Order for their experiment and self-government to succeed and to be a moral people, the framers believed that we have to be a religious people, which is the basis from which many Christ-claimers in the United States argue for religion in public institutions like taxpayer-funded schools. And because the majority of Americans have always claimed to be Christians, some among them argue that Christianity should be the basis for religious expression and instruction in public institutions. This may be at least part of the reasoning behind a recent surge in Christ-claiming officials passing laws that put Christian practices and symbols back in taxpayer-funded public schools back in taxpayer-funded public schools. For example, Louisiana and Texas passed laws this year that require taxpayer-funded public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom and the Church of Christ's own. Ryan Walters, the state superintendent in Oklahoma, mandated that all public schools in his state must incorporate the Bible in their instruction from grades 5 through 12. Of course, these new laws and mandates are facing serious challenges in court, with plaintiffs seeking to halt their implementation on First Amendment grounds. But what do the American people think of all this? In the end, the law should conform to the contours of we, the people, and our will. That's the way the United States of America is supposed to work, right our will. That's the way the United States of America is supposed to work, right. So how do Americans feel about, say, Christian practices like prayer and taxpayer-funded public schools?
Speaker 1:The folks at Pew Research Center wanted to know this. In fact, they wanted to know a lot more. They recently finished their third religious landscape study, arguably the most far-ranging and thorough research project on Americans' religious beliefs and lives. Pew completed its first religious landscape study in 2007, followed it up with a second in 2014, and recently finished the third in 2024. Earlier this summer, Pew released some interesting findings on what Americans believe about school prayer. Here today, to explain what Pew found is Dr Chip Rotolo. Dr Rotolo is a research associate with the Pew Research Center, where he focuses on religious identities, beliefs and practices in the United States, with a particular focus on the role of religion in American society. He is the lead author on the Religious Landscape Study Report. Dr Rotolo, thank you for being our distinguished guest today.
Speaker 2:It's great to be here, thank you.
Speaker 1:All right. So before we get into this, we're going to use a couple of terms that some people may think of as being interchangeable, and I feel like if we don't define them right here at the front of the conversation, people may get confused as we go along. So could you explain for us the difference between religious and spiritual in the Pew report?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I love how you caveated it in the Pew report, because these terms are notoriously hard to define, and I'll say that we at Pew really don't put definitions on religion or spirituality often, but we certainly ask about questions commonly associated with each category. Just put you in our position In our work we're often most interested in seeing how prevalent both of these things are in society and how that might be changing over time and what difference it makes on outcomes like political views. So we're interested in it all and there's not really a need in our work to pit the two against each other. But starting with the easier one, when we're analyzing religion, we spend a great deal of time talking about our core measures of religion, which are religious affiliation, belief in God or a higher power, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and importance of religion. These are measures that we've asked about for a long time and they are common and traditional ways of engaging with religion in America. Of course, we look at many other religious things, like saying grace and being part of a small group or Bible study, but these measures probably give you the strongest sense of what we mean typically by religion.
Speaker 2:Spirituality is a bit more complicated. Spirituality is a bit more complicated, but when we study spirituality, we're tending to look at things that involve some perception that there's something beyond just the natural empirical world. On the belief front, that can be belief in souls or spirits, belief in an afterlife, even belief in astrology. We look at experiences like feeling the presence of someone who has passed away, and so you can probably easily see that many things could be considered both religion and spiritual. But the big thing is the religion bucket tends to be more organized, traditional and communal in nature, and spiritual doesn't necessitate any of those things. It can be those things, but it can be unorganized, non-traditional and personal.
Speaker 1:Okay, great definitions there. Thank you, now we can proceed. So my big takeaway from the religious landscape study is that Americans are, in general, spiritual people and they seem to be getting more spiritual, if I'm reading the report correctly. More spiritual we're also choosing, it seems more of us are choosing to get out of what Pew calls religion. Could you paint us a picture of you know, first of all, am I getting that correctly in my read of the report? And then, second, could you paint us a picture of what that looks like in the real world?
Speaker 2:Sure. So, first off, it is very clear that over the past few decades religion has generally been in a state of decline. Affiliation has gone down, attendance has gone down, the share who regularly pray has gone down. So here you see some of those measures I mentioned earlier. Most Americans are still religious About 70% claim some religious identity, but this is down quite a bit from a few decades ago. And it's also the case that younger Americans are less religious on average than older Americans.
Speaker 2:So as time passes and older Americans who are more religious pass away and younger Americans make up a greater share of the population, we would expect to see more religious decline in the future, and I think a lot of people see that and sense that, and that's not a particularly surprising claim. We can't actually say that Americans are becoming more spiritual, and the reason is that most of our questions about spirituality are newer. So we don't actually have trends yet to see that we will eventually. And we do ask respondents whether they think they've become more or less spiritual over the course of their lifetime, in which case four times as many Americans say they've become more spiritual. But one subjective evaluation of their spirituality can be a little bit different from looking at a population level. So, for example, about equal shares of Americans say they've become more or less religious over their lifetime.
Speaker 2:But you know, in all these religion measures we see some pretty sharp signals of decline, and so, but trends aside, americans in general are still pretty spiritual people. When we look at the share of Americans who believe in God, a higher power, an afterlife, souls or spirits or that there's something spiritual beyond the natural world, 92% of Americans have a spiritual outlook. And so, in the face of religious decline, there seems to at least be a continued openness to the spiritual realm. Part of that might be because spirituality is broader. Religion tends to have some tradition, a basis of authority, some teachings, and when we look at our data on people who are not religious, these are some of the top reasons they offer for not being religious Questioning religious teachings, not liking religious organizations, rather than complete disbelief or lack of time and interest.
Speaker 2:And so, you said, to paint a portrait, I guess I'd say religion has always been a major part of American life and it continues to be in many ways, but in general, people sense that religion has lost a lot of its influence, and while many still say religion brings people together. It helps the poor and the needy. Many also think religion is too rigid, it's too rules-focused and it's concerned with power, and so for these reasons and others, some people have left religion. Some have dropped spirituality, but broadly there's still a lot of belief in something bigger in our society.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you mentioned something just now that I was going to ask about a little while later. I'm reading Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam right now and never thought about this before, but he points out that so many changes in social norms have come about because older generations have died off and younger generations have become the majority population. So I think you just said it a moment ago yourself Some of the changes that we've seen in religion the decline of attendance or membership in a church, for example, over the last 17 years can be attributed to older generations that were more you know what we might say brand loyal to their denomination. For example, those generations dying off and these younger generations have a different opinion about religion coming into the majority. Is that at least one of the major drivers behind the change?
Speaker 2:Yes, social scientists who have been studying this, and we see this in our data. One of the big drivers of religious decline over the past few decades is definitely what we call generational replacement. Each generation or age cohort, or basically the decade you were born in, is, on average, a little bit less religious than the group before it. But that being said, it's also the case that in general we see in our religious landscape studies, people do become slightly less religious over the course of their lifetime, and when we look at these different age cohorts, young people are becoming less religious at a faster rate, and so you have three things happening kind of simultaneously.
Speaker 1:But the generational replacement is definitely a big part of the story, kind of simultaneously, but the generational replacement is definitely a big part of the story. Yeah, so before I get too far along, I want to ask you did religious landscape studies in 07, I believe, 14, and then 2023 to 2024. Just in general, what are some of the most remarkable changes that y'all observe about Americans, religious practices and spirituality? Anything that you haven't shared yet that you think is something our audience really needs to know about?
Speaker 2:Religious decline has certainly been a big part of the picture and continues to be, but one of our biggest emphases of our latest religious landscape study from 2023 and 24 that adds nuance to all of this is that, even though we've seen declines on several core measures of religion, we've seen almost complete stability in the past five years. Religious affiliation has been virtually unchanged, daily prayer has been virtually unchanged and, when we account for virtual options on religious service attendance because of the pandemic, attendance has been almost unchanged. So, in the face of this huge pandemic that forced many churches to close their doors some permanently, some temporarily and that caused many other congregations to start live streaming and to adjust how they do worship some are worshiping outside we saw all this religious decline come to a halt and you could have easily imagined the decline escalating. So that's one definitely striking thing to me that we'll have to continue to follow up on.
Speaker 1:I know you people don't speculate, but the headlines for years for those of us that follow the headlines, so certainly from your first religious landscape report in 07 to the last one the headline for years was Christianity is in free fall, christianity is in decline, and then over this last year the headlines have been well, maybe that's stabilized. You brought up the pandemic, you brought up some of the things that have happened over the last five years, and so those made headlines. That news made headlines because I think people were surprised that the decline did not continue, that it evened out. Is there anything in the data? Is there anything in the data that would point to why that might be?
Speaker 2:It's very it's a tough question and, yeah, we are definitely still looking at everything we can and we have some new 2025 data that we're kind of poking through now, and so each time we get new rounds of data, we're hoping it can shed light on the story, and I know there's lots of articles out there claiming that a religious revival is happening and we haven't quite seen signs of that in our data.
Speaker 2:But I guess one other interesting thing I'd add to the story of stability we've seen, and going back to what we were talking about, generational replacement. So each decade of people born tends to be a little less religious than the one before it. Another interesting thing we do see in our data is that our youngest age cohort, those born in the 2000s, actually aren't less religious than those born in the 90s. They, on all of our standard measures we look at, they look very, very similar. So we have to qualify what we say about that group. That's definitely not cause for any claims of revival necessarily, but if we're looking at how things have stabilized, it's interesting to see that that cohort isn't necessarily less religious than the millennials that came before them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can't wait to see how y'all study that as time goes by. Well, there may be a presumption that younger generations are leaving Christianity in the church because there's something wrong with them. That kind of goes back to the last question. It's like what's wrong with kids these days? But one of Pew's findings that is interesting to me in particular because I've grown up in the church, we're a multi-generational church family. I've been in ministry, I've been in youth ministry, I've been in children's ministry, I've worked with parents.
Speaker 1:One of the findings that's interesting to me is it seems that children who grow up to prioritize active participation in a congregation, for example, have parents who prioritize it sake of this conversation, the attending services, the traditions of the church, the teachings of the church, then kids are more likely.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying there's causation there, but there's a correlation that their kids are more likely to grow up and also prioritize religion as they received it from their parents. And yet, in the same report, one in four parents these days take their kids to religious services each week. So that means the vast majority of parents don't take their kids to church or to religious services and only two in five US adults participate in religious gatherings as much as they used to. So if the decline of church membership and participation is down among our younger generations, it seems like the data reveals not that there's something wrong with the younger generations, but maybe older generations might need to have a look at themselves in the mirror for the example that they're setting and the prioritizing that they're failing to do for religion. Can you just talk a little bit about that data for us?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really, really interesting way to pull all that data together and in my role at Pew, I can't put blame on anybody, but you're right. So the RLS shows that people who were raised in religious homes are much more likely, on average, to be religious as adults. Those who said religion was important to their families during childhood are more likely to say it was important as adults. Those who attended services regularly as children are much more likely to as adults. So there's definitely a connection there and, as you suggest, there are big differences across generations in terms of having religious upbringings. So let's talk some numbers Among those born in the 1940s or earlier.
Speaker 2:Among those born in the 1940s or earlier, 94% were raised with a religion. That number is 75% among those born in the 2000s. Similarly, among those born in the 1940s or earlier, 68%. So they attended services weekly when they were children. That number is 48% among those born in the 2000s.
Speaker 2:So this suggests considerable differences in the amount of religious parenting and education and socialization. That's happening across generations and when we look across all age squirts, we see these numbers drop each decade. So it's not that parents today have just dropped the ball all of a sudden on this front, if you will. It's that, over time, parents of each generation have seemingly had gradually less religious households. It's more of like a systemic thing.
Speaker 2:There is one important caveat to all of this, though. Our RLS shows that religious upbringings today are less sticky. So while it may be the case that a person is way more likely to be religious as an adult if they had a religious upbringing, and fewer young people are getting religious upbringings, it's also the case that young people that do get the religious upbringings are still way more likely to drop it. So here's a data point for that. If we focus just on people in our survey who told us they grew up going to services every week and that religion is very important to their life, 51% of those born in the 40s still attend weekly and say religion is very important. That number is just 28% among those born in the 2000s. So these young people that are having religious upbringing are still way more likely to shed it sometime during, you know, young adulthood.
Speaker 1:I have two follow-up questions to that. One is I'm able to understand things better if I visualize them. So what the research is showing us is that children who grow up in homes where their parents prioritize religious participation. I'll just put it that way.
Speaker 1:So, just going to church and being active in church would be one really important measure of that. Those children are more likely to prioritize religion as adults than those who do not grow up in a household where the parents prioritize religion. I think I've got that down right, but you said that it's not sticky, so it goes back to. We sometimes use the term brand loyalty, and what I mean by that is a lot of the kids I grew up with in the Church of Christ that are still very religious. They still go to church. They're very active participants in a Christian community. The majority of them are no longer members of a Church of Christ congregation. They've moved to other religious affiliations. Is that kind of what you're talking about? So, yeah, their parents raised them and they prioritized church attendance, for example, but they don't necessarily belong to the same church in which their parents raised them and they prioritized church attendance, for example, but they don't necessarily belong to the same church in which their parents raised them.
Speaker 2:That would certainly be the case for some people, but the vast majority who are shedding their religious identity are switching to no religion. Our numbers show. We asked people in this survey about their childhood religion and then we know their adult religion. 80% of Americans say they were raised as Christians, but of that 80%, 58% are still Christian and the other 22% have left Christianity. Of those 22% who have left Christianity, 19% are no religion now and just 2% have switched to a different Christian or a different religion.
Speaker 1:Okay, Okay, Wow, One of the interesting things. They're Two things that stand alongside each other in the research here. One is that personal private prayer is on the decline among all American cohorts. So when I say all American cohorts, I mean the different generations. Personal private prayer is in decline Even though, as you said earlier, something like nine out of 10 Americans still believe in God the vast majority still believe in heaven and so personal prayers on the decline. But here's the most recent headline that's made the news from your research 52% of Americans more than half favor teachers leading prayers to Jesus. And I need to be clear on that, because you make a distinction between prayers to Jesus and prayers to God in public schools. So I don't know what you want to do with that, but I'm sure you've answered a lot of questions the last few weeks about prayer in public schools. Can you talk, can you unpack this a little for us?
Speaker 2:schools. Can you talk, can you unpack this a little for us? Absolutely. We are really digging in here and I love it.
Speaker 2:It is true that religion has been on decline. Belief in God has been in decline. Belief in heaven has been in decline. Regular prayer has been in decline. At the same time, majorities of Americans still believe in God, believe in heaven and pray regularly. I mean remember about seven in 10 Americans are still affiliated with a religion.
Speaker 2:Church and state questions are extremely difficult to ask and to report on because I can tell you people have complex ideas about it, and so even the slightest change in question wording or question structure can make a big difference. So, on the RLS survey you're referring to, we ask people whether they favor or oppose allowing public school teachers to lead their classes in prayers that refer to Jesus. 52% say they favor Christian prayer in school, while 46% oppose it. I think there's a few things worth pointing out here. As we hear about all kinds of legislation involving religion in schools, it's important to note that there is a substantive difference in meaning between allowing certain religious things and requiring religious things. This question asks about allowing them, so that produces numbers I would expect to be higher than requiring them. Another thing that's you know we've been thinking a lot about in the past few years with questions on church and state. This question format is what we call forced choice, which means respondents have to go one way or the other. There's no middle option. In 2021, we asked a highly similar question but gave respondents a neutral option and they could say you know, I don't favor or oppose, or I have no opinion, and ultimately, the same share 46% say they were opposed to Christian prayer in school, but instead of 52% favoring it, just 30% said they favored it and 24% chose that middle option. So this suggests to me that a significant share of Americans may say they favor allowing Christian prayer in school when forced to take a side, but they may not feel particularly strong about the issue.
Speaker 2:You know we also asked on that survey a question about whether people favor or oppose the federal government being allowed to declare the US a Christian nation, and very similar shares nearly half of Americans say yes, they do favor the government being allowed to declare the US a Christian nation, and we've seen that on previous surveys.
Speaker 2:But we've also asked on other surveys open-ended questions where we let people tell us what does it mean to be a Christian nation, and we hear people say things like it means having good values, it means being a good person, and so it goes to show when we ask about church-state relations, people have very different ideas about what it means in practice. And one counterpoint I like to think about not a counterpoint, but just an interesting reference we see a considerable number of non-religious Americans, or people who are Muslim, buddhist, hindu, who say you know, I support Christian prayer in schools, and so that just makes me wonder. You know what is it? You know, as a data analyst, we're trying to figure out what are. How are people reading this question? What are they hearing? What are they thinking when they say they favor or oppose it?
Speaker 1:I don't remember if you asked this question in 07 and 14. Did you ask this question? No, this is the first time. That's right, okay, because I am automatically number one. I was surprised. I was a little surprised at the 52%. I'll just admit that here. I didn't expect that a little more than half of Americans would say they favor allowing Christian prayer in public schools. I thought it would be less than 50%, so my mind automatically goes to well, has that changed since 07? And you don't know, because you asked it for the first time in 2023, 2024. I'm blanking, and that's okay because I can edit this out. Oh, one of the things I should point out about that 52% that I noticed is that is not 52% spread equally across the country. There are big differences depending on where people live, how they respond to that question. You want to talk about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I published a piece on our website not too long ago, a few weeks on this.
Speaker 2:One great thing about this religious landscape study we did is it's so massive.
Speaker 2:We can actually look at all these religion questions not just at the national level but in all 50 states plus DC, and we can even look at these religion measures in 34 of the country's largest metro areas, and all of that's available on our website.
Speaker 2:We continue to produce analyses but, as you mentioned, we see a wide range in terms of support for Christian prayer and school across the 50 states. I believe it's in the 80%, in terms of around 80%, who support it in some states like Mississippi, alabama, and it's closer to 30% in states like Vermont and the District of Columbia. Short answer is that the states that are most in favor of allowing Christian prayer in schools are the states that are the most religious, the states you know when you look at attendance and prayer and affiliation. Those are a lot of the same states and likewise, the states that are most opposed to it are the least religious states. You can imagine a lot of other factors that play a role, probably party lines and, you know, maybe age or education factors in some way, but I think the clearest correlation there is religious religiosity.
Speaker 1:I like how you made a distinction in your questions about prayers to Jesus and prayers to God. Right and I'll say generic God Hope. No one takes offense at that. You know Jesus. Being very specific, this is a Christian prayer to Jesus Christ and God can almost lapse over into the realm of civil religion, you know. So our coinage says in God, we trust Well, which God right. So talk about how you came up with the idea to write those two different questions prayers to Jesus versus prayers to God and what were the differences in how people responded to each one of those.
Speaker 2:Right. So I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with different conversations about Christian nationalism or religious nationalism broadly, and we at Pew have tried to ask questions along the lines of this subject, engaging church and state from different angles. We don't say that Christian nationalism is or isn't a thing. We ask people how many people have heard of Christian nationalism, those kinds of things. We definitely tread lightly in this area, but we did think it was important. If we're going to ask about Christian prayer in school and then we get that percentage back, x percent of Americans believe this. It's nice to have a comparison of who might be in favor or opposed to some religious expression beyond just Christianity, and so that's why we asked this question about allowing teachers to lead students in prayers referring to Jesus and then allowing teachers to lead prayers to God but to no specific religion. I think that's how the actual question is worded. So, as we mentioned earlier, 52% essentially favor allowing Christian prayer. That number rises to 57% for prayers to God but to no specific religion. So it's slightly higher. 5%. It's not dramatic, but that would at least suggest to me that you know people have pretty similar ideas reacting to this question and you know a majority are in slight favor of both. So sentiment is pretty similar.
Speaker 2:I was mentioning that some non-Christian people end up being in favor of these things earlier. 22% of non-religious Americans say they favor allowing Christian prayer in school and that number rises to 28% of non-religious Americans who favor, you know, more generic prayers to God. So you could imagine why the numbers will be slightly higher for non-Christian groups when we're talking about the broader category. But sentiment seems to be pretty similar for these questions. I've had some other interesting percentages here. So, going back to that question about Christian prayer, 31% of Hindus support Christian prayer in school, 27% of Buddhists, 23% of Muslims. So I just, you know, shed some light on the different ways people might be hearing this question.
Speaker 1:And you don't have to comment on what I'm about to say because you stick to the data.
Speaker 1:But you're making me think of our interview with Dr Christina Littlefield where we did a show on Christian nationalism. This was maybe back in the spring, and she talked a lot about the civil religion of the United States. And the civil religion is, I'll call it, kind of the generic religion that the majority of Americans kind of hold to, the generic belief in God, the generic belief in Providence, if you will, and that God is involved in the affairs of the United States. And so what you're describing sounds to me a little bit like what she was talking about with civil religion People who are maybe not Christians at all, they are religious people, they are spiritual people, but they seem to recognize that there's kind of a place for civil religion in American life, which could include praying in a public institution like a school, and it sounds like they don't mind that because they maybe subconsciously not consciously understand that there's a civil religion at work in our country. You don't have to talk about that at all, but you're reminding me of that conversation that we had.
Speaker 2:Going back to when we asked people to tell us what a Christian nation meant to them. Among all those people who said they do support declaring the US asa Christian nation yeah, those are the people that said it means being a good person, having good values, having good morals. On the other side, you know the large share that said they did not support, or they were opposed to, declaring the US a Christian nation. We heard pretty different responses. It's not that they were opposed to people being good persons or good morals. When they hear the term Christian nation, they were more likely to say that means the US as a theocracy and where religion is forced on people. And so when we see people on different sides of these sorts of issues, it's not uncommon to see they have pretty different ideas about what they might mean in practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point and I'm glad you brought that forward. That's something that I believe a lot of Christians miss in the discussion about what it means to be a Christian nation, and so that's a very important distinction there. I want to end on a high note here.
Speaker 1:We've talked a little bit about generations, and I spend a lot of time in churches.
Speaker 1:I spend a lot of time, as much as I can, with Christians of different generations, a lot of time as much as I can, with Christians of different generations, and I hear a lot of lament from older generations that have seen the glory years in the Church of Christ, which is our tradition, and they worry about the younger generations. They ask you know what's wrong with kids these days, like I said, and there's a piece of data that came up in your research and it seems to indicate that let's see if I can find it here, no-transcript. So, whether you're in an older age cohort or a younger age cohort, the Pew data seems to point to all Americans really, regardless of their age, report, or the majority of Americans report growing more spiritual throughout their lives, which to me seems like a really positive thing and a good opportunity for religion, for a church. Could you share more about that fact and then tell us a little more about what you've got coming up? We hear you've got some more exciting projects coming up after this.
Speaker 2:Sure. So on that question, when we ask people about whether they become more or less spiritual over the course of their lifetime, I think I might have suggested this earlier there are four times as many people who say they become more spiritual over the course of their lifetime. I mean, I think that actual number it's somewhere in the 40% range, whereas in the 10% range say they become less spiritual, and then the remainder, which is probably a little less than 50% I don't have the table up right now say they become less spiritual and then the remainder, which is, you know, probably a little less than 50% I don't have the table up right now Say they've stayed the same level of spirituality throughout their life. So you're absolutely right, the balance of opinion there leans towards people becoming more spiritual. We can ask what that means, you know, is that a spiritual maturity, even as spiritual practices decline? Or, you know, people embracing spirituality in a deep way? Is the idea of spiritual growth just so inherent to what? Spirituality means that people see it that way?
Speaker 2:But it is interesting to contrast that to you know, the numbers about people becoming more or less religious, which about equal share, say they're becoming more or less religious, but we've definitely seen religious decline in recent years. The fact that we see non-major differences among the youngest cohorts on religion and spirituality measures I think that's really interesting, and just the stability we've seen in the past five years. All of these things kind of shake up what I think all of us thought we knew about religion, which is largely that story of decline. I think it's important to bear in mind. Like we said, as older generations pass away and less religious younger generations come up, all the data would tell us we are going to see some more religious decline in the future, unless something major happens. But just the fact that there's so many atypical patterns right now kind of, I think, has everybody brainstorming and thinking and wondering what's really going on, and so for many people who are interested in religion, as religious persons or as religion scholars I think it's an opportunity and it definitely inspires me to want to go deeper and ask a lot of questions In terms of what we are working on next. We just got back new 2025 data and so when we're looking at these trend lines, it's religion going up, down, staying the same. Pretty soon Not quite yet, we're still analyzing the data We'll be able to add one new year to that and see what's happening, and we can, you know, we'll be able to look among age groups too to see if there is anything like a religious revival happening. So I'm super excited about that.
Speaker 2:I have a few new reports coming out on religion and public life in the next couple of weeks, including one about religion in the 2024 election, so stay tuned for that, and I just think there's a lot more to learn about how the fine ways that religion and spirituality play a role in people's daily lives. So, always looking forward to coming up with new questions, I would encourage any listeners who want to stay more in touch with this stuff to check out our Pew Research Center website. You can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter from the religion team specifically, so it'll show you what's in the headlines more broadly and also what we're working on at Pew. And if you're on social media, on Instagram, I'd encourage you to follow my page. I have been trying to make short 30 second clips or so that highlight our latest and most important findings and that break it down in a practical way and tries to get to that. So what question? My page is just chipratolo, so you can find me on Instagram.
Speaker 1:Links will be in the show notes and when that report comes out in a couple of weeks, we'll link that to the show notes too. I subscribe to the newsletter. I highly recommend it. Dr Chip Rotello is the lead author on the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscapes Study, which is a deep, deep dive into the religious beliefs, lives and practices of Americans. You don't have to be a data nerd like me to find lots of fascinating stuff in that study. Have to be a data nerd like me to find lots of fascinating stuff in that study. So we will post a link to it in the show notes and encourage you to go check it out. Dr Rotello, thank you for being our guest today.
Speaker 2:Really enjoyed the conversation, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you, it's been a pleasure. We hope that something you heard in this episode encouraged, enlightened or enriched you in some way. If it did, thanks be to God and please pay it forward. Subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. Recommend and review it wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Your subscription, recommendation and review help us reach more people. Please send your comments, ideas and suggestions to podcast at christianchronicleorg.
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