The youngest American adults report attending religious services more often than people just a few years older, but new Pew Research Center findings show no clear religious revival across generations.
The report released Wednesday found that 41% of adults born from 2004 through 2008, roughly ages 18 to 22, say they attend services at least monthly, compared with 27% of those born from 2000 through 2003 and 33% of adults overall.
The contrast does not extend equally to every measure of faith. Adults roughly 23 to 26 were the least religious age group on attendance, daily prayer, religious affiliation and the importance of religion in their lives. The youngest adults scored higher than that group, but were less religious than several older groups on measures other than attendance.
Across the country, the shares identifying with a religion, praying daily, considering religion very important and generally attending services at least monthly have largely stabilized since 2020, following a longer period of decline.
Young adults’ attendance leaves important questions
Pew found no clear evidence that any birth cohort it can track has become more religious in recent years. The newest adults cannot yet be followed over a comparable period because they were children during earlier surveys.
The youngest group included 443 respondents in the combined 2025-26 surveys, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points. Splitting that group by gender or party produces smaller samples and wider uncertainty.
Young adults can also be difficult to reach. Some live with parents, some attend college and others have entered the workforce. Pew said an unrepresentative mix could affect results, although respondents with and without college experience showed similar religiousness.
Comparisons of affiliation, prayer and religion’s importance show that today’s youngest adults are no more religious than people the same age were in 2014. Both the youngest and second-youngest groups are less religious on those measures than their counterparts were in 2007.
Pew cautioned against directly comparing attendance estimates with the 2007 and 2014 Religious Landscape Studies because those surveys were conducted by telephone, while newer studies rely mainly on online and paper responses.
Earlier surveys have also recorded relatively religious groups entering adulthood whose religiousness later faded. Researchers said the current findings could reflect a pandemic rebound, a lasting change or a temporary fluctuation.
Gender and party differences do not tell the whole story
The youngest men reported attending services more often than the youngest women, reversing the pattern Pew historically found between American men and women.
But young women also had relatively high attendance. Among women born from 2004 through 2008, 35% reported attending at least monthly, higher than women born in the 1990s or early 2000s and roughly comparable with women born from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Women nationwide still reported more daily prayer and greater importance of religion than men. The gap in the share calling religion very important narrowed from 14 percentage points in 2007 to nine in the 2023-24 study and six in the 2026 National Public Opinion Reference Survey. Pew attributed the longer-term narrowing to declining religious engagement among both sexes, with a larger decline among women.
The youngest Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were more religious than their Democratic counterparts. Fifty-five percent reported attending services at least monthly, a rate higher than every Republican age group except the oldest, whose difference from the youngest group was not statistically significant.
The youngest Democrats also attended more often than Democrats born from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Both parties’ youngest adults identified with a religion at below-average rates for their respective parties, so Pew said the attendance pattern could not be explained as an exclusively Republican development.
The youngest adults also were not especially Republican: 34% identified with or leaned toward the GOP, 56% identified with or leaned toward Democrats and 10% leaned toward neither party.
Following the same people shows more stability than change
A separate Pew analysis compared answers from the same 5,835 American Trends Panel participants in 2020 and 2025.
Eighty-seven percent were either affiliated with a religion in both years or unaffiliated in both. Six percent moved from no affiliation to an affiliation, while 6% moved in the opposite direction.
Between 84% and 86% stayed in the same broad categories for monthly attendance, daily prayer and religion’s importance. Attendance and religion’s importance showed small net declines of three and two percentage points, respectively.
Younger adults changed affiliation more often: 78% of respondents born in the 1990s had the same affiliation status in both years, compared with 95% of those born before 1950. Within every age group, however, roughly equal shares joined and left religious affiliations. Large majorities of both men and women and both political coalitions remained stable on the four measures.
The analysis measured changes across thresholds, such as attending at least monthly or less often. Moving from seldom attending to never attending did not count as crossing that threshold. It compared the two endpoint surveys, rather than tracking every intervening year, and could not adequately analyze adults born in the 2000s.
The surveys ran Aug. 3-Sept. 20, 2020, and July 8-Aug. 3, 2025. Results were weighted to represent the 2020 adult population with an adjustment for participants who left the panel. The full-sample margin of error was plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.
Attendance has recovered from pandemic lows
In a different Pew survey conducted May 26-June 1, 2026, 34% of adults said they had attended services in person during the previous month, up from 13% in July 2020. Twenty-six percent watched services online or on television, down from 36%.
Forty-five percent did one or both. The questions allow overlapping answers; the in-person and viewing percentages are not separate groups that can simply be added. This survey included 9,750 adults, with a full-sample margin of error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.
Those questions began during the pandemic, so they cannot establish whether current participation has regained or exceeded pre-pandemic levels. They also differ from questions asking how often people generally attend.
Other research complicates the picture. Pew said recent Gallup polling found growing religiousness among young men, but the organizations differed on which gender gaps were apparent. In the federal American Time Use Survey, 14% of adults born in 2000 or later reported attending services the preceding Sunday in 2025, with no statistically significant difference from older groups.
That federal estimate relied on just 102 young adult respondents and had substantially greater uncertainty. The 2025 survey also missed activities from Sept. 30 through Nov. 11 because of the government shutdown. A Sunday-only comparison misses many services traditionally held on other days; an all-days analysis likewise found no evidence of unusually high attendance among young adults.
Pew’s principal age comparisons combine nationally representative address-based surveys from 2025 and 2026, totaling 15,926 respondents. The combined surveys ran Feb. 5-June 18, 2025; July 9-Dec. 5, 2025; and Jan. 30-June 18, 2026. The full-sample margin of error was plus or minus 1.1 percentage points. Participants could respond online, on paper or by telephone in English or Spanish. The research was funded through the Pew-Knight Initiative by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Knight Foundation.
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