The American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life released a comprehensive report in April 2026 on Generation Z and faith. The headline finding is significant: 34% of Gen Z Americans have no religious affiliation — the highest proportion of religiously unaffiliated young people in the history of American polling. By comparison, 29% of Millennials, 25% of Gen X, 18% of Baby Boomers, and 9% of the Silent Generation were unaffiliated at similar life stages.
Every generation has been less religious than the one before it. But the gap is widening, and the report suggests there is little evidence it will reverse — Americans who leave religion tend to do so before age 18, and most don't return as adults.
Then there's the other finding.
The Headline: Least Religious Generation in American History
The mechanism behind the decline is less mysterious than it might appear. The Survey Center's researchers found that Gen Z's parents — many of them Millennials and younger Gen Xers — modeled fewer religious behaviors than previous generations. Church attendance wasn't woven into childhood routines. Common practices like saying grace before meals have shifted from expectation to exception. Formative religious experiences, which research consistently shows to be the strongest predictor of adult religiosity, simply happened less frequently.
What was missing wasn't primarily belief. It was practice. And without early practice, belief rarely forms roots deep enough to survive the competing pulls of adult life.
The implications for civic and community life are real. Religious Americans are significantly more likely to volunteer, join community organizations, and participate in civic activities than their secular counterparts — and the Survey Center's research suggests that frequency of participation matters more than religious identity alone. A generation with fewer institutional connections of any kind is a generation more likely to experience the social isolation that has become a documented crisis.
Why the Formative Gap Matters
The parents of Gen Z — Millennials and late Gen Xers — were already less religious than previous generations. They raised children in a cultural environment increasingly skeptical of organized religion, shaped in part by institutional scandals, growing identification of conservative religion with partisan politics, and the rise of digital communities that competed for the time and attention that religious communities once received.
Once disaffiliation becomes common in a generation, it tends to become more common in the next. The Survey Center estimates that roughly 65% of Americans who grew up without religious affiliation are still unaffiliated as adults — the pattern holds across life stages, including marriage and parenthood, which traditionally served as on-ramps back to religious participation.
The Countertrend Nobody Expected
And yet: something else is also happening.
Research from Barna Group found that among Gen Z men specifically, commitment to Christian faith jumped 15 percentage points between 2019 and 2025. Among Millennial men, the corresponding jump was 19 points. Greek Orthodoxy, a historically niche denomination, reported a 78% increase in converts in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic levels, with a significant share of them being young men.
The gender dimension of this trend is notable. For decades, women were consistently more religious than men — a reliable feature of American religious life. Among Gen Z, that gap appears to be closing. Young men are now retaining or adopting Christian identity at rates equal to or higher than their female peers — a reversal that researchers attribute partly to a search for structure, community, and a framework for masculinity that secular culture has struggled to provide.
Spiritual But Not Religious — and What That Means
The overall picture is more textured than either "religion is dying" or "there's a revival." Sixty-five percent of Gen Z still describe themselves as spiritual. What they're rejecting, by and large, isn't transcendence — it's institutions.
The research on what that distinction costs them is worth sitting with. People who leave religious communities, particularly those from conservative traditions, report meaningfully higher rates of loneliness and social isolation. The Survey Center found that 39% of Americans who were raised evangelical Protestant and no longer identify with it say they feel lonely most or all of the time — a rate dramatically higher than their religiously active peers.
Religion, for all its complications, has historically served as one of the primary structures through which people build and maintain community. Something can be both declining and deeply consequential at the same time.
