Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 4, 2025 /
07:00 am
According to data from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES), the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion has largely stopped rising and has even slightly decreased among certain generations.
The Harvard-run CES is conducted before and after U.S. presidential and midterm elections and is then uploaded for analysis to Harvard’s “Dataverse” online repository. The study includes 60,000 American adults interviewed to survey how they vote.
Ryan Burge, the research director for the religious outreach initiative Faith Counts, said on X on Wednesday that the 2024 data reveals a plateau in the country’s population of “nonreligious” or “nones.”
NEW DATA IS OUT!!!!1!1!!!
And guess what?
The nones have stopped rising – for real, for real.
Non-religious Boomers are down to 2020 levels.
Gen X nones are 31%. The same as 2012.
Millennial nones haven’t budged since 2020.
Among Gen Z – certainly no dramatic increase. pic.twitter.com/N2PRrzzp7L— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) April 2, 2025
The data indicated that baby boomers experienced the greatest decrease in the number of “nones” from 2023 to 2024, falling from 28% to 24%.
The 28% figure represented the highest number of nonreligious boomers since the survey began. This is the first year that the percentage of nonreligious boomers has decreased.
The data similarly found that 31% of Generation X participants said they have no religious affiliation, a drop of 3 percentage points from 2023 and the lowest it has been since 2012.
The Silent Generation — consisting of those born between 1928 and 1945 — has always had the lowest number of “nones” compared with the other cohorts. In 2024, the number of nonreligious people in this group dropped by 2 points to 19% overall.
The number of millennial nones has not changed from 2023. A full 42% of American millennials do not identify with a religion.
Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, was the only generation that was found to have increased in its number of nonreligious individuals. In 2023, 42% of Gen Z Americans considered themselves nones. This number has increased to 46%.
Overall findings
The data also examines the specific way these individuals identify — whether as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular.
As of 2024, 21% of Americans have no particular nonreligious identification — down from 24% in 2023— while 6% are agnostics and 7% are atheists.
In 2019, 36% of Americans overall were nonreligious, and as of 2024 the total dropped to 34%.
Tessa Gervasini is an intern for Catholic News Agency and a fellow of the College Fix. She recently graduated from Texas Christian University with a bachelor’s degree in strategic communication.
