"I like the IDEA of Religion."

Why Religious Importance and Religious Attendance Aren't the Same Thing

For those who have been long-time subscribers to this newsletter, you will know that the predominant approach to measuring religion is called “the three B’s.” One is religious behavior — that’s pretty straightforward: just ask people how often they attend a house of worship and you’ve got a pretty good assessment of this dimension of religiosity. The second B is religious belonging. This is what we are tapping into when we ask folks, “What’s your present religion, if any?” and then they get a list of possible response options like Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist, or nothing in particular. It’s the most sociologically accurate measurement of religion because it’s really about how the respondent situates themselves in the grand sweep of American society.

The last one is the one that is often the hardest to parse: religious belief. If belonging is sociological, then belief is primarily psychological. It’s the mental schema that one has in their head when they think about supernatural and philosophical things. The most widely used question to measure this dimension of religiosity is about belief in God. But it’s also the question that gets the most criticism, because it’s so amorphous. And no one loves the response options.

There’s this other question that hangs out in surveys, too, that I don’t know if I have ever thought about that much — it’s religious importance. It’s pretty straightforward: how important is religion in your life? A respondent can indicate that it’s very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not at all important. I’m not sure which “B” this one falls into. Probably belief, but maybe not entirely.

I’ve been forced to think about it a whole lot more as a result of a recent Gallup poll.

The headline, “Rise in Young Men’s Religiosity Realigns Gender Gaps“ points toward a huge finding: among young adults (age 18–29), there’s been a weird shift in religious importance. For young men, the share who said religion was very important was 28% in 2022–2023. In the most recent data it shot up to 42%. For young women, those figures went from 32% to 29%. A 50% increase in importance among young men in less than two years is a bit eyebrow-raising. For those who study long-term trends through survey data, it’s not every day that you see a measure move 10+ points in such a short period of time.

So what I’m going to do here is just explore religious importance through the Cooperative Election Study, which has been asking that question of folks for nearly twenty years. I want to determine the contours of such a question and then I will zoom in on that young adult result to see if the CES validates what is happening with the Gallup result.

First, here’s the broadest look at the data — how the full population has answered that question over time.

The “very important” line has always been off by itself at the top of the graph. Back in 2008, 46% of Americans said that religion was very important in their life. That figure has slowly eroded over time. Notice how there hasn’t been any major wiggle in the data? As I just stated — that’s the norm in this kind of work. Movement is glacial and deliberate. The “very important” line has dropped to 38% over a period of 15 years — about half a point per year.

The only other shift worth discussing is the “not at all important” line. Back in 2008, that was just 14% of the sample. Today, it’s 22% of Americans. The volatility in this line is low, with the biggest shift being three points from one year to the next — a total movement of eight points, the same as the “very important” group. The other two response options — “somewhat” and “not too” important — are about the same.

One question I had when looking at the previous graph was: how did these lines actually change? Was it generational replacement? That’s the idea that older folks are more religious than younger people, and when they die they are replaced by the next generation. It’s pretty easy to test in this case because I can just track how each generation has answered this question over time.

What may be surprising to some readers is that both the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers have become less likely to say religion is very important to them over time. For Silents, the drop is about four percentage points between 2008 and 2025. For Boomers, the drop was nearly the same magnitude (51% in 2008 to 45% in 2025). So it doesn’t look like it’s just generational replacement happening here — there are noticeable declines in religiosity inside those two older generations.

But for younger generations, the decline in the “very important” response is much smaller. For Gen X, it’s only been two percentage points — though that’s due to a big spike in the 2025 data compared to 2024 (up four points), so it may just be a weird blip. For Millennials, it’s a whole lot more stable: their “very important” share is down three percentage points over the last 17 years. And for Gen Z, it’s at 33% in 2025, but the two years before that it was around 30% — exactly the same number recorded back in 2016. So I don’t know if we can make big claims based on just the 2025 data.

Overall, though, I am more convinced that generational replacement is doing the heavy lifting here. The Silent Generation is about twenty points more likely to say that religion is very important to them than Millennials or Gen Z. When those older Americans die, it drags down the aggregate numbers on importance.

Speaking of Gen Z — let’s pivot back to that Gallup poll. The first thing I’m going to do is try to replicate the findings in the Cooperative Election Study. I am using the same parameters: 18–29-year-olds who say that religion is very important to them, broken down by gender.

For the most part, the trend lines in the Gallup data are replicated in the Cooperative Election Study. For both men and women, there was a drop over time. The Gallup numbers were consistently higher than the CES data, but in most years the difference was small. I’m not terribly alarmed by that gap — I think we can chalk it up to Gallup always reporting higher overall levels of religiosity compared to the Cooperative Election Study.

But I’m sure your eye was drawn to what is happening in the graph on the right. That’s young men. The CES data looks pretty darn stable. In the 2022 data, 27.2% of young men said religion was very important to them. In the 2024 data, it was 29.7% — an increase of 2.5 points. That’s certainly within the tolerances of normal survey noise and nothing to write home about.

However, the Gallup numbers have it at 28% in 2022 (exactly the same as the CES) but then push it up to 42% in 2024. As you can probably guess — that’s way outside the bounds of normal. A move of 14 points is the largest ever recorded in this time series for Gallup, though there were two 12-point drops for women on this metric.

Now, I can’t fully investigate what’s happening with the Gallup numbers because I don’t have the raw data, but I can do a bit of poking around in the CES because they post their files on the Dataverse for download. Before I do that, I need to point out something — I had to pool the CES data to match the years listed in the Gallup survey online.

If I just look at individual years in the CES, here’s the share of young men who say religion is very important to them over the last couple of surveys:

• 2022 — 24.4%

• 2023 — 32.4%

• 2024 — 28.2%

• 2025 — 34.2%

That’s a lot of bounce. And here’s some inside baseball: the odd-numbered CES samples are a lot smaller than the even years. For instance, 2024 was 60,000 respondents; 2025 was just 17,000. So that may be doing some of the work here.

Beyond that, I wanted to see how religious importance interacted with religious attendance among these youngest adults. The graph below shows the share of weekly attenders who said that religion was very important to them.

What’s super interesting to me here is that among young adults who go to church often, the share who say religion is very important to them has declined by about ten percentage points between 2008 and 2025. Maybe it’s because non-denominational churches have taught young people that they aren’t “religious” — a common refrain in those spaces is, “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship.” That sentiment could be changing how young folks interpret this question.

The other thing worth highlighting is the line for young men. In 2022, only 65% of weekly churchgoing young men said that religion was very important to them. By 2024, that was about twelve percentage points higher — a huge shift in a short period of time. That said, young men and young women are now at basically the same level in the last couple of years.

But what about the other end of the attendance spectrum — those who report seldom or never attending? This is where things get super weird.

The aberration here is pretty hard to miss. Among men who reported going to church less than once a year, religious importance is predictably low — just 6.7% of this subgroup said that religion was very important to them back in 2024. But then in a single year, that figure rose to 17.1%. That’s both statistically significant and substantively huge. The confidence intervals between men and women are still overlapping here, but not by that much.

So what in the world is happening in the Gallup data? I can’t say for certain since I can’t replicate this analysis with their spreadsheets. But what I can say is that a clear contributor to the rise in religious importance among young men in the CES is a growing number of folks who like the idea of religion but don’t go to church that much.

It’s belief without behavior. They like what religion stands for, but they can’t manage to put their butt in a pew on Sunday morning.

Cue the think pieces.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.