Let's Talk About America’s Religion Boom
Notes on the commodification and co-opting of faith
The narrative we’re all likely familiar with goes like this: church attendance is in free fall, the “nones” are on the rise, and organized religion is dying. Pew Research tells us that about 29% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, up from just 16% in 2007. Millennials fled the pews, and Gen Z was supposed to finish the job.
Something else appears to be happening instead, though. While many headlines trumpet religious decline, people are buying Bibles at unprecedented rates—sales are up 41.6% since 2022. Christian music streams on Spotify are up 60% over five years, and religious app downloads have tripled since 2019. The YouVersion Bible app set a single-day download record on the first Sunday of 2025 with 798,000 new installs. Though previously falling, Christian identification has stabilized. “Commitment to Jesus” has jumped 12 percentage points since 2021 among Americans overall, with Gen Z—dubbed “the courageo…
