By Joshua Arnold

A recent Gallup poll shows “the percentage of U.S. adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life” dropped from 66% in 2015 to 49% in 2025, a drop which “ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any 10-year period since 2007.”

According to Gallup, a drop of 15 percentage points or more is highly unusual, occurring in only 14 out of 160 countries since they began polling. The drop draws the U.S. further away from global averages (where 80% or more say religion is important) and closer to the averages of other developed nations, although America is not as secularized.

In a vacuum, these data could lead one to speculate that America is following an inevitable trend of becoming a totally secular, post-Christian society, like its European counterparts. However, it is necessary to make two stipulations.

First, many people who no longer say religion is important have likely embraced religion of a different kind. The word “religion” carries unfortunately formal connotations, but a person’s religion is shown by the way they answer questions like these: what do you hope in? Where do you put your trust? Whatever is the answer has taken the place of God in their life and, in a sense, they worship that thing. Paul makes this connection for us in Friday’s “Stand on the Word” Bible reading, when he says that “covetousness,” the inordinate desire for something possessed by another, “is idolatry.”

In this sense, American society offers a range of religions that often aren’t counted as religion. There is straight secularism, where people worship scientific progress, material prosperity, or even their own desires. There are various forms of spiritualism or supernaturalism, which lead people to trust in astrology, psychics, or even magic. The former is just as religious as some forms of Buddhism, while the latter is just as religious as many forms of paganism.

So, religion doesn’t go away; it just changes form, and sometimes it puts on a disguise.

Second, the nature of Christianity would lead us to expect that societies heavily influenced by Christianity would see fluctuation in the importance of religion over time, which we would not expect to see in societies where another religion is dominant.

The reason for this expectation is that people do not inherit Christianity from their parents as they would inherit any other religion. Real Christianity — the kind that becomes important in a person’s life — only comes about through personal conversion, effected by a divine work in the person’s life. Christianity is unique in this regard because it is the only religion that worships the true God.

In fact, such a generational fluctuation has been evident among God’s people since Israel first entered the land of Canaan. The inspired author records that “the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel,” but “there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel” (Judges 2:7, 10).

If this is true, one may ask, why does this trend not show up more clearly in the Gallup data? The answer is that their time frame is too short. Gallup has only been asking the question since 2007. That gives them only eight years thus far in which to measure a 10-year change — not even a single generation.

Anecdotally, some periods in American history were known for high religious engagement (the 1730s, the 1810s), while others were known as less religious (the 1850s, the 1920s), but there were no statistical surveys to put hard numbers to these figures.

The fact that the Christian religion is not inherited informs the urgency that Christians should feel for making disciples in the next generation. Such discipleship is encouraged across both Old and New Testaments. “We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done,” writes Asaph. “He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children” (Psalm 78:4-6).

Then, there is the Great Commission that Jesus gave to his disciples, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18-19). Jesus’s next words, “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age,” imply that the need for discipleship extends through time as well as through space.

Many readers will likely be engaged already in discipling their children to know the Lord. But beyond discipling their own children, Christians are also called to evangelize others. Testifying to the gospel of Jesus Christ is the means God instituted by which he will grow his church. For Christians troubled by the apparent decline in religion in the United States, perhaps God is stirring your heart to evangelize the lost — especially the youthful lost — around you.

Most importantly, these data are also a call for Christians to pray, urgently, for revival. Only when God pours out his Spirit afresh is the church enlivened, empowered, and expanded. For more Americans to say that religion is important in their lives — and particularly the Christian religion — God must send revival.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.