(ANALYSIS) No one is more worth heeding on U.S. religious trends and statistics than Ryan Burge. The political scientist’s Substack columns are must-reads (select columns also available for reading at Religion Unplugged).

His May 20 post, in particular, presents American religion’s “Story of the Year” — if it keeps holding true.

Burge claims it's now “crystal clear” that “the share of non-religious Americans has stopped rising in any meaningful way. … The rise of the nones may be largely over now. At least it won’t be increasing in the same way that it did in the prior 30 years.”

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Big stuff because the major trend in 21st century American religion has been that inexorable increase of “nones,” the folks who tell social science surveys that they have no religious identity or affiliation. They were a negligible 6% of the population in 1991 and then increased steadily over the years.

It began to look like the U.S. was destined to match the prevalent — and sometimes oppressive — secularism of Canada and Western Europe that is moving Christianity’s spiritual and statistical center toward the Global South. The Pew Research Center projected that if trends continued, nones would hit 41% to 52% of the U.S. population by the year 2070.

Burge chiefly relies upon the newly released 2023 data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES) housed at Harvard University, with its huge sample of 25,400 respondents. Moreover, those numbers are corroborated by two other authoritative sources, the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey (GSS) and Pew Research polling.

After continual CES increases, nones grew only 2% between 2013 and 2018, to 32% . Then nonreligious Americans for 2019 through 2023 numbered, in turn, 35%, 34%, 36%, 35% and 36%. Over the past decade, the numbers for both agnostics and atheists have held steady year by year, at around 6%. The dominant segment of those saying their religious identity is “nothing in particular” has stalled at 23% to 24% over the past four years.

And we’ll be watching this: The nonreligious segment of Generation X and the millennials hit a ceiling the past three years, and between 2022 and 2023 it fell by a surprising and noteworthy 6% with the youngest age cohort, Generation Z. Will that continue?

Likewise, the GSS enumerated a steady nonreligious rise from 6% in 1991 to 28% by 2021, but then a tiny 1% downturn, suggesting a ceiling has been hit. Pew Research reports these numbers for the nonreligious for 2020 through 2023: 28%, 29%, 31% and then a dip to 28%.

So have we indeed reached a turning point?

Burge remarks that “this really may be the end of an era” with trend lines that might “demarcate religious history around this time period.”

Perhaps, but Pew expert Greg Smith told Religion News Service that “it’s way too early to tell if the rise of the religious nones has come to an end.” This writer is equally cautious.

In religion, what goes down can always come up again. American religions continue to face persistent skepticism from elite culture, education and entertainment along with long-term internal damage from sexual abuse scandals and disputes over sexual morality and Trumpism that are not disappearing. Also, stated identity in polls does not make up for sagging in-person attendance and donations that erode organized religion.

Burge does not pursue a major anomaly with the numbers for 2020 through 2023. In March 2020, President Trump declared COVID-19 to be a “national emergency.” By May 2023, Johns Hopkins University tabulated there’d been 103.8 million U.S. cases. Did this crisis somehow shift peoples’ outlook toward faith? That should be added to analysts’ agenda.

If we’re at a turning point, how come? Burge theorizes that large numbers of nominal but uninvolved church members drifted toward “no religion” answers to pollsters the past decade or two, possibly because that became socially acceptable. “Eventually there weren’t that many marginally attached folks anymore,” leaving a solidly committed religious population that did not shrink. As he puts it, “the loose topsoil has been scooped off and hauled away, leaving nothing but hard bedrock underneath.”

Alongside the religious dynamics here, note Burge’s political calculation that nones have reached 26% of the Democratic Party constituency, equal to Catholics (compared with only 12% among Republicans). Going forward, the U.S. is destined to have a population with large numbers of both religious and nonreligious citizens. If that means polarization and hostility, it “will be bad for democracy,” Burge told RNS.

You'll find more to ponder in Burge's treatment of this turf in his book, “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going” that was released last year. Among other things, this informative analysis emphasizes that vague "nothing in particular" Americans should not simply be lumped together with far different, militantly anti-religious agnostics and atheists.

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.