After decades of steady decline, the share of Americans identifying as Christian has stabilized. One reason is the unexpected religiosity of Generation Z—young adults born after 2000—who are not abandoning religion at the rate their parents did. For some, faith has become a form of rebellion against a culture that rejects traditional values.

According to the Pew Research Center’s latest Religious Landscape Study, 63 percent of Americans now identify as Christian—a slight increase from the 2022 low of 60 percent and part of a five-year trend of relative stability following nearly two decades of decline. The study analyzed respondents by birth decade and found that every twentieth-century cohort showed a drop in Christian identification compared with the previous one. For example, 80 percent of the group born in the 1940s and earlier identify as Christian, compared with just 46 percent of those born in the 1990s. But among those born in the 2000s, the rate held steady at the 1990s level, suggesting that the generational decline may have plateaued.

More broadly, the Pew study found that Christianity is increasingly a marker of conservative political identity across all age groups. Since 2007, the share of conservatives identifying as Christian has declined only modestly—by 7 percentage points. Among liberals, however, Christian identification has dropped sharply, falling 25 points—from 62 percent to 37 percent. Today, conservatives are 45 percentage points more likely to identify as Christian than liberals are.