How Religion Can Be Growing and Declining at the Same Time

Thus, seemingly contradictory findings emerge.  I came across an article about what is happening in Southern Baptist churches.  Membership from 2024 to 2025 was down 3%.  And yet, for that same period, attendance in Southern Baptist churches was up 4.65%.  And the number of baptisms–of adults, which for Baptists is only for “believers”–is up 4.96%.

So is the number of Southern Baptists declining or growing?  I would say growing.  Membership rolls are typically full of non-active members.  If they were truly committed to their church, they would be attending.  It’s not news when nominal members drift away or tell pollsters they aren’t affiliated anymore.  The point is, for Baptists, more people are attending and more people are getting baptized.  That is far more significant.  But what is happening for the Baptists may not be happening for other religious groups.

Some of the discrepancies may be because both growth and decline are happening in different demographics, the numbers for which end up canceling each other out.  For example, there does seem to be a genuine surge of religion among young men of Generation Z, in their teens and twenties. To use Burge’s breakdown, in their religious behavior, in 2022-2023 only 33% of young men attended services at least once a month, but in 2024-2025, that shot up to 40%.  In belonging, 63-65 percent of young men identify with a specific religion, a number that has held up with little change. In religious interest, in only two years, the percentage of young men who say that religion is “very important” has risen from 28% to 42%.

By just about every measure–the Gallup poll being referenced doesn’t get at “belief,” as such–young men, as a group, really do seem to be getting more religious.  Not so much with women, though.  Among young women in the same demographic, the percentage who identify with a specific religion is 58-60%.  And only 29% of young women say that religion is “very important” to them.

Then again, in other age groups, women are still more religious than men.  And different demographics show different breakdowns.  Overall, concludes Gallup, little has changed.  Beneath the surface, though, notes Jorge Mújica, is “a more complex and unsettled religious landscape.”

Joseph Holmes of Religion Unplugged gives a more substantive explanation for why religion can surge and decline at the same time:

Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times, gives a helpful possible explanation. He pointed out, “It’s entirely possible for a faith to experience revival and decline simultaneously. … What determines whether a big religion is growing or shrinking is not the convert mentality. It’s how many kids its adherents are having, and whether it feels like a default for those kids to remain with the faith in adulthood. So a certain sense of normalcy is helpful for that kind of religious growth — a feeling that life is basically stable, that your religious worldview is compatible with your practical ambitions, that God is in his heaven and all is right with America.”

Conversion from outside a faith, on the other hand, often proceeds from a sense of cultural abnormalcy — a feeling of dislocation, rupture, crisis.

And some people’s impulse to seek after God in new terrain, to leap or swim into a new tradition, can grow stronger during exactly the sort of unstable cultural moments that make other people less likely to stick with an inherited and loosely held religious commitment.

In such a moment, it’s entirely possible to have a spirit of revival or intensified belief among the restless and spiritually curious — yet also a continued decline in religious practice among cradle believers. And as birthrates drop, a decline in the number of people born into a religion in total.

So times of cultural turmoil, such as we have today, can be occasions both for some people to lose their religion and for other people to turn to religion.

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