For the better part of a decade, the story of American religion has been told as a story of subtraction. Affiliation is down. Attendance is down. In 2024, eight in ten Americans said religion was losing influence in American life, and serious scholarship has documented the retreat of traditional religious authority. That perception has since softened—by 2026 the proportion seeing religion’s influence as diminished has fallen to six in ten—but the subtraction story persists as a frame through which American religion is read.
But affiliation and attendance measure institutions. They tell us where Americans belong. They tell us little about what Americans believe, what they practice when no one is watching, what they draw on under stress, what they pass to their children, or what they expect after death.
The Wheatley Institute Survey of Lived Religion (WSLR), a nationally representative survey of 2,005 American adults, was built to ask that wider set of questions. This is the first of four reports drawing on it.
| Report 1 | State of Religion and Spirituality in America | This report establishes the baseline: what Americans believe, how they practice, which identities they rank as most essential to who they are, and what they hope for at the end of life. |
| Report 2 | Religion and Personal Well-Being | This report turns to the individual, asking whether religious practice tracks with happiness, family life, and the capacity to cope with stress—and what we observe among those with no practice to draw on. |
| Report 3 | Religion and Civil Society | This report considers what religious communities contribute beyond their own walls, including participation in civic organizations that have nothing to do with faith. |
| Report 4 | Faith Transmission and the Next Generation | This report asks how belief passes between generations, and what fills the vacuum when parents step back from faith. |
Across the series we ask whether religious beliefs and practices predict favorable outcomes for individuals and for society. The cumulative claim is that religion in America is more alive, more beneficial, and more civically consequential than the coverage of its decline suggests—and that America is more faithful than the
numbers we usually cite would imply.
This first report establishes the baseline for the state of religion and spirituality in America today. Before we can ask whether religion makes people happier, whether it strengthens communities, or whether it survives the passage between generations, we need an accurate picture of what American religious life actually consists of. That picture is organized around questions the standard surveys do not ask:
- What do Americans believe about God—and about themselves in relation to God?
- How many read scripture or pray daily, and how many of those are religious “nones”?
- How many have witnessed a miracle or changed a decision based on a spiritual impression?
- Why do people attend the congregation they do, and how many showed up last Easter?
- What do Americans think happens when they die, and who do they want at the graveside?
- Which identities do they rank as most essential—e.g., parent, Buddhist, child of God, or Democrat?
To begin, three findings set the stage:
- Three-quarters of Americans place at least some importance on religion.
- Forty-three percent thank God multiple times a day; indeed, Americans are more likely to direct gratitude to God with this frequency than to human beings in their lives.
- And only about a quarter of the unaffiliated believe that death is simply the end.
Read the full report
Read the press release
About the Authors
Shima Baradaran Baughman, Woodruff J. Deem Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School and Distinguished Fellow at Wheatley Institute
Stephen Cranney, Data Scientist and Lecturer at the Catholic University of America
Paul Lambert, Religion and Human Flourishing Director at Wheatley Institute