Last week, we released the latest PRRI Census of American Religion. Our 2025 data show religious affiliation in the United States has remained largely unchanged since 2024, with 28% of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated. Church attendance also has not increased. In fact, self-reported attendance has remained relatively stable since 2020, although still below 2013 levels.
Among young Americans (ages 18 to 29), weekly church attendance has similarly held steady over the past year. We find 39% of young adults are religiously unaffiliated. This overall stability, however, masks modest gender differences: young men report similar rates of disaffiliation as in 2024 (35%, down slightly from 36%), while young women show a small increase — from 40% in 2024 to 43% in 2025.
Are young men becoming more religious, while young women continue to move away from organized religion?
At the same time, Gallup’s latest analysis — also released last week — offers a somewhat different perspective on Gen Z, particularly young men. Gallup reports an increase in church attendance among young men in recent years, along with a notable rise in the share who say religion is very important in their lives. These shifts are not mirrored among young women.
So what explains these differences? Are young men becoming more religious, while young women continue to move away from organized religion? And what might these trends mean for American politics?
A largely similar story
Gallup reports trend data in two-year intervals, while PRRI reports annually. Despite these differences, both datasets show consistent long-term patterns. Comparing changes since 2013 — when PRRI began the Census of American Religion — with Gallup’s 2012-2013 data reveals key similarities.
First, young women have disaffiliated from religion at substantially higher rates over time, while young men’s levels of religious affiliation remain broadly similar to those in the early 2010s.
Second, young women today are less likely than young men to identify with a religious tradition.
Moreover, neither dataset shows recent growth in religious affiliation among young men. Gallup’s 2024-2025 data indicate 63% of young men identify with a religious tradition, essentially unchanged from 2022-2023. PRRI finds a similar pattern: 63% in 2024 and 65% in 2025, a difference that is not statistically significant.
Gallup’s 2024-2025 data show 60% of young women identify with a religious tradition — similar to PRRI’s 2024 findings. Although PRRI data indicate a slight decline to 58% in 2025, this difference is not statistically significant, aligning with Gallup’s findings.
The broader pattern is consistent across both surveys: Over the past decade, Gen Z women have disaffiliated at notable rates, while Gen Z men’s levels of religious affiliation have remained relatively stable.
Here are three important observations based on further analysis:
- Religious attendance data tell different stories — largely due to differences in measurement, reporting and mode of data collection.
One of Gallup’s most attention-grabbing findings is that young men are attending church at higher rates than in recent years, with modest increases also reported among young women.
A key distinction, however, is how attendance is measured. Gallup reports monthly attendance, while PRRI focuses on weekly attendance. Using this stricter measure, PRRI finds only about two in 10 young Americans — both men and women — attend religious services weekly in 2025, a rate that has remained statistically unchanged since 2022. By contrast, Gallup reports a 7-point increase in monthly attendance among young men (from 33% in 2022–2023 to 40% in 2024–2025) and a smaller 3-point increase among young women.
Direct comparisons are complicated by differences in survey design. PRRI offers six response options for attendance (ranging from “more than weekly” to “never”), while Gallup uses four broader categories. To approximate a comparison, we combine PRRI respondents who attend weekly or monthly and examine those attending at least a few times a year.
Using these measures, PRRI data show relative stability in attendance among young adults since 2021, with a dip in 2022 and a modest rebound afterward. Among young men, monthly attendance ranges from 27% to 29%, with a temporary drop to 24% in 2022. We are therefore unable to replicate Gallup’s finding that young men are now reporting more monthly attendance. If we widen the category to those who attend at least a few times a year, rates range from 42% to 44%, again dipping to 38% in 2022. Importantly, Gallup doesn’t allow for a response option for attending only a few times a year, which may lead respondents to overreport monthly attendance in the Gallup data — although this can’t be confirmed.
A similar pattern appears among young women. Monthly attendance declines from 32% in 2021 to 25% in 2022, before rising slightly to around 28%. When including those who attend at least a few times a year, attendance falls from 45% to 41% in 2022 and then stabilizes near 43%.
A key takeaway is that church attendance shows no gender gap among young men and women in 2024-2025, regardless of how it is measured, consistent with findings from Gallup. In addition, church attendance declines from 2021 to 2022 but increases slightly in subsequent years.
It would be useful to assess whether Gallup still would find an increase among young men if their analysis were restricted to weekly attenders only.
Differences may also reflect data collection methods. Gallup conducted monthly live telephone surveys of about 1,000 U.S. adults in 2024-2025, while our estimates are based on much larger annual online samples (about 40,000 adults per year) from Ipsos KnowledgePanel since 2021. Telephone surveys may be more susceptible to social desirability bias: Because many Americans view worship attendance as a positive behavior, respondents may be more likely to overreport attendance in phone interviews than in online surveys.
- We both find religious attendance is higher for Gen Zers who are Republican, but not that rates of attendance have gone up among this group.
Consistent with Gallup’s findings, our data find younger Republicans attend church at far higher levels compared with their Democratic counterparts. Yet our analysis shows church attendance rates are generally flat among young Republican men: In 2021, we find 41% of young Republican men report attending church at least monthly, compared with 43% in 2025. Combining Republicans with independents who lean Republican, which is how Gallup reports their data, there are few discernible differences.
Among Republican young women, in 2021, we find 55% report attending monthly; in 2025, that figured dropped to 45%. When independent leaners are included, we see similar trends.
- The reported surge in the share of young men who say religion “is very important” warrants scrutiny.
Perhaps the most striking finding in Gallup’s new report is the jump in the share of young men who say religion is “very important” in their lives: 42% in 2024-2025, up from 28% in 2022-2023. By contrast, Gallup finds young women’s views have remained relatively steady at about 30%.
If this increase among young men is real, it is notable and worth monitoring. A 14-point jump on a religion measure is highly unusual, though, and it remains to be seen whether the pattern will persist.
PRRI has not asked this exact question in several years. But when we last measured the importance of religion, in November and December 2023, we found 17% of men ages 18 to 29 said religion was “the most important thing in my life,” compared with 12% of women. Because PRRI and Gallup use different question wording and response options, direct comparisons should be made cautiously.
Even so, the broader trend lines show some similarities. Gallup found 41% of young men said religion was very important in 2012-2013, a level close to its 2024-2025 finding. PRRI’s data likewise suggest little overall change in the importance of religion among young men between 2013 and 2023.
For young women, however, both surveys point in the same direction: The importance of religion in their lives has declined over the past decade.
What can we say about Gen Z and religion today?
Despite differing headlines, PRRI and Gallup point to several shared conclusions about Gen Z, gender and religion. Both find young women have become less religious over time, both in terms of affiliation and the importance they place on religion. At the same time, young men are now more likely than young women to identify with a faith tradition — a notable shift from historical patterns in which women have been consistently more religious than men.
The surveys diverge, however, on religious attendance. PRRI finds little change in weekly attendance among young men or women, while Gallup reports increases in monthly attendance among young men. These differences likely reflect variation in how attendance is measured.
Gallup’s finding that young men are placing greater importance on religion also warrants close attention. A 14-point increase is highly unusual; however, if confirmed by future data, it could signal a meaningful shift in how young American men engage with religion — and potentially politics. At the same time, this pattern stands in contrast to longer-term trends showing declining religiosity among young women, making it an important development to watch in the years ahead.
Melissa Deckman
Diana Orcés
Melissa Deckman serves as CEO of Public Religion Research Institute and is author of The Politics of Gen Z. Diana Orcés serves as research director at PRRI.
This column originally appeared on Deckman’s Substack and is republished here with permission. Subscribe to her original columns there as well.
