America now is less spiritual and less religious

Pew recently released a new survey describing the state of spirituality in America. It contains a lot of interesting information about Americans’ spiritual beliefs as well as new demographic data on our self-identification as “spiritual” and/or “religious.”

What the survey does not do is indicate how the self-identification numbers have changed over time. Instead it contents itself with the following:

While Pew Research Center surveys have documented a decline since 2007 in the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian, the evidence that “religion” is being replaced by “spirituality” is much weaker, partly because of the difficulty of defining and separating those concepts.

This survey is intended to help fill the gap.

Well, OK. But the question of whether religion is being replaced by spirituality has up till now been answered by asking people whether they consider themselves spiritual and/or religious. And in fact two earlier Pew surveys as well as the present one provide the percentages.

Thus, the proportion of Americans who say they are spiritual but not religious rose from 19% to 27% between 2012 and 2017 but has since declined to 22%. As for the three other categories:

The proportion who say they are religious and spiritual sank from 59% in 2012 to 48% in 2017 and remains at 48%.

The proportion who say they are religious but not spiritual was at 6% in 2012 and 2017 but has now grown to 10%.

The proportion who say they are neither religious nor spiritual has grown from 16% in 2012 to 18% in 2017 to 21% today.

In sum, the proportion of Americans who say they’re spiritual dropped by three percentage points from 2012 to 2017 and since 2017 has dropped by an additional five points — an overall decline from 78% to 70% of the adult population. Com