- Ryan Panzer
- May 1
- 4 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
America’s thoroughly documented decline in religiosity appears to have hit a plateau. What does this mean for churches?
After nearly two decades of continuous decline, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian appears to have stabilized. According to the 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study, 63% of American adults now identify as Christian. While this is down from 78% in 2008, it’s actually a tick more than the 62% who identified as Christian in 2022. After a long period of growth, the percentage of Americans identifying as “nones” also appears to have stabilized. And while people aren’t going to church more than they were in years past, they at least aren’t going less. 33% of Americans say they go to church at least once a month.
This trend has been thoroughly analyzed across religious and secular media, including both right-leaning and left-leaning outlets. The New York Times, for example, is running a new series of editorials exploring belief in America. Among pundits and commentators, some have pointed to this stabilization as evidence that Americans are moving away from secularism. A few evangelical commentators have celebrated that the New Atheist movement of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens seems to be losing momentum. Other commentators have suggested that the stabilization has less to do with stalled secularism and more to do with the limitations of authenticity. Not finding durable fulfillment and through Soul Cycle, Instagram, or the workplace, it seems that some are turning to more conventional forms of religion as a source of spiritual identity. It’s also entirely possible that slowing rates of secularization don’t have a grand cause, and are simply the natural floor of the downward trend.
We won’t be able to definitely explain the root causes and top contributors behind these results from the Religious Landscape Study until further research is completed. But in this time of permissible speculation, allow me to posit another potential contributor to slowing rates of secularization.
The post-pandemic economy has pivoted towards efficiency as an intrinsic good. When rising interest rates rattled markets, notable business leaders (Mark Zuckerberg included) trumpeted a “year of efficiency,” a prolonged period of cutting costs and cranking up outputs. Elon Musk instilled a similar ethos in his “more hardcore” version of Twitter. Investors bought into companies that loudly leaned into efficiency through layoffs, hyper-growth forecasts, and commitments to use generative artificial intelligence across their business.
As efficiency became virtuous, artificial intelligence equipped us with tools for completing mundane tasks at greater speed. Google Gemini can now summarize the contents of my entire inbox. Microsoft Co-Pilot can build my presentation for next week’s team meeting. ChatGPT can plan my family’s weekly meals and shopping lists, and Anthropic’s Claude can write this blog post. Taken together, we are witnessing the elevation of efficiency as a value, as we are gaining access to tools that (at least in theory) can make us meaningfully more productive.
But where does that leave us spiritually?

Some of us may come to recognize that efficiency is a rather unfulfilling objective.I have suggested that working alongside AI in some ways dims the creative spark. When working alongside a chatbot, I can be more efficient, completing more tasks per hour, but I don’t feel as strong a sense of satisfaction when I outsource considerable amounts of work to ChatGPT.
In a spiritual sense, we may come to recognize that productivity lacks power. Individual efficiency doesn’t leave us feeling more curious, connected, or creative. It doesn’t show us how we are part of a story larger than ourselves, or why our work has meaning. Efficiency doesn’t leave us comforted in times of crisis, nor does it console us in our grief. So while some have looked to social media, technology, and work to provide a sense of rootedness, it’s unsurprising that we might look elsewhere when these domains become over-indexed on getting stuff done.
We might call this pivot the Great Aw(AI)kening - not because AI awakens some dormant religious impulse, but because our preference for production proves to be somewhat hollow and unfulfilling. If I am efficient, I might rate higher on a performance review or receive a higher grade. But in adeptly wielding these digital tools, I’ll miss out on a connection to a larger whole. I’ll miss out on where I fit within a bigger story. And I’ll lack the connections and community that carry me through times of crisis.
I believe there is merit to using AI and digital tools for the sake of productivity and efficiency, particularly if these tools offload the monotony and drudgery that are part of digital age work. But I’m also cognizant that these tools cannot be fulfilling ends in and of themselves. In that sense, I’m not surprised that America has slowed in its rate of secularization. Efficiency can be important, but not all that fulfilling. To find fulfillment, perhaps I ought to look to more ancient sources. To find connection, perhaps I ought to seek more traditional forms of community. As the digital age pushes us towards individual productivity, the church, its teachings, sacred texts and sacraments, offer me a necessary counter-weight.