Ed Kilgore writes:

It’s Holy Week for Christians and Passover for Jews; there are also two Hindu holidays this week. But as Gallup reports, the percentage of Americans who belong to houses of worship where such days in the religious calendar are observed has been rapidly falling in this century. For the first time since Gallup began compiling religious membership statistics in 1937 (when 73 percent of Americans belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple), a minority — only 47 percent — now say they belong to some sort of congregation.

Though there has been a decline in religious memberships among older generations in the past 20 years, the big new factor is the sharply lower level among millennials (36 percent report memberships). These numbers should not, however, be conflated with the percentage of Americans expressing (or declining to express) a religious preference, since a sizable minority of Americans profess to follow some particular religious tradition without affiliating with a house of worship. But the ranks of the irreligious continue to climb, their numbers nearly doubling among Baby Boomers (7 percent to 13 percent) and Gen-Xers (11 percent to 20 percent) since 1998 and so far comprising 31 percent of millennials and 33 percent of Gen-Zers. [Continue reading…]