On Monday April 14, 2025, the peer-reviewed sociology journal Socius published an article called “Breaking Free of the Iron Cage,” a striking title. Why was Breaking Free of the Iron Cage so arresting that even the lofty physics outlet Phys.org gave it space?
StudyFinds, an outlet that sums up the latest eye-catching scientific research, said Breaking Free of the Iron Cage showed that “Americans are losing their religion.” Let me repeat that. “Americans are losing their religion.” That’s a stark statement.
StudyFinds explained that “The proportion of study” participants who check a box for no religion at all “has risen from 1 in 20 to more than 1 in 4 in just a few decades.” That’s a rocket rise from 5% with no organized religion to 25%. Study Finds goes on to explain that
Young Americans are leaving organized religion in record numbers, with weekly church attendance dropping from 44% to 13% over a decade.
But there’s more. Says StudyFinds, “religious affiliation dropped” 29%, plummeting “from nearly 89% to about 60%.”
However there’s a sunny side to this dark religious picture. The data from Breaking Free of the Iron Cage hints that this is not the end of spirituality. It is a new beginning. Many young people “maintain personal spiritual beliefs and practices.”
In other words, as StudyFinds explains it, young Americans are “breaking up with the institution” rather than with faith itself. They are finding their own god in their own way.
And that way often involves some element of Buddhism or other Eastern religion. In fact, the research says that from 2003 to 2013 the Asian practice of meditation nearly doubled, from 12% to 21% “while personal prayer,” the Western way of making religion portable and personal, went down.
StudyFinds sums it up like this: “parishioners are fleeing [the] church, yet keeping their faith.”
A headline from the Barna Group, a Christian “polling organization that specializes in studying the intersection of faith, culture, and public opinion,” put it like this as long ago as 2009, “Christianity is no longer Americans’ default faith.”
But back to the research in Escaping the Iron Cage. As persuasive as this study sounds, it has a huge shortcoming. It’s based on a survey that “tracked 1,348 individuals born in the late 1980s from adolescence through early adulthood, collecting data through both surveys and in-depth interviews.” That sounds impressive. Until you look at the fine print.
Breaking Free of the Iron Cage’s data was collected between 2003 and 2013. It is twelve years old. Twelve years out of date. And things change fast in the world of fads, fashions, and religions.
So what is the truth today? Are young people still dropping out of churches, synagogues, and mosques and turning to a personal connection with the spiritual? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.
According to a flurry of Pew surveys, the percentage of those who checked a box indicating no religion nearly doubled from 2010 to 2025, leaping from 16% in 2007 to as much as 31% in the early 2020s, and hanging in that zone for the last five years straight.
However the Christian Barna Group adds a twist. Its State of the Church 2025 initiative contends that “66% of U.S. adults affirm a personal commitment to Jesus that remains vital, a 12-point leap from 2021’s record low of 54%.”
In other words, Pew says organized religion is on a sharp decline. But the Barna Group implies that though Christians may be dropping out of the Church, many are taking their personal connection to Jesus with them. In other words, even a major Christian polling organization implies that Jesus can be worshipped outside the church in your own personal, portable, spiritual space.
But even Barna confesses that many young people are abandoning Christianity entirely and going with a “”pick and choose” approach to “what they believe.”
References:
Schnabel, Landon, Ilana Horwitz, Peyman Hekmatpour, and Cyrus Schleifer. “Breaking Free of the Iron Cage: The Individualization of American Religion.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, Volume 11: 1–27, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251327442
https://studyfinds.org/why-more-americans-believe-in-godbut-not-religion/
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-religious-identity/
https://youthandreligion.nd.edu/research-design/
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https://www.barna.com/research/christianity-is-no-longer-americans-default-faith/
https://www.barna.com/research/belief-in-jesus-rises/
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-diy-religion-americans-faith-church.html
https://religionnews.com/2025/04/08/new-research-shows-major-rise-in-commitment-to-jesus/
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s next book, coming out in spring, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in scientific journals and in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
