Americans ages 18 to 22 are attending religious services at unusually high rates, but a sharp drop appears among adults just a few years older, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released Oct. 28.
The report found that 41% of adults born between 2004 and 2008—roughly ages 18 to 22—attend a church, synagogue, mosque or other house of worship at least once or twice a month. That compares with 33% of U.S. adults overall and 27% of those born between 2000 and 2003, who are now approximately 23 to 26 years old.
The older group recorded the lowest results among age groups on three other measures: daily prayer, viewing religion as very important and identifying with a religion. Twenty-six percent said they pray daily, 27% said religion is very important in their lives and 50% identified with a religion. Among 18-to-22-year-olds, the corresponding figures were 34%, 36% and 59%, according to Pew’s published tables and analysis.
Pew cautioned that the attendance finding should not be treated as proof of a broad religious revival. The 18-to-22 results combine 443 respondents from surveys conducted in 2025 and 2026, producing a margin of error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points. The center said the group’s other measures of religiousness are less distinctive than its attendance rate, and that today’s youngest adults are no more religious than people in the same age range were in 2014. Both younger groups are less religious on several comparable measures than their counterparts were in 2007.
The pattern also cuts across familiar political and gender lines. Fifty-five percent of the youngest Republicans said they attend services monthly, while 31% of the youngest Democrats did so. Yet Pew said attendance among the youngest Democrats was also relatively high compared with older Democrats, so the results cannot be described as exclusively Republican. Young men reported monthly attendance at a higher rate than young women—47% compared with 35%—although the center noted that young women’s rate was comparable to that of women in several older cohorts.
Across the country, Pew found that religious measures have been broadly stable since 2020. In 2026, 70% of adults identified with a religion, 47% said they prayed daily, 44% described religion as very important and 34% reported attending religious services at least monthly. The center also reported that 34% had attended services in person during the previous month in a June 2026 survey, the highest figure since it began asking that question during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pew said the youngest adults’ higher attendance could partly reflect a post-pandemic rebound. Earlier periods have also shown the youngest adults entering adulthood with relatively high religiousness before that engagement faded over time. Because the center cannot yet track the 2004-08 cohort across its full transition into adulthood, it concluded that “time will tell” whether the current pattern is a turning point or a blip.