OPINION:
In 2007, Pew Research Center found 78 percent of U.S. adults identified as Christian. In 2014, that percentage fell to 71. And in a 2025 report, Pew pegged that percentage at 62 percent. But what seems a longterm downward trend has actually come to a halt. For the past five years, between 2019 and 2024, the percentage of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has wavered between 60 percent and 64 percent.
That’s a lot of data. But the gist is this: This is good news for America.
“Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off,” Pew wrote, in the headline of its most recent “Religious Landscape Study,” conducted over seven months in 2023 and 2024 and involving 36,908 American adults.
The more Christian believers in the country, the better for the fate of freedom and individual liberties for the country’s citizens.
Founding Fathers provided a form of governance that limited the powers of politicians and elevated the rights and liberties of the individual — but warned that government could only be constrained so long as the people were moral and virtuous.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” as John Adams said.
Immoral people aren’t capable of self-governing; they aren’t able to control their immoral behaviors; they struggle to keep their wayward impulses in check; they require outside influences to keep them on a path of lawfulness and cultural normalcy. And typically, that outside influence takes the form of government — government police, government regulators, government lawmakers, and so forth. Big Government becomes Bigger Government.
And all the individual rights and freedoms go — help!
Moreover, in America, the foundations of civil society were based on biblical truths, biblical values, Judeo-Christian teachings. Founders, when they worshipped, weren’t worshipping a Hindu god. They weren’t reading and applying to daily life Islamic teachings. They weren’t consulting the texts of Wiccans as sources of inspiration for their development of laws or their declarations of independence or their crafting of the Constitution.
As Oxford University Press wrote in 2016, of the Bible: “Its expansive influence on the political culture of the age [founding of America] should not surprise us because the population was overwhelmingly Protestant, and it informed significant aspects of public culture, including language, letters, education and law. No book at the time was more accessible or familiar than the English Bible, specifically the King James Bible. And the people were biblically literate. The discourse of the era amply documents the founders’ many quotations from and allusions to both familiar and obscure biblical texts, confirming they knew the Bible from cover to cover.”
And they didn’t confine their discussions of the Bible to Sunday service.
“The phrases and cadences of the King James Bible influenced their written and spoken words,” Oxford University wrote.
“Its ideas shaped their habits and mind and informed their political experiment in republican self-government,” Oxford University wrote.
That’s why America’s republic has lasted as long as it has — because by and large, founders based their ideas of individualism and freedom on Bible-based definitions of how a proper ruling body should behave, and how a just society prioritizes the roles of citizens and elected classes, and more crucially, because for the most part, Americans have been a batch of church-going, Bible-believing, God-fearing people.
Over the past few decades, Americans’ belief in God and respect for the Bible have faltered. Society’s seen the rise of the “nones,” the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, the rise of secularism and atheism and false gods coming in the form of environmentalism and materialism and tolerance for wickedness. In response, government’s grown and individual rights have become pushed to the side. Think Covid. Think of the Covid years when previously accepted and unquestioning individual rights — the right to go to work, the right to travel, the right to go to church, the right to refuse medical treatments — became matters of government decision and dictate.
A country filled with citizens who know God, who know biblical truths, and who understand the concept of God-given rights and liberties never would have let government intrude so callously and expansively on individuals’ freedoms and lives, no matter how threatening a virus; no matter how loudly Anthony Fauci demanded compliance. That’s a marker in time, and a dark blot on the state of American liberty. Covid was the darkness.
But the Pew finding of the leveling of decline in Christian belief is a spring back to the light.
It’s impossible to have the God-given liberties and rights founders framed and provided if today’s Americans don’t know God, don’t read God’s word and don’t apply biblical truths to modern society, politics and culture.
“Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry was said to have proclaimed during a speech at the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond, Virginia, on March 23, 1775.
To keep that spirit of liberty alive, Americans most of all need to know God.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
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