You’ve probably seen headlines claiming Gen Z is walking away from religion, but a new Pew Research Center report complicates that story. The October 2026 analysis, built from Pew’s 2026 National Public Opinion Reference Survey and its 2025 Cross-Sectional Engagement Survey, finds that key religious indicators among U.S. adults overall have held fairly steady since 2020, according to researchers Gregory A. Smith, Chip Rotolo and Alan Cooperman. Among young adults specifically, the numbers split sharply by gender, and even the pollsters don’t fully agree with each other. Religion Remains Stable in the U.S., With Mixed Signals for Young Adults | Pew Research Center
The gender gap in religious importance has shrunk for decades. When Pew first ran its Religious Landscape Study in 2007, women were 14 percentage points more likely than men to call religion very important in their lives. By the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, that gap had narrowed to 9 points. In the 2026 NPORS, it’s down to 6 points, Pew reports.
Women’s Declining Religiousness, Not Men’s Rise, Explains the Shift
It’s tempting to read a shrinking gender gap as men getting more religious. Pew says that’s not what’s happening. Both women and men have grown less religious over time by measures like prayer and identification, but women’s engagement has declined more sharply, the report states. Pew’s own tables show the share of women identifying with a religion sliding from 73% in 2020 to 70% in 2026, while the share for men edged up from 69% to 70% over the same stretch, putting the two groups essentially even for the first time in the data Pew tracked.
Monthly attendance tells a similar story. Women’s attendance has hovered near 34% since 2020, per Pew’s figures, while men’s climbed from 29% in 2020 to 33% in 2026. Daily prayer also narrowed, with women at 52% and men at 42% in 2026, according to the same report.
Young Men Now Outpace Young Women at Services
Here’s where the generational story gets genuinely surprising. Pew finds the gender gap in religion is much smaller among adults born in the 2000s than among those born in the 1960s or earlier. In the most recent surveys, the youngest men actually report attending religious services at higher rates than the youngest women, and at rates significantly higher than almost all older age groups, the report notes. That flips the historical pattern, where women of nearly every generation before this one out-attended men.
Gallup’s Numbers Don’t Match Pew’s
This is where the headline’s warning about broad claims really applies. Gallup’s recent polling finds that 18- to 29-year-old men have become more likely to call religion very important and to attend services regularly, with young men now outpacing young women on importance while attendance is roughly equal between the sexes, Pew’s report summarizes. Pew’s own 2025-26 data tells a slightly different version: among 18- to 29-year-olds, more young men than women attend services regularly, but the two groups report roughly equal levels of religious importance. Same age group, two respected pollsters, two different pictures of exactly where the gender gap shows up.
Pew’s report also notes that today’s youngest adults, born between 2004 and 2008, aren’t any more likely than older generations to lean Republican, with 34% identifying with or leaning toward the GOP compared with 56% leaning Democratic. That’s another reminder that sweeping statements about what Gen Z believes or votes rarely hold up once you look at the actual breakdown.
If you’re trying to make sense of what’s happening with faith in your own family or community, these findings suggest it’s worth asking who specifically you mean. A blanket claim about young people losing religion overlooks that young men’s attendance has been climbing while young women’s has been the group actually pulling back. Whether you’re watching your daughter’s generation, your son’s, or your own circle of friends, the details Pew surfaced are more useful than any single number about Gen Z as a whole.
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