Despite prevalent views that Americans are unconcerned with increasing secularization, a Gallup survey revealed on Sunday that 77 percent of Americans regretted religion’s declining importance.
These represent America’s most negative evaluations of religion’s receding impact since 1970, although similar to the views that surfaced in recent years, Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport said.
The survey revealed that since 1957, when the question was first asked, Americans’ perception of religion’s power has never been lower.
The poll does not reflect Americans’ personal religiosity, such as church attendance, but rather how wider trends shaped shared views, added Newport, maintaining, “For example, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War and the rise of counterculture fed the perception that religion’s influence was waning during the late 1960s.”
Views of a secularising America peaked in 1969 and 1970, when 75 percent of Americans said that faith was losing its societal clout, with similar views dominating from 1991 to 1994 and from 2007 to the present.
Americans saw an increase in religion’s influence in 1957, in 1962 and at a few points during the Reagan presidency in 1980, spiking to its highest point ever (71 percent) after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
