The major study by MiSoC’s David Voas on religious decline in the United States was published in the American Journal of Sociology (one of the top two sociology journals), and in October 2017 received the ‘Distinguished Article Award’ from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the leading international learned society in this field. The work continues to be discussed in the media, for example in a leading article in The Guardian (19 May 2017) and an opinion piece in The New York Times (2 August 2017).
For generations, the United States has been considered a religious outlier, an exception to the rule that modernisation is associated with secularisation. This research suggests that in fact commitment to religion is waning in the US, just as elsewhere in the western world. Voas and his co-author find a slow, steady decline in the number of Americans who identify with a religion, attend church regularly and believe in God. They show that this decline is driven by generational differences. The study examined US data from the General Social Survey, which is conducted every two years, and compared it with similarly broad data from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.