Perspective 86. Are American Jews Becoming Less Religious?

Recently we reviewed evidence that the United States is becoming less religious. Is this also true for the American Jewish community?

Yes. Well, true, but that’s not the whole story. As with American Christians, religious observance is at a historical low: only 21 percent of U.S. Jews report attending a religious service at least once a month (versus 41 percent of the general U.S. public). But there is an actual increase in the percentage and actual numbers of Americans who identify themselves as Jewish.

In perspective, the most recent survey of the Pew Research Center reported that over the 2013-2020 period the percentage of Americans identifying as Jewish grew from 2.2 to 2.4 percent, and in absolute numbers from 6.7 to 7.5 million. The dissonance between this and data on religious practice reflects the fact that Jewishness is not just a religion, but also an ethnicity or heritage with which non-religious Jews can and do identify. Fully 27 percent of self-identified Jews described themselves as agnostic, atheist, or “of no particular religion.”

Furthermore, this segment of the Jewish public is likely to increase, since fully 40 percent of Jewish adults under the age of 30 were in this category of “Jews of no religion.”

Thus, while the Jewish population is actually growing, it is also part of the general trend away from organized religion, and in some ways it is in the vanguard of that trend. Only 21 percent of Jews said that religion “was very important in their lives” – versus 41 percent of the general public. Only 26 percent professed a belief in “God as described in the Bible” – versus 56 percent of all Americans. In the secularization that characterizes modernizing societies, Jews are full participants (this is true in Israel as well, despite appearances to the contrary).

Interestingly, in the period surveyed this trend had little impact on the overall denominational make-up of American Jewry. In 2020 this stood at 37 percent identifying as Reform, 17 percent as Conservative, and 9 percent as Orthodox. These figures differ only by one or two percentage points from the figures in the 2013 survey.

But there was one notable countertrend within the context of general secularization. Among Jewish adults under 30, about 17 percent identified as Orthodox in the latest study. In other words, while fewer Jews described themselves as religious, a larger share of those who did identified themselves as Orthodox.

This might be explained as a result of larger families in the Orthodox population, and thus a larger presence in younger age groups. But over time this percentage may decrease as some Orthodox default to other denominations or to no religion, in line with the general trend. There is evidence for this in the 2020 figure among Jews over the age of 65, where only 3 percent identified as Orthodox.