Do people know what it means to be Protestant? It’s a question that has long flummoxed researchers who study American religion through surveys.
In a poll conducted between 2019 and 2021, 25-year-old respondents were about three times more likely to identify their faith tradition as “just Christian” than to say they were Protestant. Among older Americans, the pattern reversed sharply—70-year-olds were three times more likely to choose “Protestant” over “just Christian.”
Until recently, though, it hasn’t been possible to dig much deeper into who these “just Christians” actually are—how they compare to self-identified Protestants or Catholics in their beliefs, practices, and backgrounds. A new survey of Generation Z from the Billy Graham Center Research Institute, funded by the Lilly Endowment, changes that.
The survey consisted of 2,365 Gen Z respondents and was conducted through AmeriSpeak and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago between August 9 and September 26, 2024, with Rick Richardson as lead investigator. With weighting applied, the sample is representative of Gen Z as a whole. One of the first questions asked respondents to indicate their current religious affiliation, if any.
The results are striking. The generic “Christian” label was easily the most popular choice, selected by 27% of Gen Z respondents—about 10 points higher than those who identified as Catholic and 17 points higher than those who chose Protestant. This largely confirms what earlier data suggested: Young people are roughly three times more likely to call themselves generic Christians than Protestants.
Perhaps equally striking is what happens when we look at born-again or evangelical Gen Z respondents—a group that makes up about 24% of the total sample. Even among this theologically engaged cohort, a majority (54%) identify as generic Christians rather than Protestant. Only 22% chose Protestant, with Catholics at 12% and the remainder scattered across other categories.
Evangelical Christian faith in America today—especially among Gen Z—appears increasingly detached from any particular tradition. Even among the historic Protestant traditions, younger evangelicals are more likely to reach for the generic “Christian” label than to claim a Protestant identity. The same pattern holds for nondenominational and Pentecostal Christians, who also prefer “just Christian” over Protestant as a self-descriptor.
In short, Gen Z is losing its sense of Protestant identification broadly, and that erosion is especially pronounced among those who also identify as evangelical, nondenominational, or Pentecostal. The label is losing both its meaning and its salience—and that tendency is even more pronounced among the Black Gen Z cohort.
It’s also worth noting that a Gen Z adult between 18 and 28 was essentially just as likely to identify as agnostic (10%) or atheist (9%) as Protestant. That’s a striking illustration of just how uncommon Protestant as an identity has become among the youngest generation of American adults.
Given how many Gen Z members identify as “just Christian,” it’s worth asking whether their religiosity actually differs from other types of Christians. One question on the survey asked respondents: “How active are you in religious activities?”
The results reveal Catholic Gen Z as clear outliers. Only 6% describe themselves as very active in their faith, while 30% say they are not active at all and another 41% call themselves only slightly active. By any measure, young Catholics are considerably less engaged in their tradition than their Christian counterparts.
The gap between generic Christians and Protestants is much narrower. The share who answered “very active” is nearly identical (13% versus 11%), and the share who say they are not active at all is essentially the same as well (around 20%). There is some evidence that Protestants skew slightly more engaged overall—49% chose one of the top two activity levels, compared to 41% of generic Christians—but the two groups are broadly similar in their religious involvement.
The differences become sharper when respondents were asked to recall whether they attended church regularly at various stages of their lives. We calculated the share of each group who reported consistent attendance at each life stage.
Among Gen Z Protestants, 82% reported regular church attendance as young children—6 points higher than Catholics and 12 points higher than generic Christians. Those gaps held relatively steady through the high school years, even as consistent attendance eroded across all three groups by roughly 13 to 15 percentage points during that stretch.
The trajectories diverge sharply after high school. Protestant attendance declined 8 percentage points between the high school and post-high school stages. For generic Christians, the drop was 12 points. For Catholics, it was 19.
And the declines only accelerated from there. By the time respondents were asked about their current attendance, only 28% among Catholic Gen Z had maintained consistent Mass attendance throughout their lives. Generic Christians fared only slightly better, at 34%. Gen Z Protestants, by contrast, were far more likely to have a lifetime pattern of regular attendance—58% reported consistent churchgoing throughout their lives, nearly double the Catholic rate.
Taken together, this is compelling evidence that Protestant Gen Z remains more durably attached to religious practice than their Catholic or generic Christian peers.
There are also meaningful differences in how these three groups were raised. Respondents were asked to indicate which types of households they lived in for three or more years during childhood, selecting all that applied.
Protestant Gen Z members were considerably more likely to have been raised in a two-parent household than either Catholics or generic Christians. The gap between Protestants and generic Christians was especially large—17 percentage points. Generic Christians were also 9 points more likely to have grown up with a single mother, and roughly three times as likely to have been raised by a single father or by grandparents.
The pattern is consistent: Protestant Gen Z Christians grew up in more structurally stable households than their generic Christian peers.
That stability extended to the religious environment as well. Several survey questions asked respondents about their parents’ overall levels of religious engagement, and the results point in the same direction: Protestant Gen Zers were raised in households with noticeably higher religious involvement than those of Catholic or generic Christian respondents.
For instance, among Protestant members of Gen Z, a clear majority said that they were raised in a household where both their mother and their father were going to church on a weekly basis. In contrast, just 7% of this group said that neither parent went to church all that much. A Catholic member of Gen Z was clearly raised in the least religious household, though. Only 43% indicated that both their parents went to church on a weekly basis, compared to 22% who attended Mass seldom or never.
What about those generic Christians? Well, many of them were raised in an engaged religious household. For these respondents, 47% said that both of their parents were regular churchgoers when they were kids, and 17% said that both parents seldom or never attended.
You get the sense from that data that Protestant members of Gen Z were raised in households where religion was a bit more pervasive, compared to those who said that they were generically Christian.
So with regard to Protestantism in America, there is good news and bad news. The good news: Where identification with a Protestant tradition in a home growing up was strong, the carryover has also been strong in the lives and religious engagement of Gen Z young adults. The bad news: More generally in American religious culture, Protestantism is gradually diminishing as a meaningful category of religious identity and involvement for Gen Z.
Today, those who in past years might have identified as Protestant (including Gen Z evangelical, nondenominational, and Pentecostal Christians) no longer do. The Protestant past in America is increasingly less relevant to the religious lives and identities of contemporary young adults.
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