The United States armed forces are seeing a rise in religious sentiment even as mainstream culture becomes more secular, according to a recent statistical analysis.
Ryan Burge, a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, posted an article on his popular Substack page, Graphs About Religion, in which he analyzed data from the Cooperative Election Study, noting that the number of active-duty military personnel who attend church at least once a week has increased in recent years.
The number of military personnel who attended church weekly has increased from 21% in 2010-2012 to 28% in 2022-2024. Those who attended more than once a week increased from 15% in 2010-2012 to 17% in 2022-2024. In total, 45% of military respondents surveyed in 2022-2024 attended at least weekly.
During the same period, the number of surveyed civilians who attended church weekly stayed at 16%, while those who attended more than once a week declined from 9% in 2010-2012 to 7% in 2022-2024. In total, 23% of civilian respondents surveyed in 2022-2024 attended at least weekly.
“A member of the military is about twice as likely as a civilian to be a weekly church attender. And remember: we’re comparing only 18–45-year-olds in both samples here,” wrote Burge.
“There are two really noteworthy findings here: military folks have always been more religiously active than other Americans, and the devotion of military members has gone up while the rest of the population has secularized.”
Burge also looked at whether respondents considered religion a vital part of their lives. The percentage of active military members who considered religion to be “very important” increased from 39% in 2010-2012 to 44% in 2022-2024. By contrast, the number of civilian respondents who considered religion “very important” dropped from 37% in 2010-2012 to 30% in 2022-2024.
Burge attributed this trend to “selection effects,” noting that the U.S. has an all-volunteer military and that states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina are disproportionately represented in the armed forces.
“It doesn’t take a whole lot of guesswork to figure out what’s happening here: the military has an easier time recruiting in areas of the country that tend to lean right on Election Day,” he wrote.
“Those areas also tend to be more religiously active. It’s not that the military is making its men and women more inclined toward a faith community — they were already that way before they swore the oath.”
According to a 2019 congressional report, approximately 70% of the U.S. military identifies as Christian, while about one quarter are identified as “other/unclassified/unknown.”
