(The Epoch Times)—A years-long decline in the U.S. Christian population appears to have subsided, at least temporarily, according to a new survey.
The Pew Research Center’s latest Religious Landscape Study found that the share of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has remained relatively stable since 2019, hovering between 60 percent and 64 percent.
Some 62 percent of adults currently describe themselves as Christians, according to the survey, which was conducted from July 2023 to March 2024.
While that figure marks a 16-point drop from 2007, it also represents a slight bump from 2022.
The portion of the population that identifies with other religions has ticked up slightly since 2007, from 4.7 percent to 7.1 percent.
Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share (29 percent) appears to have plateaued in recent years after a long period of sustained growth.
The survey marks the third in the Pew Research Center’s series of Religious Landscape studies.
The nonpartisan think tank started the project in 2007, surveying more than 35,000 people across all 50 states about their religious affiliations, beliefs, and practices, as well as their social and political views.
The second study was conducted in 2014.
To fill in the gaps between studies, the center incorporated annual data from the random-digit-dial phone surveys it conducted until 2019 and the National Public Opinion Reference Survey it has administered since.
A breakdown of the survey’s Christian respondents shows that a plurality (40 percent) identified as Protestants. The second largest category was Catholics at 19 percent, and 3 percent identified with other groups.
Of those who identified with other religions, 2 percent were Jewish, while Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus represented 1 percent each.
As for the unaffiliated, 5 percent were atheists, 6 percent agnostics, and 19 percent identified as “nothing in particular.”
Another key finding of the survey was that a large majority of Americans ascribe to some spiritual beliefs.
For instance, 86 percent said they believed every person has a soul or spirit; 83 percent espoused a belief in God or a universal spirit; 79 percent said there was something spiritual beyond the natural world; and 70 percent said they believed in heaven, hell, or both.
Still, spiritual divisions were evident between demographic groups.
Women proved to be more religious than men when measured by such metrics as prayer frequency and belief in a higher power, as were Republicans compared to Democrats.
Young adults also presented as far less religious than those of older generations—a fact that the study’s researchers noted could portend an eventual decline.
“It is inevitable that older generations will decline in size as their members gradually die. We also know that the younger cohorts succeeding them are much less religious,” the researchers wrote in their report.
“This means that, for lasting stability to take hold in the U.S. religious landscape, something would need to change.”
That change could be on the horizon.
In the few weeks since President Donald Trump took office, he has taken several steps to put Christianity front and center, from creating a new White House Faith Office led by Pastor Paula White-Cain to establishing a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias.
He has also vowed to create a Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, Trump lamented the decline of faith in America and called on the nation to “bring God back into our lives.”
“We have to bring religion back. We have to bring it back much stronger,” he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “It’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve had over the last fairly long period of time.”
While the president’s Christian faith is not new, he has said that surviving an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally last July reinforced his belief in God.
Reliving that moment at the prayer breakfast, he noted that if he had not turned his head at the last moment, the bullet that pierced the upper part of his right ear likely would have killed him.
“God did that,” Trump said of his miraculous survival, adding that the experience “changed something” in him.
“I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.