Between 20% and 30% of adults no longer affiliate with the religion which they grew up in many Western countries, including 28% of Americans. But fewer than 1% of adults who were raised as Israeli Jews no longer identify as such, per a new Pew Research Center report on “religious switching.”
Pew drew on data from 36 countries, including 36,908 American adults from a study conducted between July 2023 and March 2024, and surveys of 41,503 adults outside of the United States conducted between January and May 2024.
“Christianity and Buddhism have experienced especially large losses from this ‘religious switching,’ while rising numbers of adults have no religious affiliation,” per the Pew study.
In South Korea, 50% of adults surveyed said that they had switched from their birth religion, per the Pew study, followed by Spain (40%), Canada (38%), Sweden (37%), the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (36% each) and Australia, France, Germany and Japan (34% each).
Pew found that religious switching was also rare—lower than 5%—in India, Nigeria and Thailand, in addition to Israel.
“Most of the movement has been into the category we call religiously unaffiliated, which consists of people who answer a question about their religion by saying they are atheists, agnostics or ‘nothing in particular,’” Pew found. “Most of the switching is disaffiliation—people leaving the religion of their childhood and no longer identifying with any religion.”
Per Pew, 80% of Jews worldwide live in the United States and Israel.
“Viewed as a percentage of all U.S. adults, few people have left or joined Judaism. But Jewish adults make up only a small fraction of the U.S. population to begin with, about 2%,” according to the study. “Most people who were raised Jewish in Israel and the United States still identify this way today, resulting in high Jewish retention rates in both countries—though it’s higher in Israel than in the United States.”
About a quarter (24%) of U.S. adults raised Jewish no longer identify as such, some 24 times the corresponding number of Israeli adults, with most now identifying as atheist, agnostic or no faith, according to the study.
Among U.S. adults raised Jewish, 17% are now unaffiliated, 2% identify as Christian and 1% as Muslim, the study found.
In Israel, Pew found that Jews often switch religious denominations, which the research body defines as “religious” (Dati), “ultra-Orthodox” (Haredi), “traditional” (Masorti) and “secular” (Hiloni).
Of the 22% of Israeli Jews who switched denominations from the one in which they were raised, 10% were raised traditional and 9% religious, and 9% of Israeli adults who weren’t raised secular now identify as such, according to Pew. Fewer than 1% of those raised Haredi have switched, and about the same number have become Haredi, the study found.
Overall, per the Pew data, shifts in denominations in Israel have seen 15% become less religiously observant and 6% become more observant.
