Yes and I would point to three main factors….

1. Evangelical Christians being co-opted by far-right politics. (This is basically the legacy of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.) A disturbing amount of hateful stuff comes from this faction, racism, homophobia, militarism, and so on.
2. The loss of credibility of the Catholic Church owing to the sex abuse scandals, and even more than that, the institutional cover-up. I’m not a Catholic, but the priests and sisters I have known have been upstanding people. Still the failure to address and weed out the few “rotten apples” will plague the Church for decades.
3. The aging out of many Mainline Protestant congregations. The typical church is mostly made up of Baby Boomers, led by Baby Boomers, and with programming for Baby Boomers. Gen X and Millennials often don’t feel welcome and Church become irrelevant. Add to that many parents spending Sunday mornings taking their kids to youth soccer and such, and there goes the congregation.

Yes. The trend away from church attendance that grew in Western and Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada a few decades ago has now established itself firmly in the US. The GOP’s embrace of the religious right and cultural norms in the Bible Belt and Midwest along with increasing immigration from our more traditionally Christian neighbors in this hemisphere helped keep church pews filled until Millenials grew up and largely rejected participation in religions that deem homosexuality sinful and women unfit to lead a congregation.

In my community, there are many nondenominational churches with modern services that appeal to younger worshippers who still believe in the divinity and saving power of Jesus. These independent local churches do not have the organized financial and political power of the Catholic and mainline Protestant Churches, and that is a good thing.

As more and more Americans become open about not believing in a sentient deity, that belief will become normalized and easier for others to accept. I myself transitioned from Catholicism to nondenominational monotheism to atheism while living overseas among fellow Americans, Canadians, Europeans, and Asians who were mostly agnostic.

We are seeing it happen right now. Back when I was young, Christians were normal people. They lived and moved freely in society, believed in higher education, and didn't spout off wacky conspiracy theories.

That was a long time ago. That was before Jerry Falwell, the Satan obsession explosion in the eighties, and Fox News.

U.S. Christians are a scared and angry bunch, who are kept isolated from the rest of society by people who use them and profit by them.

I wouldn't call them a culture anymore. The ones who control them are systematically destroying it. Take Christmas for example. It should be a happy time for Christians, right? But they have been trained to be angry with their War on Christmas, Happy Holiday outrage, and Jesus is the reason for the season signs in their front yards.

Seriously, what kind of mindset puts an angry sign in their front yard at Christmas? That is not a culture. That is a carefully cultivated deception which has created a group of people who have been pushed to the margins for money and votes. They are mostly powerless to escape, and are furious that others are leading free lives.

With the drive for anti-intellectualism and anti-science, they push themselves even farther away from mainstream society. Their lifestyles become more rigid, and they get poorer.

They honestly don't realize that they are doing this to themselves. They are trained to believe it's everyone else's fault. And on it goes.

Ask yourself this question, why was sodom and Gomorrah destroyed? If your answer is in alignment with the bible ( Ezekiel 16:49–50, Leviticus 18:22, and Jude 7) then why would you as a follower of christ allow such things in front if your eyes. The bible clearly states the eyes are the window to the soul (Proverbs 30:17). Be careful what you allow in your life, for it can open doors. Allowing such things in front of you all the time can bring you to becoming desensitized to it, which in turn can cause you to come into agreement with said things. Sex of any kind, nudity, drugs, and language; i would say isnt good to watch. Remember, if it isn’t glorifying God, its glorifying the enemy of christ. remember this as well, God watches you, but so does your adversary the devil. I hope this helped you in your walk with God and anyone else seeking him.

Are we portrayed as particularly religious on TV?

The mother in Young Sheldon is religious in an especially neurotic, worry-wort way.

Who else?

I’ll confess that I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies. But the religiosity of Americans doesn’t strike me as something often portrayed there.

In fact, a lot of religious people think the opposite is true. TV and Hollywood are a moral wasteland. Shit blowing up, profanity everywhere, gratuitous empty sexuality, in-your-face salesmanship. “Talk to your doctor about buying this wonder drug that you have to have a doctor’s prescription for…”. (As if you know more than your doctor about it.) Is that “religion”?

Questions like this are up there with the perennial question “Are Americans as stupid as they’re commonly portrayed in the movies?” Are we portrayed as especially stupid? Are other nationalities portrayed as unusually sharp and intelligent?

One of the most American movies I can think of is There Will Be Blood. There’s a religious huckster in there, Eli, portrayed by an actor whose name I can’t remember right now, and a greedy, insane California oil man, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Eli is a typical 1920s evangelical shyster. At the very end of the movie, Day-Lewis’s character beats the huckster to death with a bowling pin, creaming his skull on a wooden floor.

Point being: even in a movie that portrays certain Americans as being exceptionally, over-the-top religious, those movies don’t necessarily portray that fact in an endearing way. In fact, I can’t think of any movies, really, that are truly enamored of the extreme religiosity of some Americans. Most movies where religion is a theme tend to mock that religiosity. Hallmark movies set on the prairie frontier possibly excepted.

In global terms, most Americans are not unusually religious. In the cherry-picking world where Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are the self-appointed arbiters of everything, then the United States is somewhat more religious. Though it’s getting less religious every year. In terms of all humans everywhere, the U.S. is a pretty normal country. Certainly once you account for all humans in human history, the US is actually less religious than I think most humans have ever been.

There’s no evidence at all that the move away from religion is the result of arguments by atheists.

It’s a controversial topic, but the balance of evidence suggests that atheism spreads as life becomes fairer and more secure. If you look at the stats, the least religious cultures tend to be the most economically advanced with the best arrangements for income redistribution, health, education and social security.

From this perspective, religion is largely a crutch that helps people cope with poverty and discrimination. Of course there are other historical and cultural forces at play, but the theory explains the general trends pretty convincingly.

With its high religiosity the USA is an outlier among the advanced economies, and it is also an outlier in terms of income inequality and poor access to healthcare, education and social security. It’s unlikely that this is a coincidence.

Over the last 20 years we’ve seen the emergence of a Republican Party that is aggressively pursuing policies that further impoverish the poor while further enriching the wealthy, and attack even the poor quality health and social services that remain.

So Christians take heart - the poor of the USA will be needing the solace of religion for some time to come…

Ah, what is religious?

Does it mean belonging to a certain group with designated values and behaviors? We still have lots of those, though more right-wing evangelicals and fewer main-streamers.

If it means something deeper, about morality, and ethics, and reverence for all of creation, and sharing the wealth, and a fundamental option for the oppressed and the poor and for social justice for all? We’ve gotten pretty short on that.

Evangelical Christians have in large measure allied themselves with a single party, a single political philosophy, and in some cases a single politician and a single race. They have abandoned Biblical ethics and shown tolerance for violence, oppression of the poor, equation of wealth with virtue, and favor individual “liberties” over the common good. For starters. They can have their tax-exception and highly selective adherence to a narrow range of values, but it’s hard to see them as a religion any more.

They are also the most influential cadre in contemporary American politics. That equals secular power.

They are joined by far-right Catholics in significant numbers, not in fellowship, but in objectives.

Mainstream Protestants have experienced serious slippage, along with mainstream Catholics, in recent decades.

I think of the highly politicized groups not so much as religions any more but as comfy clubs of the like-minded, the self-absorbed, the self-congratulatory, determined to keep “the Other” at bay, whether it’s immigrants or sexual minorities or non-whites.

I think of the old mainstream groups as depressed and diminishing in scope and influence.

Short answer: The Evangelicals are a power to be reckoned with, but in political, not religious terms. Most of the other religions are in serious decline in America.

Question: Are Americans actually as religious as they're portrayed on TV?

I’ll go with Yes.

Although with significant caveats.

Let’s review:

1. There are tens of thousands of churches across the nation from small cult-like followings with as few as a half dozen members to megachurches with tens of thousands in attendance every weekend. - In fact, with the exception of truly tiny settlements with fewer than 100 or so people, I have yet to travel to a place that didn’t have a church and in fact, have been to small towns with five or more,
2. Mentioning that you are atheist is akin in many areas to admitting that you are a child molester - People simply cannot accept that you don’t believe what they believe even when they know that they have difficulty believing it. It would be unwise to do so in areas where you aren’t well-known and around people who you don’t know as you simply have no idea what type of response your statements may engender.
3. Many people use religious greetings when they met people or address them in a religious manner when that person departs - I’m not sure how many times that I have been wished a “Blessed day” or when I inadvertently asked how someone was doing and they described their state using religious terms. It is so common that unless I was in area where religious belief levels were statistically lower (around a major university or Silicon Valley, for example) that it’s almost background noise at this point.
4. People routinely wear religious jewelry and iconography - Crosses, crucifixes, and the occasional Star of David are so common that unless you think about their meanings, you ignore them. Many people wear them and will relate their meaning to them to you if you ask, and many even if you don’t.
5. While this is purportedly a secular nation, religion keeps interfering with that on a daily basis - The current ban on abortion is rooted in religious “traditions” as it has no practical purpose in a secular society. Prayer in schools is still debated even though that serves little useful, nor practical, objectives. No elected politician who wants to win will declare themselves to be an atheist although that would have nothing to do with their ability to perform their role. And despite the numerous financial scandals involving churches, no government entity would dare suggest that the varied groups be subject to greater scrutiny by that government even though doing so would likely curtail much of the theft and fraud.

While it seems nice to believe that the United States is actually less religious than is shown on television, in reality religion plays a dominant role in all of our lives here whether you’re a believer or not. Failing the introduction of an alien race with greater levels of knowledge than our own, that seems likely remain that way for the foreseeable future.

That would be a big, no, humongous no.

Christians and christian apologists have been busy making films that sell people belief. The house in the forest, god is not dead 1,2,3,4,5… And many more.

All of these movies are horrible, like, they don’t have a single redeeming factor, even the lighting is bad.

They made God Almighty 1 and 2. They even got an Atheist, Morgan Freeman to do a documentary on “god”. Let us not even talk about the most horrible movie John Cusack has ever been in, 2012.

All they accomplished is burning money and showed just how bad and childish religion really is. If this is the best they can do, then they would be better off not doing anything.

Religion is simply on the decline because people are more educated. Superstition is on the decline. Better information. Better healthcare, endless streams of mishandled fortunes, money, housing, corruption and endless sexual horror stories of mishandled children, and near older churches with mass graves of children. This is bad PR at best.

No. Religion is on the decline and only getting there faster. When you can no longer kill people for criticizing the church, you kind of loose all power. And even then you are just showing how weak your god is, if he needs humans to torture someone for them. Your god can’t just kill someone? Really? How weak is that?

There is a difference between abating and declining.

I would argue that believers largely remain believers because changing from one's position of deep belief is a lifelong process.

One's religious beliefs don't vanish like darkness does when a light switch flicks.

I believe people are simply acknowledging the destructive impact of zealously held beliefs and are changing their rigidity toward their beliefs. People are learning to become more flexible in their thinking because failing to do so leads the nation into a nightmare of barbarism they mainly associate with the Middle East.

It's now become impossible to distinguish between religious zealots in America and religious zealots in Iran.

That's a wake-up call for many right there.

Broadly, Christianity is declining just about everywhere, though this tendency is far more pronounced in North America and Europe than elsewhere. Globally, the share of the population that is Christian is relatively steady, but that represents a net decrease considering the rate of population growth. What that also means is that the most pronounced overall effect is that Christianity is going to be a shift demographically and geographically, primarily towards sub-Saharan Africa, though Christianity is not keeping pace with the growth of population there either, and is going to be out-grown by Islam in the same region.

Hello.

Movies and television are forms of entertainment. The Word of God, however, is not entertainment—it is sacred. This distinction creates a profound challenge when filmmakers attempt to adapt traditional religious stories to the screen.

Sacred texts, like the Bible, often present narratives with purposeful brevity, leaving gaps in dialogue, character motivations, and historical context. To turn these stories into compelling scripts, directors and writers must invent dialogue, emotions, and dramatic tension to engage modern audiences. While creativity can make these tales visually stunning or emotionally gripping, there is a risk: audiences unfamiliar with scripture may confuse artistic interpretation with divine truth.

When viewers see biblical figures portrayed with Hollywood flair—amidst dramatic music, vivid costumes, and action-packed sequences—they might assume these events unfolded exactly as depicted. scripture is not a screenplay.

Filmmakers walk a delicate line. Sometimes their adaptations can inspire curiosity about faith, they must also acknowledge the responsibility that comes with reshaping sacred silence into spectacle.

While films and series inspired by religious traditions should not be treated as definitive sources of spiritual truth, they can serve as a valuable introduction—sparking curiosity in young minds and opening doors to deeper exploration of faith. Entertainment, when approached thoughtfully, may plant the seeds of understanding, but nurturing those seeds requires turning to scripture, study, and sacred teachings.

Religion seems to be in decline. This is just a short-term measurement, however. Faith has a long history of going up and down quite a bit in the past, although we don’t have statistics on it.

It is suggested by one study that the country is increasingly becoming individualistic, and it is thus to be expected that people would reject institutional religion. It also appears people may be less attracted to spirituality.

What does this mean? Not much, actually. In some areas, you may find little religion, but in other areas, quite a bit, to the point where ordinary folks find it oppressive.

Since we do not have any really hard data for the long haul, it’s impossible to say what is happening. One thing I would state without any hesitation: don’t get sucked in by a linear graph, going forward. It almost certainly is not going to yield a useful result. If one takes present trends seriously, one might say all religion will vanish by x year, and obviously that is not going to happen. People are much more complicated than that.

Also, there is a tendency to view certain religions with disdain because their numbers are quite high. However, fast forward a few years, and assuming the numbers of Xtians in the USA have dropped to the point where they are outnumbered by Muslims. In that environment, the attitude toward Xtians will change dramatically. They will no longer be regarded as the only show in town when they quite obviously no longer are. To the dismay of all Xtian-haters, I have to say that this might be precisely what Xtianity needs to redefine itself in the 21st century.

How will all of this effect ethnic religions such as Judaism and Islam? That still remains to be seen. It may be that in time, with much less actual Xtianity to push against, Islam may also lose its drive, since it seems to be defining itself not so much as Islam so much as something to resist those awful Xtians. If they lose that target of their ire, the future of Islam might be uncertain, and they also will need to redefine themselves.

Judaism, not attempting to gain new members, will probably just continue much as it has, gradually losing numbers. Will the rabbis see the light and open the faith to prosyletizing or perish? I suspect they will, especially since I’ve already seen some signs of Jews happy to get out there and proselytize, and I suspect this can only continue to grow.

Of course, this kind of idle speculation is always lots of fun, and probably means next to nothing.

For many it has become less a religion and more of a brand. And a toxic brand at that.

Remember when Christianity was about loving others and turning the other cheek and turning your swords in to plough shares? I mean a lot of it’s history has hd nothing to do with that, but anyway.

Today it is associated with people who love guns, gate people who don’t look like them, and oppose doing basic things to help those around them.

Gun toting, uninformed, racist, and anti vaxxers are all part of brand Christianity these days. What sensible person would want anything to do with that?

I know that many, even most, Christians are not that, but if I say “Evangelical” does anything positive come to your mind?

If you want to know who is responsible for the decline of Christianity in America go to a Trump rally. That is who has done it.

I do not think America has become anti-religious. Certainly there are people in America that are extremes in both perspectives, but America is not anti-religious.

I am still free to openly attend the religious activities I choose without fear of persecution or reprisal. I can stand on a crowded street corner if I choose and read aloud the Gospels. And likewise, someone with an opposing view is free to speak his/her mind.

It is a beautiful thing, and it's etched in parchment.

The actions of a small number of madmen, gut wrenching as they are, are not to be taken as the obituary for religious freedom in America.

Religion and human autonomy are polarities. The more technocratic and scientific we become in controlling the once uncontrollable, the less we need a greater power to watch over our destinies.

Where does religion still hold strong in the world, and where does it not? Why do places with natural disasters and tenuous human existence have a stronger religious footprint?

The other correlation seems to be with beauty. Mountains and great natural monuments seem to call the faithful. Ugly places with greater densities of humans (i.e cities) seem to be less concerned with God, or spirituality in general, and more with empirical arguments against the existence of a greater power. Never understood beating a creed with a scientific/empirical stick. Proving or disproving the existence of God would discount it as a belief system.

Belief without evidence is treated with eye rolling condescendence by the logocentrics.