A new statistical review indicates that religious sentiment is increasing within the United States armed forces, even as broader American culture continues to become more secular.
The findings come from Ryan Burge, a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who shared his analysis on his Substack page, Graphs About Religion, using data from the Cooperative Election Study.
Burge reported that the share of active-duty personnel attending church at least once each week has grown noticeably over the past decade.
According to the data, weekly church attendance among military members rose from 21% in 2010–2012 to 28% in 2022–2024. Those attending more than once per week increased from 15% to 17% during the same period. Altogether, 45% of those surveyed in the military from 2022–2024 reported attending religious services at least weekly.
Civilians, by contrast, showed little to no growth in weekly attendance. Civilian respondents attending church weekly remained at 16%, while those attending more than once weekly declined from 9% in 2010–2012 to 7% in 2022–2024. In sum, 23% of civilians surveyed in 2022–2024 attended church at least weekly.
Burge summarized the contrast this way: “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.”
He added, “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 analyzed whether respondents saw religion as central to their lives. For active-duty members, the percentage describing religion as “very important” rose from 39% in 2010–2012 to 44% in 2022–2024.
Among civilians, the opposite trend occurred: the share who viewed religion as “very important” dropped from 37% to 30% over the same period.
Burge attributed the divergence largely to “selection effects,” explaining that the all-volunteer U.S. military draws heavily from regions with strong religious traditions. He noted that states such as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina are disproportionately represented in military recruitment.
“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,” he added.
A 2019 congressional report found that about 70% of U.S. military personnel identify as Christian, while roughly one-quarter fall into the “other/unclassified/unknown” category.
