1.0Church Answershttps://churchanswers.comTrading Faith for Nothing: What Americans Are Really Doing After Leaving Church | Church Answersrich600338<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="xGq1vYJKA0"><a href="https://churchanswers.com/blog/trading-faith-for-nothing-what-americans-are-really-doing-after-leaving-church/">Trading Faith for Nothing: What Americans Are Really Doing After Leaving Church</a></blockquote><iframe sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" src="https://churchanswers.com/blog/trading-faith-for-nothing-what-americans-are-really-doing-after-leaving-church/embed/#?secret=xGq1vYJKA0" width="600" height="338" title="“Trading Faith for Nothing: What Americans Are Really Doing After Leaving Church” — Church Answers" data-secret="xGq1vYJKA0" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" class="wp-embedded-content"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
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https://churchanswers.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Young-Woman-Meditating-With-Hands-In-Prayer.png1200628I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with young people on a fairly regular basis. That’s one of the benefits of being a college professor. It’s much easier to keep up with the cultural discourse when you are surrounded by people in their late teens and early twenties. My students are aware of my expertise and often seek to engage in discussions with me about religion, politics, and society. I’m all ears, of course. One thing I hear on a pretty consistent basis from them is that people are rejecting traditional forms of religion and are replacing them with alternative spiritualities. This idea seems to have seeped into the discourse—that many Americans have replaced Sunday morning worship with yoga sessions, astrology, or consulting a psychic on a regular basis. A recent book by Tara Isabella Burton called Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World makes this point exactly. In Burton’s estimation, people are just remixing religion into something that is more personal and authentic to them. Think SoulCycle, not Bible Study. But what does the data say? Are people actually engaging in a lot of these alternative types of spiritual practices? Tony Jones and I asked over 15,000 Americans to review a list of popular spiritual practices and indicate which ones they had participated in over the past 30 days. They could choose as many as they wished or select none at all. Here’s what that looks like.