US Jews less religious than other Americans, Pew survey finds

(JNS) The Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 religious landscape study found that U.S. Jews are less religious than the general American public.

Becka Alper, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center and one of the lead researchers on the survey, told JNS that the poll found that non-Jewish Americans put greater stock in observing their faith than do those who self-identify as Jews.

“Broadly speaking, Jews tend to be less religious on a range of traditional religious measures of belief and practice compared with Americans overall,” Alper said. “In terms of the share of Americans who say they pray daily, we find that 44% do that. Jews by religion, 22% say they pray daily.”

She added that “38% of U.S. adults say that religion is very important in their lives,” while “27% of Jews say this.”

The survey, which was released on Wednesday, asked nearly 37,000 U.S. adults about their views on religion, politics and society. Of those, 1.7% identified as religiously Jewish compared with 62% who identified as Christian, 1.2% Muslim, 1.1% Buddhist and .9% Hindu. Some 29% said they were religiously unaffiliated, including atheists, agnostics and those who said they were “nothing in particular.”

The survey did not break down Jewish observance into Reform, Conservative, Orthodox or other denominations.

One key question in polling of American Jews is whether the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 prompted Jews to swing to the Republican party in the 2024 elections.

While the Pew poll was conducted during a period both before and after Oct. 7 and concluded before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, the Pew surveyors found that Jews remain much more likely than the wider U.S. public to identify with the political left, including 66% of American Jews leaning towards the Democratic party.

“We still see more Jews saying they’re liberal compared to the public overall, 46% of Jews by religion in the survey said this, compared to 24% of U.S. adults overall,” Alper told JNS. “We still see this on a range of social issues that we asked about.”

Jews, Buddhists and the religiously unaffiliated are the most likely Americans to say that homosexuality should be accepted in U.S. society, with 82% of Jews saying so compared to 36% of Evangelical Protestants and 41% of American Muslims.

Jews are also the American religious group most likely to say that abortion should be legal in “most or all cases” other than the religiously unaffiliated, with 83% of Jews saying it should be permitted compared to majorities of Latter-day Saints and Evangelical Protestants, who say that abortion should be illegal in nearly all cases.

The survey found that Hindus and Jews are, on average, the best educated Americans, with 39% of U.S. Jews holding a postgraduate degree, compared to just 15% of all U.S. adults.

Jews and Hindus likewise report the highest family incomes of any American religious group, with 54% of Jews reporting household earnings above $100,000 compared to 30% of the broader American public, which says it earns that much.

The Pew researchers also found that after years of relative decline, the share of the population that identifies as Christian has stabilized at 62%—a 16-point drop from Pew’s 2007 religion survey, but about the same as its findings from polls over the past five years.

The 1.7% of Americans that identifies religiously as Jewish has also been stable and is the same figure that Pew found in 2007.

“We found that broadly, there’s been a long term decline in the share of Americans who identify as Christian and an increase in the share who identify as religiously unaffiliated,” Alper said. “In that same time span, we’ve seen that the share of Americans who affiliate with a religion other than Christianity has picked upward slightly.”

Alper said that despite the increasing number of Americans who are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” faith remains important to broad swaths of the American public.

“Large shares of Americans are spiritual in a range of ways, either by saying that being spiritual is at least somewhat important to them, or holding various spiritual beliefs,” she told JNS. “When you look at some traditional measures, it may look one way, but when you look at these spiritual measures, it looks very much like Americans are fairly spiritual.”