That is over 80 million American adults. Parents and grandparents, coworkers and neighbors, people in the pews and people who quietly stopped going. Most are not activists. They are people managing the distance between what they privately believe and what the people they love expect.
THE RESEARCH
Roughly one in three American adults hide their religious doubts or exaggerate how religious they are.
Schnabel et al., Cornell University, 2024. Nationally representative survey of 1,199 U.S. adults. Findings under peer review.
One in Three
Not who you might expect
The easy assumption is that hiding doubt is something nonbelievers do in religious spaces. The data tells a more human story. Among Americans who say they know God exists and have no doubts at all, one in four still report managing how religious they appear. Among evangelicals, the rate is 30 percent, nearly identical to the national average of 33 percent. And the highest rate belongs not to atheists but to people who say they sometimes believe. Uncertainty, it turns out, is the hardest thing to say out loud in a room that expects certainty.
The weight of the room
The strongest predictor of concealment is not what someone believes. It is what they sense the people around them expect. Among Americans who feel no particular pressure to appear religious, 23 percent report hiding doubts or exaggerating how religious they are. Among those who do feel that pressure, the number is 52 percent. In the study’s statistical models, perceived community pressure more than triples the odds of concealment, a larger effect than any measure of personal belief or affiliation.
The mirror effect
Ask Americans to compare themselves with their communities and something strange appears in the data. Forty-five percent say they are less religious than the people around them. Only 21 percent say they are more religious. Both cannot be true. If everyone were seeing their neighbors clearly, those numbers would balance. The arithmetic points to a simple conclusion: American communities look more religious from the outside than they are on the inside, and each person who edits themselves makes the next person more certain they are the only one.
45 percent see themselves as less religious than their community. 21 percent see themselves as more religious. Both cannot be true.
Why people stay quiet
In hundreds of open-ended responses, people explained their reasons in their own words, and the most common thread was not fear of strangers. It was care for particular people. Protecting a parent from worry. Keeping the peace in a marriage. Belonging in a workplace or a town where church is simply assumed.
Roughly one in five anticipate real consequences if their true beliefs were known, strained relationships or worse, and a smaller group describes stress, shame, and isolation.
What polls measure, and what they miss
In early 2025, the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study reported that the long decline of American Christianity has leveled off. Pew measures affiliation: the label people claim. The Cornell study measures something different: how people manage private conviction, whatever their label. The two findings are not in conflict. They are different instruments pointed at different layers of the same country. Read together, they suggest that the public surface of American religion may be smoother than the private landscape underneath.
NOTE ABOUT THE RESEARCH
This research is not a critique of faith or people of faith. It documents the social pressures around doubt and belonging, and it affirms a pluralistic society where believers and nonbelievers have an equal seat at the table.
About the study
The findings on this page come from a nationally representative survey of 1,199 U.S. adults, fielded in July 2024 through the probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel of NORC at the University of Chicago, which covers roughly 97 percent of American households. The study was designed and analyzed by researchers at Cornell University, and it pairs statistical analysis with hundreds of open-ended responses in participants’ own words. The paper is currently under peer review at a leading academic journal. We will link to the published article when it appears. Cite as Schnabel et al., Cornell University, 2024.
Where the film begins
Heathens follows five Americans who live inside this statistic. Under assumed names, they gather at a retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, each navigating family, community, and a faith they no longer hold. What they find there is not emptiness. It is honesty, community, music, and joy.
Data Sources and Methodology
Pew Research Center: Religious Landscape Study (Feb 2025).
NORC at the University of Chicago: AmeriSpeak® Omnibus (July 2024; n=1,199; Margin of Error +/- 3.9%).
Study Design: Cornell University.
SHERM Journal: Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry (Vol 5, no 1, 2023; n=1,581).