By Robin Schumacher, Exclusive Columnist Monday, December 29, 2025 iStock/Getty Images Plus/ mattjeacock
In a recent article entitled Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion While Others Stay?, Pew Research found that the vast majority of U.S. adults (86%) were raised in a religion. The Pew data “shows that the nature of their religious experiences as children – that is, whether they were mostly positive or negative – plays a significant role in whether they stay in their childhood religion as adults.”
Pew found that 84% of Americans who were raised in a religion and had a mostly positive childhood experience with religion still identify with that religion as adults: “Just 10% of people who grew up in a religion and had a positive childhood experience with it are ‘nones’ today, while 6% identify with a different religion than the one they were raised in.”
But in sharp contrast, “69% of those who grew up in a religion and had a negative experience with it no longer identify with any religion at all. Far fewer (24%) still identify with their childhood religion, and 7% identify with a different religion.”
Such findings play well into the hands of religious skeptics who have long argued that the primary reason most people adhere to a religion is because of their upbringing. They say, for example, that the only cause behind the vast majority of U.S. Christians identifying as such is that America is mostly a Christian nation, spiritually speaking. They say if the same people were raised in Saudi Arabia, they’d likely be Islam devotees, given the fact that the majority of citizens (85-90%) are Sunni Muslims.
The tag-along sting of the skeptic’s charge is that people don’t think rationally where religion is concerned, unlike free-thinking unbelievers who have rejected such flawed teaching. However, Pew pours cold water on that stance, finding only “3% of U.S. adults weren’t raised with a religion but now identify with one”, and “about three-quarters (73%) of people who grew up as ‘nones’ remain religiously unaffiliated as adults”.
So, it seems the skeptics are adhering to their childhood faith also.
The Hellenistic and classical Greeks had a word for the kind of faith exhibited by someone only because of their upbringing, custom, and tradition: nomizo. It’s worth noting that nomizo is never used once in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament to identify Christian faith.
Instead, the Greek term found everywhere in the pages of Scripture for faith is pistis, which comes from the verb peitho that means “to be persuaded”, and denotes trust, confidence, conviction, reliability, and something worthy of belief.
That kind of faith, along with a few other biblical truths, is why anyone who is a Christian now will continue to be one in 2026, along with every other year afterwards until the Lord takes them home.
Kept for Jesus Christ
There are endless testimonies from those who claim to have been Christians but aren’t any longer. The stories and reasons for the rejection are many, but Pew’s survey states that the top causes for those in their survey were “They stopped believing in the religion’s teachings (cited by 46% of people), it wasn’t important in their life (38%), they just gradually drifted away (38%).”
The Bible, though, teaches that will never be true of a born-again believer, leading John MacArthur to assert, “Do you know that there’s no such thing as an ex-Christian?” How can this be true given the countless declarations from those who say they once believed and now do not?
Two reasons.
First, Scripture tells us there is a fake, superficial faith that many possess, which can end in the abandonment of Christianity, just as John writes: “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us” (1 John 2:19).
Next, the Bible tells us many times over that what keeps us in the faith is God Himself. Charles Spurgeon put it this way: “It is not your hold of Christ that saves you, but His hold of you.”
One simple example of this found in Scripture is the opening line of the book of Jude: “Jude, a bond-servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, to those who are the called, beloved in God the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ” (vs. 1).
The Greek word for “kept” (tēreō) means “to retain in custody, keep watch over, guard someone; to cause a state, condition, or activity to continue, keep, hold, reserve, preserve”. The word is in the present tense, indicating something that occurred in the past but whose effects extend up to the present.
That tells us those in the faith are “kept” by God, much in the same way He told the prophet Elijah about those in Israel who belonged to Him: “I have preserved in Israel seven thousand whose knees have not bent to Baal and whose lips have not kissed him” (1 Kings 19:18).
When it comes to us ever being separated from God, the Bible says: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).
That being said, plenty still maintain that we can still walk away from God if we choose, but as Tim Keller asks in one of his messages, “Are you a created thing?” If so, then you won’t separate yourself from God’s saving grace once it’s been applied to your life.
This is why no one reading this now who has been born again of God (John 3) will leave the faith in 2026 or any year thereafter. Martin Luther put it this way in his work, Bondage of the Will: “Now that God has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will, and put it under the control of His, and promised to save me, not according to my working or running, but according to his own grace and mercy, I have the comfortable certainly that he is faithful and will not lie to me, and that He is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break Him or pluck me from Him.”
Now, that’s something to make 2026 a happy year for all of us.
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master’s in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
