The steep rise of Americans who tell pollsters they lack any religious identity or affiliation, the so-called “nones,” was among the country’s top religion stories of the decade past. If that increase is now stalling, it’s a hot candidate for top trend of the 2020s. But hold on.

Journalists should be covering (with accompanying graphs), or at least carefully watching, this highly important discussion, which broke this past week online by social-science scholars. The stall scenario was asserted by Melissa Deckman of Washington College and immediately pursued by GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University and Religion in Public co-author Paul Djupe of Denison University.

GetReligion honcho tmatt (as usual) was on top of this. But then Joseph Baker of East Tennesse State University doused some cold water on the optimistic scenario.

Writers will need to examine these articles for themselves, but let’s unpack the debate a bit for those just tuning in.

In the common lingo for age cohorts, the “Greatest Generation” that survived the Depression and World War Two was followed by the “Silent Generation” and then the “Baby Boomers.” Problems for organized religion — even during adult marriage-and-parenting years — zoomed with the “Millennial” generation, usually defined as Americans born between 1981 and 1996. The current debate compares them with the next cohort born after 1996, the “Post-Millennials” or “Generation Z.”

Deckman collected data on 2,200 Gen Z subjects drawn from a Qualtrics Panels political survey last year. This was not a strictly random sample, but results were weighted by Pew Research benchmarks for gender, race or ethnicity, and income, to match the demographic makeup of this population.

With Gen Z, 38 percent were religiously unaffiliated, surely a troublesome number. However, that was the identical percentage with the earlier cohort of Millennials in a 2016 Public Religion Research Institute study, hinting at a plateau.