Pew Research Center dropped two reports this month, and together they put hard numbers on something Christian women in business have probably been feeling for a while. The cultural ground under our feet has been shifting, and the data finally caught up to what a lot of us already knew.
In “What Do Americans Consider Immoral?” published March 19th, Pew surveyed 3,605 U.S. adults on 15 morally debated behaviors and found American attitudes on ethics have been moving in the same direction for two decades. A companion report from March 5th, “In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad,” compared 30,000 people across 25 countries and surfaced something harder to brush off. America was the only country in the survey where a majority of adults, 53%, said the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens were bad. Canada sat at 92% positive. Indonesia at 92%. Americans rated the people around them lower than every other country on the list.
Read it again if you need to. We are building businesses in a country where the cultural consensus on what is right, what is wrong, and what God has to do with any of it is fractured, and Americans themselves are saying so.
What the data is saying
Pew’s March 19 findings show a country where moral permissiveness has become the default across a wide range of behaviors. A growing share of Americans believe you can be a good person with no belief in God at all, and according to the data, the view has picked up serious ground over the last twenty years.
People who say faith matters deeply to them are still more likely to hold traditional moral positions than the general population, and white evangelical Protestants showed up consistently in Pew’s data as holding those positions across the board. The gap between where faith communities stand and where broader American culture stands has widened, and the research makes the gap visible in a way casual observation alone cannot.
Jonathan Evans, a senior researcher at Pew and one of the lead authors on the international study, told Religion News Service the findings “don’t support that Americans are overarchingly more judgmental or moralistic than in other countries.” What the data points to instead is something more foundational. Americans are deeply divided about what a good life is built on in the first place, and the divide goes all the way down to first principles.
Why this matters regardless of what kind of business you run
A quick note before going further, because this comes up every time faith and business get discussed in the same sentence. A Christian woman in business is not automatically running a faith-forward brand. She might be running a construction company, a law firm, a creative agency, or an e-commerce shop selling housewares. Her customers could be anybody. Her business might have nothing explicitly Christian about it from the outside.
None of it changes what Pew is describing.
The gap the data documents lives in the person doing the building, not in what the business sells or who it serves. A woman whose faith shapes how she hires, how she handles a difficult client, what she will and will not agree to in a contract, and what she is ultimately trying to build toward is working inside a culture growing increasingly ambivalent about whether any of her framework has a foundation. Whether or not her business ever mentions God publicly, she is still the one holding convictions in rooms that may not share them. Understanding the size of the gap, without catastrophizing it or dismissing it, is how you build with clear eyes.
Two ways to read this
One read is discouraging. The cultural baseline is moving away from a faith-shaped worldview, the gap has been widening for twenty years, and no data suggests it is about to reverse.
The other read is clarifying, and personally, this is where I land.
Pew’s data describes a documented, measurable community of American women who believe faith belongs in how they live and build, and who are doing it anyway inside a culture growing less certain about the foundations they are standing on. Women in this group run businesses across every industry. Their faith shows up in how they lead, how they make decisions under pressure, and what they consider non-negotiable. Pew did not shrink the community. Pew counted it.
What to do with this information
Read both reports if you have not already. “What Do Americans Consider Immoral?” covers the domestic survey across 15 behaviors, and “In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad” puts American attitudes in global context. The crosstabs broken down by religious affiliation are particularly useful for understanding where faith communities land inside the larger picture.
Beyond reading, the more practical question is whether you are building with a clear understanding of the environment you are in. A cultural climate in active disagreement about the foundations of morality creates measurable pressure on decision-making, especially for women whose faith shapes how they hire, how they negotiate, what clients or partnerships they take on, and what they are ultimately building toward. Understanding where the culture stands lets you make decisions from a grounded place rather than a reactive one. You are not imagining the friction. A twenty-year shift in American moral attitudes is documented, sourced, and published by one of the most credible research institutions in the country. You can work with information like that.
Pew measures what the culture says. Proverbs 31 describes a woman who builds anyway.
Sources: Pew Research Center, “What Do Americans Consider Immoral?” (March 19, 2026); Pew Research Center, “In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad” (March 5, 2026). Both reports draw from Pew’s American Trends Panel surveys conducted in spring 2025, with an international component surveying 28,333 adults across 24 additional countries.
Wanna go behind the scenes? Subscribe to Letters for The Virtuous Creative
Every Tuesday, Danielle founder and independent journalist behind The Virtuous Creative shares how stories come together, PLUS reflections on faith, entrepreneurship, and showing up fully in business and life. Join 900+ women already subscribed.
