Easter weekend is a time of prayer, but fewer may actually be doing that this year.

The number of Americans who say they pray or believe in God has hit a low since at least the early 1970s, according to a new study.

However, nonreligious people are twice as likely today to believe in an afterlife as those in the 1980s, according to the survey, which analyzes responses to four decades of data compiled in the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey.

“It’s an indication that people believe they don’t have to do all the work, they don’t have to pray and go to church, but they will still enjoy all the benefits of an afterlife,” said Ryne Sherman, assistant professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, who helped conduct the study.

Senior citizens tend to be the most religious and saw the smallest shifts in habits over time, the analysis shows. The study found larger religious declines among whites than blacks and larger declines in the West and Northeast than South.

“We think it may be driven by cultural shifts in individualism,” Sherman said. “Americans have become more individualistic and expect more entitlements and things like that.”

Sherman conducted the study with researchers at San Diego State University and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The data used comes from polls of 58,893 respondents to the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults of all ages administered between 1972 and 2014.

The results were published this week in Sage Open, an academic journal.

The findings show that from the early 1980s to 2014:

—Those who identified their religion as “none” increased from 7 percent to 21 percent.

—Those who never attend religious services doubled to 26 percent.

—Those who say they never pray leaped from 3 percent to 15 percent.

—Those who say they don’t believe in God climbed from 13 percent to 22 percent.

—Those who believe in an afterlife stayed flat at 79 percent, but non-churchgoers who believe in an afterlife increased from 7 percent to 15 percent.

The study’s conclusions are similar to ones in a survey released last fall by the Pew Research Center.

“There’s a greater willingness now to say ‘I’m not religious,’” Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame told the Christian Science Monitor. “For people who do continue to practice religion, (their communities) tend to be made up of the seriously committed, not just those swept along by obligation.”

A potential downside to a less religious nation is that people often identify faith as a motivating factor for why they help others, Sherman said.

The researchers did not break down results by Hispanic or immigrant populations. But their findings are particularly stark among those under 30, with nearly a third saying they are not religious, up from 12 percent of young people in the 1980s.

“The large declines in religious practice among young adults are also further evidence that millennials are the least religious generation in memory, and possibly in American history,” said San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. Twenge, another author of the study.

Sherman said he believes the main reason for the decline among millennials is “they live in a time period where everyone is less religious.”

“It also appears that groups with relatively high social power are less likely to see themselves as having a significant need for religion or God in recent years,” Sherman said.

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©2016 Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)