Barna Group found that 26% of self-identified Christians report ongoing unresolved spiritual doubt — not past doubt they worked through, but current, persistent questioning — the dominant inaction-side rate. On the action side, PRRI’s 2024 report on religious change in America found that only 9% of religiously unaffiliated US adults say the statement “I am looking for a religion that would be right for me” describes them well, making active seeking the closest available attitudinal proxy for action-side regret. Pew Research Center’s December 2025 survey of 8,937 US adults adds context: among those who kept their childhood religion, only 64% rated belief in its teachings as extremely or very important, leaving a substantial minority whose reasons for staying center on community, habit, or family rather than conviction.
The 17-point gap favoring inaction regret aligns with Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal framework, in which regrets of inaction tend to compound over time. Identity decisions like religious affiliation fit this pattern: leaving a religion is a concrete, time-stamped action whose consequences become familiar, while staying despite doubt is an ongoing omission that can accumulate as a “what if I had been braver” narrative. Bleidorn et al.’s 2024 longitudinal study of roughly 20,000 Dutch adults found no significant change in life satisfaction after deconversion, suggesting that the action itself is neither reliably beneficial nor harmful to well-being. The size of the gap here likely overstates true regret asymmetry because the two proxies measure different intensities of dissatisfaction: actively seeking a new religion is a higher bar than reporting unresolved doubt.
Both proxies stretch the meaning of “regret rate.” Seeking a religion is not the same as regretting that one left; some seekers may want a novel spiritual practice rather than a return to what they abandoned. Ongoing doubt is not regret; many theologians treat doubt as intrinsic to mature faith rather than a sign that staying was the wrong call. Denomination-level variation is likely large, with high-demand groups (LDS, Jehovah’s Witnesses) producing higher social costs for leaving and thus potentially more seekers whose motivation is community re-entry rather than spiritual conviction. The PRRI and Barna surveys differ in date (2023 vs 2017) and population framing. All sources are US-centric; in societies where religion is legally or socially compulsory, the inaction/action frame barely applies.