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Religion in America: Facts and Figures


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(Selections from the Pew Research study on religion trends in the United States)

 

Key Findings and Statistics on Religion in America

 

More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

 

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

 

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions - evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).

 

While those Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular religion have seen the greatest growth in numbers as a result of changes in affiliation, Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration. The Landscape Survey finds that among the foreign-born adult population, Catholics outnumber Protestants by nearly a two-to-one margin (46% Catholic vs. 24% Protestant); among native-born Americans, on the other hand, the statistics show that Protestants outnumber Catholics by an even larger margin (55% Protestant vs. 21% Catholic). Immigrants are also disproportionately represented among several world religions in the U.S., including Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

 

Although there are about half as many Catholics in the U.S. as Protestants, the number of Catholics nearly rivals the number of members of evangelical Protestant churches and far exceeds the number of members of both mainline Protestant churches and historically black Protestant churches. The U.S. also includes a significant number of members of the third major branch of global Christianity - Orthodoxy - whose adherents now account for 0.6% of the U.S. adult population. American Christianity also includes sizeable numbers of Mormons (1.7% of the adult population), Jehovah's Witnesses (0.7%) and other Christian groups (0.3%).

 

Like the other major groups, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (16.1%) also exhibit remarkable internal diversity. Although one-quarter of this group consists of those who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic (1.6% and 2.4% of the adult population overall, respectively), the majority of the unaffiliated population (12.1% of the adult population overall) is made up of people who simply describe their religion as "nothing in particular." This group, in turn, is fairly evenly divided between the "secular unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is not important in their lives (6.3% of the adult population), and the "religious unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is either somewhat important or very important in their lives (5.8% of the overall adult population).

 

Even smaller religions in the U.S. reflect considerable internal diversity. For instance, most Jews (1.7% of the overall adult population) identify with one of three major groups: Reform, Conservative or Orthodox Judaism. Similarly, more than half of Buddhists (0.7% of the overall adult population) belong to one of three major groups within Buddhism: Zen, Theravada or Tibetan Buddhism. Muslims (0.6% of the overall adult population) divide primarily into two major groups: Sunni and Shia.

 

For a whole lot more info, check out the whole study here.

 

This is one of those studies that gets thrown around a lot. I suppose it's obvious that the most surprising finding is just how large the unaffiliated category has become in such a short time. I read elsewhere that up until around 1990, responders blitzkrieged the polls for Christianity at a steady rate of 87%. This has since dropped to 76%, and meanwhile the unaffiliated category has crept comfortably into the number 3 slot behind protestants and catholics respectively, and is now the fastest growing category. Which then begs the question regarding the bolded sentence above: If one in four young people are already unaffiliated, how long is it before that group takes the top slot, provided there isn't another Great Awakening to impede its progress? Is it possible that within a generation or two organized religion will be a minority?

 

The other question I have not just about this study, but all studies about issues of politics and especially religion, is that these categories, imposing though they seem, in fact probably aren't as tightly-knit as they appear (and the Pew study goes deeper into this if you click the link). Meaning that I wonder how many catholics, say, are really orthodox catholics, Christians are orthodox Christians, etc., and not some other species of their own creation.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I wasn't aware of the exact numbers that you have posted, but it's been pretty clear to me that the religious/non-religious landscape is changing fast. Most of my friends are either very loosely affiliated with a religion, or they are full-blown atheists.I just wish fundamentalist people of (insert religion) would just go away, they do nothing but make society even more stupid than it already is.

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I've had the same experience. What you might call your 'average believer' today is probably a different set of experiences than it would have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Although I've heard some people say that America is actually MORE religious today than it used to be, there seems to have been a slow transition to a more docile majority who are, metaphorically speaking, fat and happy in their religion and don't see a need to convert their neighbors. Which to me is even stranger than fundamentalism, because Hell is still a point of emphasis with both.

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