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Pew Research Center - http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
America’s Changing Religious Landscape
Christians
Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue
to Grow
The Christian share of the U.S.
population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify
with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by
the Pew Research Center. Moreover, these changes are taking place across the
religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic
groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced
among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same
trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates
and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men. (Explore the data
with our interactive database tool.)
To be
sure, the United States remains home to more Christians than any other country
in the world, and a large majority of Americans – roughly seven-in-ten –
continue to identify with some branch of the Christian faith.1 But
the major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center
finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves
as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven
years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in
2014. Over the same period, the percentage of Americans who are religiously
unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in
particular” – has jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%. And the
share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths also has inched up,
rising 1.2 percentage points, from 4.7% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2014. Growth has
been especially great among Muslims and Hindus, albeit from a very low base.
The drop in the Christian share
of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants
and Catholics. Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately
three percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share of the
U.S. population also has dipped, but at a slower rate, falling by about one
percentage point since 2007.2
Even as
their numbers decline, American Christians – like the U.S. population as a
whole – are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Non-Hispanic whites
now account for smaller shares of evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants
and Catholics than they did seven years earlier, while Hispanics have grown as
a share of all three religious groups. Racial and ethnic minorities now make up
41% of Catholics (up from 35% in 2007), 24% of evangelical Protestants (up from
19%) and 14% of mainline Protestants (up from 9%).
Religious
intermarriage also appears to be on the rise: Among Americans who have gotten
married since 2010, nearly four-in-ten (39%) report that they are in
religiously mixed marriages, compared with 19% among those who got married
before 1960.3 The
rise in intermarriage appears to be linked with the growth of the religiously
unaffiliated population. Nearly one-in-five people surveyed who got married
since 2010 are either religiously unaffiliated respondents who married a
Christian spouse or Christians who married an unaffiliated spouse. By contrast,
just 5% of people who got married before 1960 fit this profile.
While many
U.S. religious groups are aging, the unaffiliated are comparatively young – and
getting younger, on average, over time. As a rising cohort of highly
unaffiliated Millennials reaches adulthood, the median age of unaffiliated
adults has dropped to 36, down from 38 in 2007 and far lower than the general
(adult) population’s median age of 46.4 By
contrast, the median age of mainline Protestant adults in the new survey is 52
(up from 50 in 2007), and the median age of Catholic adults is 49 (up from 45
seven years earlier).
These are
among the key findings of the Pew Research Center’s second U.S. Religious
Landscape Study, a follow-up to its first comprehensive study of religion in
America, conducted in 2007.
Because
the U.S. census does not ask Americans about their religion, there are no
official government statistics on the religious composition of the U.S. public.5 Some
Christian denominations and other religious bodies keep their own rolls, but
they use widely differing criteria for membership and sometimes do not remove
members who have fallen away.6 Surveys
of the general public frequently include a few questions about religious
affiliation, but they typically do not interview enough people, or ask
sufficiently detailed questions, to be able to describe the country’s full
religious landscape.
The Religious
Landscape Studies were designed to fill the gap. Comparing two virtually
identical surveys, conducted seven years apart, can bring important trends into
sharp relief. In addition, the very large samples in both 2007 and 2014
included hundreds of interviews with people from small religious groups that
account for just 1% or 2% of the U.S. population, such as Mormons,
Episcopalians and Seventh-day Adventists. This makes it possible to paint
demographic and religious profiles of numerous denominations that cannot be
described by smaller surveys. The most recent Religious Landscape Study also
was designed to obtain a minimum of 300 interviews with respondents in each
state and the District of Columbia as well as to represent the country’s
largest metropolitan areas, enabling an assessment of the religious composition
not just of the nation as a whole, but also of individual states and
localities. (See Appendix D.)
The latest
survey was conducted in English and Spanish among a nationally representative
sample of 35,071 adults interviewed by telephone, on both cellphones and
landlines, from June 4-Sept. 30, 2014. Findings based on the full sample have a
margin of sampling error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points. The survey is
estimated to cover 97% of the non-institutionalized U.S. adult population; 3%
of U.S. adults are not reachable by telephone or do not speak English or
Spanish well enough to participate in the survey. (See Appendix A
for more information on how the survey was conducted, margins of error for
subgroups analyzed in this report and additional details.)
Even a
very small margin of error, when applied to the hundreds of millions of people
living in the United States, can yield a wide range of estimates for the size
of particular faiths. Nevertheless, the results of the second Religious
Landscape Study indicate that Christians probably have lost ground, not only in
their relative share of the U.S. population, but also in absolute numbers.
A Note on Defining
Religious Affiliation and the Study’s Terminology
In this
study, respondents’ religious affiliation (also sometimes referred to as
“religious identity”) is based on self-reports. Catholics, for instance, are
defined as all respondents who say they are Catholic, regardless of their
specific beliefs and whether or not they attend Mass regularly.
The terms
“unaffiliated” and “religious ‘nones’” are used interchangeably throughout this
report. This group includes self-identified atheists and agnostics as well as
those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.”
The
unaffiliated are generally less religiously observant than people who identify
with a religion. But not all religious “nones” are nonbelievers. In fact, many people who
are unaffiliated with a religion believe in God, pray at least occasionally and
think of themselves as spiritual people. Forthcoming reports will
describe the Religious Landscape Study’s findings about the religious beliefs
and practices of “nones” and other groups.
For more
details on the exact questions used to measure religious identity, see the
survey topline. For more on how Protestant respondents were grouped into
particular religious traditions, see Appendix B.
In 2007,
there were 227 million adults in the United States, and a little more than 78%
of them – or roughly 178 million – identified as Christians. Between 2007 and
2014, the overall size of the U.S. adult population grew by about 18 million
people, to nearly 245 million.7 But
the share of adults who identify as Christians fell to just under 71%, or
approximately 173 million Americans, a net decline of about 5 million.
This
decline is larger than the combined margins of sampling error in the twin
surveys conducted seven years apart. Using the margins of error to calculate a
probable range of estimates, it appears that the number of Christian adults in
the U.S. has shrunk by somewhere between 2.8 million and 7.8 million.8
Of the
major subgroups within American Christianity, mainline Protestantism – a
tradition that includes the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist
Churches USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) and the Episcopal Church, among others – appears to have
experienced the greatest drop in absolute numbers. In 2007, there were an
estimated 41 million mainline Protestant adults in the United States. As of
2014, there are roughly 36 million, a decline of 5 million – although, taking
into account the surveys’ combined margins of error, the number of mainline
Protestants may have fallen by as few as 3 million or as many as 7.3 million
between 2007 and 2014.9
By
contrast, the size of the historically black Protestant tradition – which
includes the National Baptist Convention, the Church of God in Christ, the
African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Progressive Baptist Convention and
others – has remained relatively stable in recent years, at nearly 16 million
adults. And evangelical Protestants, while declining slightly as a percentage
of the U.S. public, probably have grown in absolute numbers as the overall U.S.
population has continued to expand.
The new
survey indicates that churches in the evangelical Protestant tradition –
including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, Churches of
Christ, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Presbyterian Church in America,
0ther evangelical denominations and many nondenominational congregations – now
have a total of about 62 million adult adherents. That is an increase of
roughly 2 million since 2007, though once the margins of error are taken into
account, it is possible that the number of evangelicals may have risen by as
many as 5 million or remained essentially unchanged.10
Like mainline Protestants,
Catholics appear to be declining both as a percentage of the population and in
absolute numbers. The new survey indicates there are about 51 million Catholic
adults in the U.S. today, roughly 3 million fewer than in 2007. But taking
margins of error into account, the decline in the number of Catholic adults
could be as modest as 1 million.11 And,
unlike Protestants, who have been decreasing as a share of the U.S. public for
several decades, the Catholic share of the population has been relatively
stable over the long term, according to a variety of other surveys (see Appendix C).
Meanwhile,
the number of religiously unaffiliated adults has increased by roughly 19
million since 2007. There are now approximately 56 million religiously
unaffiliated adults in the U.S., and this group – sometimes called religious
“nones” – is more numerous than either Catholics or mainline Protestants,
according to the new survey. Indeed, the unaffiliated are now second in size
only to evangelical Protestants among major religious groups in the U.S.
Factors Behind the Changes
in Americans’ Religious Identification
One of the
most important factors in the declining share of Christians and the growth of
the “nones” is generational replacement. As the Millennial generation enters
adulthood, its members display much lower levels of religious affiliation,
including less connection with Christian churches, than older generations.
Fully 36% of young Millennials (those between the ages of 18 and 24) are
religiously unaffiliated, as are 34% of older Millennials (ages 25-33). And
fewer than six-in-ten Millennials identify with any branch of Christianity,
compared with seven-in-ten or more among older generations, including Baby
Boomers and Gen-Xers. Just 16% of Millennials are Catholic, and only 11%
identify with mainline Protestantism. Roughly one-in-five are evangelical
Protestants.
However,
generational replacement is by no means the only reason that religious “nones”
are growing and Christians are declining. In addition, people in older
generations are increasingly disavowing association with organized religion.
About a third of older Millennials (adults currently in their late 20s and
early 30s) now say they have no religion, up nine percentage points among this
cohort since 2007, when the same group was between ages 18 and 26. Nearly a
quarter of Generation Xers now say they have no particular religion or describe
themselves as atheists or agnostics, up four points in seven years. Baby Boomers
also have become slightly but noticeably more likely to identify as religious
“nones” in recent years.
As the
shifting religious profiles of these generational cohorts suggest, switching
religion is a common occurrence in the United States. If all Protestants were
treated as a single religious group, then fully 34% of American adults
currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were
raised. This is up six points since 2007, when 28% of adults identified with a
religion different from their childhood faith. If switching among the three
Protestant traditions (e.g., from mainline Protestantism to the evangelical
tradition, or from evangelicalism to a historically black Protestant
denomination) is added to the total, then the share of Americans who currently
have a different religion than they did in childhood rises to 42%.
By a wide
margin, religious “nones” have experienced larger gains through religious
switching than any other group. Nearly one-in-five U.S. adults (18%) were raised
in a religious faith and now identify with no religion. Some switching also has
occurred in the other direction: 9% of American adults say they were raised
with no religious affiliation, and almost half of them (4.3% of all U.S.
adults) now identify with some religion. But for every person who has joined a
religion after having been raised unaffiliated, there are more than four people
who have become religious “nones” after having been raised in some religion.
This 1:4 ratio is an important factor in the growth of the unaffiliated
population.
By
contrast, Christianity – and especially Catholicism – has been losing more
adherents through religious switching than it has been gaining. More than 85%
of American adults were raised Christian, but nearly a quarter of those who
were raised Christian no longer identify with Christianity. Former Christians
represent 19.2% of U.S. adults overall.
Both the
mainline and historically black Protestant traditions have lost more members
than they have gained through religious switching, but within Christianity the
greatest net losses, by far, have been experienced by Catholics. Nearly
one-third of American adults (31.7%) say they were raised Catholic. Among that
group, fully 41% no longer identify with Catholicism. This means that 12.9% of
American adults are former Catholics, while just 2% of U.S. adults have
converted to Catholicism from another religious tradition. No other religious
group in the survey has such a lopsided ratio of losses to gains.
The
evangelical Protestant tradition is the only major Christian group in the
survey that has gained more members than it has lost through religious
switching. Roughly 10% of U.S. adults now identify with evangelical
Protestantism after having been raised in another tradition, which more than
offsets the roughly 8% of adults who were raised as evangelicals but have left
for another religious tradition or who no longer identify with any organized
faith.
Other
highlights in this report include:
About the 2014 U.S.
Religious Landscape Study
This is
the first report on findings from the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, the
centerpiece of which is a nationally representative telephone survey of 35,071
adults. This is the second time the Pew Research Center has conducted a
Religious Landscape Study. The first was conducted in 2007, also with a
telephone survey of more than 35,000 Americans.
The new
study is designed to serve three main purposes:
The
results of the 2014 Religious Landscape Study will be published in a series of
reports over the coming year. This first report focuses on the changing
religious composition of the U.S. and describes the demographic characteristics
of U.S. religious groups, including their median age, racial and ethnic makeup,
nativity data, education and income levels, gender ratios, family composition
(including religious intermarriage rates) and geographic distribution. It also
summarizes patterns in religious switching.
In
addition, this report includes an appendix that compares the findings of the
2007 and 2014 Religious Landscape Studies with several other surveys and
assesses how recent developments in American religion fit into longer-term
trends. Data from a variety of national surveys, including the long-running
General Social Survey and Gallup polls, confirm that Protestants have been
declining as a share of the U.S. population and that the unaffiliated have been
growing. But there is less of a consensus about trends in American Catholicism.
Some surveys, including the one featured in this report, indicate that the Catholic
share of the population is declining, while others suggest it is relatively
stable or may have declined and then ticked back up in recent years. (See Appendix C.)
Other
findings from the 2014 Religious Landscape Study will be released later this
year. In addition to the written reports, the Religious Landscape Study’s
findings will be available through a new
interactive tool. The online presentation allows users to delve more
deeply into the survey’s findings, build interactive maps or charts and explore
the data most interesting to them.
Many
individuals from the Pew Research Center contributed to this report. Alan
Cooperman, director of religion research, oversaw the effort and served as the
primary editor. Gregory Smith, associate director for religion research, served
as the primary researcher and wrote the Overview and Methodology. Smith also
wrote the chapter on the changing religious composition of the U.S., the
appendix on the classification of Protestant denominations and the appendix on
putting the findings from the Religious Landscape Study into context. The
chapter on religious switching and intermarriage was written by Research
Associate Becka Alper. Research Associate Jessica Martinez and Research
Assistant Claire Gecewicz wrote the chapter on the demographic profiles of
religious groups, and Research Analyst Elizabeth Sciupac wrote the chapter on
the shifting religious identity of demographic groups. Gecewicz prepared the
detailed tables. The report was number checked by Alper, Gecewicz, Martinez,
Sciupac and Research Associate Besheer Mohamed. The report was edited by Sandra
Stencel, Michael Lipka, Caryle Murphy and Aleksandra Sandstrom. Bill Webster
created the graphics. Stacy Rosenberg, Russell Heimlich, Diana Yoo,
Besheer Mohamed, Ben Wormald and Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa developed the
interactive tool.
Others at
the Pew Research Center who provided research guidance include Michael Dimock,
Claudia Deane, Scott Keeter, Andy Kohut and Conrad Hackett. Communications
support was provided by Katherine Ritchey, Stefan Cornibert, Russ Oates
and Robyn Tomlin.
John C.
Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the
University of Akron, served as a senior adviser on the Religious Landscape
Studies, providing valuable advice on the survey questionnaires, categorization
of respondents and drafts of the reports. Additionally, we received helpful
comments on portions of the 2014 study from David E. Campbell, director, Rooney
Center for the Study of American Democracy, University of Notre Dame; William
D’Antonio, senior fellow, Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies,
The Catholic University of America; Mike Hout, professor of sociology, New York
University; and Barry Kosmin, director, Institute for the Study of Secularism
in Society and Culture, Trinity College. We also received valuable advice from
Luis Lugo, former director of the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public
Life project, and Paul Taylor, former executive vice president of the Pew
Research Center.
Funding
for the 2014 Religious Landscape Study comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts,
which received generous support for the project from the Lilly Endowment Inc.
While the
analysis was guided by our consultations with the advisers, the Pew Research
Center is solely responsible for the interpretation and reporting of the data.
The
remainder of this report explores in greater depth many of the key findings
summarized in this Overview. Chapter 1 offers a detailed look at the religious
composition of the United States and how it has changed in recent years.
Chapter 2 examines patterns in religious switching and intermarriage. Chapter 3
provides a demographic profile of the major religious traditions in the United
States. Chapter 4 then flips the lens, looking at the religious profile of
Americans in various demographic groups. Appendix A describes the methodology
used to conduct the study. Appendix B provides details on how Protestants were
categorized into one of three major Protestant traditions (the evangelical
tradition, the mainline tradition and the historically black Protestant
tradition) based on the specific denomination with which they identify.
Appendix C compares findings from the Religious Landscape Studies with other
major religion surveys and puts the current results into the context of
longer-term trends.