2 Major US Religion Surveys Coincide, With Some Guarded Good News
(ANALYSIS) One of the most impactful cultural changes in 21st-century America has been the steady decline in Christian vitality, as measured by membership, baptisms versus funerals, worship attendance, practices, and perceptions. Two major new social science surveys suggest that this decline may have bottomed out — though statistics about secularizing youth give believers ample reason to worry about the future.
Two weeks ago, the Pew Research Center released its important Religious Landscape Study, the first since 2014, a 392-page report based on a large survey of 36,908 adults. Next week, by coincidence, Oxford University Press will publish “The American Religious Landscape” by Ryan Burge, a leading analyst of U.S. religious trends whose Substack column also appears at Religion Unplugged.
Pew’s team concludes that “after many years of steady decline, the share of Americans who identify as Christians is leveling off — at least temporarily,” with “relative stability” setting in around 2020.
Burge, on the other hand, emphasizes the opposite trend. He observed that while the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has leveled off, the rise of Americans with no religious affiliation — known as “nones” — has been significant, and he finds “some indications in a variety of data sources that this era may be coming to an end.”
In the big picture, Pew reports the current breakdown of American religious identity as follows: Unaffiliated (29%), evangelical Protestant (23%), Catholic (19%), mainline Protestant (11%), Black Protestant (5%), Jewish (2%), Latter-day Saint (2%), with around 1% each for Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims, and 5% identifying with other religions.
The recent dramatic shifts are shown by the changes in the five largest categories compared to Pew’s 2007 "Landscape" report: Evangelical Protestant (26.3%), Catholic (23.9%), mainline Protestant (18.1%), Unaffiliated (16.1%), and Black Protestant (6.9%). Let’s take a closer look.
Catholics
In reaction to the Pew report, Charles Collins of Crux made this sweeping observation: “It’s fair and even necessary to acknowledge how the Catholic Church has seen a massive decline in the United States since the Vatican II ended in 1965.”
The percentages above are just the beginning. The current 19% share, Collins notes, includes not only regular and occasional churchgoers but also people who haven’t attended Mass in years — even decades.
Pew reports that only 44% of self-identified Catholics consider religion “very” important, compared with 60% of Protestants overall. Only 29% of Catholics attend worship weekly, versus 40% of Protestants. Additionally, 48% of Catholics consider the Bible “extremely” or “very” important, while 72% of Protestants do.
Burge noted that Catholicism’s “only real growth” comes through Latin American immigration, but Hispanics remain underrepresented in church leadership.
Mainline Protestants
These mostly white and long-established denominations, which are generally moderate or liberal in belief, were once influential as the closest thing to an established religious center in the U.S. They claimed perhaps half the population as recently as World War II. Now, Burge predicts that this form of Christianity “will largely disappear.” (Burge himself once led a mainline American Baptist church that recently had to disband).
Burge points out that these believers, who made up about 28% of Americans in the 1972 General Social Survey (GSS), now account for only around 10%. In Pew’s 2007 Landscape survey, the percentage of mainline Protestants was 18%, and it has since dropped to 11%.
By one projection, the number will fall to just 5% by 2030, with even smaller remnants around 2040. The reasons for this decline include aging memberships, fewer younger members, poor retention of children raised in these congregations, and minimal gains from evangelism or “switching” from other church groups. Meanwhile, the minority evangelical members within these churches have been drifting away.
Evangelicals
Pew reports that these high-profile conservative denominations and congregations have seen a decline since 2007.
Burge notes that they experienced significant growth between 1983 and 1993, reaching 30% of Americans by GSS count, and were once “pervasive” in American culture. He deems it “unlikely” that the Evangelical Protestant share will ever return to those heights. However, he also points out that evangelicals still make up a larger share of the U.S. population today than they did in 1972 and are “still a force to be reckoned with.”
Black Protestants
Data on this category cover historically Black denominations, leaving out Black members in predominantly white evangelical, mainline and non-denominational churches. The eight major denominations have about seven million members in 21,000 or so local congregations.
As Burge observes, Black Protestants share similar beliefs with white evangelicals but align politically more closely with mainline liberals. They made up around 8% to 9% of the U.S. population in the 1970s, but their numbers have declined in the past two decades, likely to around 6% according to Pew or 5% according to Burge. Burge suggests they are “likely headed downward in the next decade or so.”
Today, about 23% of Black Americans report no religious affiliation.
Other observations
The Protestant map is being redrawn by the rise of independent, “nondenominational” local congregations, almost all evangelical in belief. Pew estimates that nondenominational churches now account for 7.1% of American adults and 18% of U.S. Protestants, even as long-established denominations continue to decline. This shift is highly significant. The Religion Census of 2020 found that nondenominational churches were second only to Catholics, with over 21 million members — making them the largest U.S. Protestant category and representing more than 13% of the nation’s churchgoers. The Census recorded 44,319 such congregations.
Burge closely examines the three categories of religiously unaffiliated Americans, as distinguished by Pew: Atheists (5%) are convinced that God does not exist, while agnostics (6%) don’t know or believe it’s impossible to know.
A much larger group (19%) falls into the “nothing in particular” category, lacking any specific religious affiliation or identity. Compared with atheists and agnostics, this group is less hostile to religious faith, less affluent, less educated, less politically liberal, and less engaged with not only churches but other social organizations.
Another of Pew’s many fascinating findings is that Hindus are the highest-status religious group, with 57% reporting family incomes of $100,000 or more and 70% holding bachelor’s degrees — surpassing even Jews. Muslims rank somewhat lower, in third place. Then come mainline Protestants, Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Black Protestants, with the religiously unaffiliated falling somewhere in the middle.
Burge concludes his book with the sobering prediction that American religion’s impact “will continue to recede,” with “little evidence” that the expanding non-religious Americans are able to organize effective local social services that churches have provided for centuries. He sees only two real outcomes: Either government services expand further, “which seems unlikely,” or millions of needy Americans “fall through the cracks of the social safety net.”
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.