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Survey says religious life in America is diverse, fluid

 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape.

Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults (28 percent) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion — or no religion at all.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1 percent) 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.

Dwindling Protestants

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 percent.

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 percent) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24 percent) describe themselves as Catholic.

These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.

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.

Significant minorities

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 percent of the U.S. adult population. American Christianity also includes sizeable numbers of Mormons (1.7 percent of the adult population), Jehovah’s Witnesses (0.7 percent) and other Christian groups (0.3 percent).

Even smaller religions in the U.S. reflect considerable internal diversity.

For instance, most Jews (1.7 percent 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 percent of the overall adult population) belong to one of three major groups within Buddhism: Zen, Theravada or Tibetan Buddhism.

Muslims (0.6 percent of the overall adult population) divide primarily into two major groups: Sunni and Shia.

The full text of the report and additional information is available by clicking here.