Washington (AP) – The number of Americans who identify as Christian has decreased steadily for years. According to a new survey on Wednesday of the PEW Research Center, however, signs of slowing down shows.
In the religious landscape study, 62% of us adult Christians call themselves. While a significant decline in 2007, when 78% of the Americans identified as Christ, Pew found that the Christian proportion of the population had remained relatively stable since 2019.
According to PEW, the rapid rise of religiously un associated so-called “nones” has also reached at least a short-lived plateau. About 29%of the US -growing people identify as religious, including those who are atheistic (5%), agnostic (6%) or “nothing special” (19%).
“It is remarkable to have observed this recent time of stability in the American religion after this long period of decline,” said Gregory Smith from Pew, one of the co-authors of the study. “One thing that we cannot know exactly is whether these short -term signs of stabilization prove to be a permanent change in the country’s religious trajectory.”
After a few measures, the United States mostly remain spiritual. Many Americans have a supernatural attitude, with 83% believing in God or a universal spirit and 86% believe that people have a soul or a spirit. About seven out of ten Americans believe in heaven, hell or both.
Young adults are less religious than their oldest
Despite this widespread spirituality, there is future religious decline. Pew in particular found a gigantic age gap, with 46% of the youngest American adults identified as Christians compared to 80% of the oldest adults. The youngest adults are also three times more common than the oldest group that is not religiously connected.
“This type of generation difference is a large part of what has driven the long -term declines of the American religion,” said Smith. “As older cohorts of highly religious, older people have died, they were replaced by new cohorts of young adults who are less religious than their parents and grandparents.”
Michele Margolis, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who is not connected to the PEW survey, has investigated how religious engagement has changed for a lifetime.
Young adults often move away from religion. “When you get married and have children, this is a time when scholars have found that religion is rather important,” said Margolis.
Margolis said that a future question was whether the youngest American adults firmly reject organized religion or whether some of them will return to religious folding with increasing age.
Between 2007 and 2024, the Pew Religion Landscape Studies did not point out that the Americans become more religious when they get older.
Smith at Pew said “something should change” to stop the long -term decline of American religion, regardless of whether adults become more religious or new generations become more religious than their parents.
How party political politics combines with religious identity
The long-term decline of the US Christian and the rise of the “non-” “has occurred in traditions, gender, breed, ethnicity, education and region. According to Pew, however, it is much clearer among political liberals. The survey shows that 51% of the liberals did not get a religion from 2007 to 24 points. Only 37% of the US liberals identify as Christ, compared to 62% in 2007.
Penny Edgell, a sociologist and expert at the University of Minnesota and Expert of PEW studies, said that this religious and political sorting aims at whether people “support traditional, patriarchal gender and family arrangements”.
Edgell also notices that black Americans resist the assumption that all Democrats are less religious than Republicans.
“Democrats are more black Americans, but their religious engagements are still very high,” said Edgell. “This has something to do with how religious institutions and politics are historically uniquely intertwined for different groups.”
About seven out of ten black Protestants said Pew said that religion is very significant for them-the same rate as evangelicals and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the saints of the past few days. However, black Protestants are likely to identify themselves as a democrat (72%), while evangelicals and saints of the past few days probably identify as Republicans (70%or 73%).
The Pew Survey pursues many religious traditions
Since the last religious landscape study, it has been almost 10 years ago that follows religious data that the US people does not do.
The new survey showed that the majority of immigrants in the USA are Christian (58%), but they pursue the upward trend of religious incirection, with a quarter of the US-growing people born abroad.
The number of Americans who belong to religions alongside Christianity has increased, although it is still a tiny part of the population (7%). This includes the 2% that are Jewish and each 1% Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu.
Of us Christian adults, 40% are Protestant and 19% Catholic. The remaining 3% in Pew’s survey include saints of the past few days, Orthodox Christians, Jehovah’s and smaller Christian groups.
The two largest Protestant denominations in the PEW survey remain the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church – although both have lost many members in 2007 since the first religious landscape study.
The study of religious Pew Religious landscape was carried out between July 2023 and March 2024 in English and Spanish under a nationally representative sample of 36,908 respondents in all 50 states and in the District of Columbia. The error rate of the survey for results is based on the full sample plus or minus 0.8 percentage points.
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