Christian Americans Have Dropped 15 Points In 14 Years To 63%

Nearly three-quarters of American adults say they have no religious affiliation, making up a group called “nones,” a report from the Pew Research Center says.

63 percent of adults now say they are Christians, down from 78 percent in 2007, the Washington, DC-based group said. This is down 15 points from 2007.

It doesn’t look like the changes in American society that have happened so far in the 21st century are going to slow down any time soon, says Gregory A. Smith, Pew’s associate research director.

The unaffiliated are people who say they are atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious beliefs, the group says.

The study, which looked at data from 2020 and 2021, says that Protestant churches, which now make up 40% of the adult population, have lost 4% of their members in the last five years and are down 10% from 2011.

Pew said 60% of Protestants said “yes” when asked if they were “born-again” or “evangelical” Christians. The rest said “no” or didn’t say.

Almost half of white Protestants say they are evangelicals, but only 42 percent say they aren’t or don’t know. At 66%, evangelical Black Protestants are twice as many as non-evangelical Blacks, the study found.

The study found that the number of Roman Catholics in the United States has stayed about the same. Americans said they were Catholic in 2021, the same number who said they were Catholic in 2014. People who say they’re Catholic in the United States haven’t changed much since 2007, when they were 27%, Pew said. Between then and 2014, that number dropped to 20%.

Many people in the United States belong to a religious group, but their expression may not be as strong as it could be.

The Pew Research Center said that only 45 percent of U.S. adults pray every day, which is down from 58 percent who did so in 2007. When people said they prayed weekly or monthly, 22 percent of them did so between 2007 and 2021. People who said they rarely or never prayed rose from 18 percent to 32 percent over the same time.