A major new study reveals some deep shifts in American religion. (Photo: Getty Images)
Religion in the U.S. was once largely white and Christian, but the future looks increasingly diverse and non-Christian.
This is among the findings of a major new study by Public Religion Research Institute, which offers a nuanced snapshot of religion in the U.S. today and offers some hints at what’s to come.
According to PRRI’s 2016 poll of more than 101,000 Americans across all 50 states, the U.S. has perhaps never been as religiously diverse as it is today. Here are seven major trends from the study:
White Christians are now a minority.
Just 43 percent of Americans identify as both white and Christian. Only 30 percent of American identify as white and Protestant. In 40 years, the population of white Christians has dropped nearly in half. A 1976 General Social Survey found that 81 percent of Americans identified as white and Christian, and a majority ― 55 percent ― were white Protestants.
Non-Christian communities are rapidly growing.
Although non-Christian religious groups represent fewer than one in 10 Americans combined, they’re also some of the youngest groups and thus most likely to comprise a large portion of the American public in the years to come.
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and religiously unaffiliated Americans are all much younger than white Christian groups. Forty-two percent of Muslims, 36 percent of Hindus, 35 percent of Buddhists and 34 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans are under the age of 30.By contrast, just 11 percent of white Catholics, 11 percent of white evangelical Protestants, and 14 percent of white mainline Protestants are under 30. Roughly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants, white Catholics, and white mainline Protestants are 50 or older.
The religiously unaffiliated have become a dominant group across many states.
There are 20 U.S. states in which no religious group makes up a larger share of residents than the religiously unaffiliated, including people who identify as atheist, agnostic and secular. The states are mostly concentrated in the Western U.S., with large unaffiliated populations in Oregon and Washington. But they also include several New England and Southern states, as well. The state where religiously unaffiliated Americans make up the largest share of residents is Vermont, at 41 percent of inhabitants.
LGBTQ Americans are disproportionately unaffiliated.
Nearly half ― 46 percent ― of LGBTQ Americans are religiously unaffiliated, compared to 24 percent of the general public. Just six percent of LGBTQ Americans are white evangelical Protestant, while 17 percent of all Americans identify that way. Six percent of LGBTQ Americans identify as black Protestant, five percent as Hispanic Catholic, and three percent as Hispanic Protestant. Six percent of LGBTQ individuals identify as either Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu.
American Catholicism has shifted west and south.
Seventy-four percent of Catholics now live outside the Northeast, once the epicenter of American Catholicism. Rhode Island remains the most Catholic state in the country, at 41 percent. But large populations of Catholics have settled in the Southwest in recent decades, partly due to immigration from predominantly Catholic countries in Latin America. In 1972, 41 percent of Catholics lived in the Northeast, and 28 percent lived in the Midwest. Today, a majority of Catholics now live in the South (29 percent) or West (25 percent). Twenty percent live in the Midwest, and 26 percent reside in the Northeast.
There are major generational divides in religious affiliation.
For instance, among Jews under the age of 30, just 47 percent identify as religiously Jewish, while a majority ― 53 percent ― identify as culturally Jewish. By contrast, 78 percent of Jewish seniors, age 65 or older, are religiously Jewish, while 22 percent identify as culturally Jewish. Nearly two-thirds of American seniors identify as white and Christian, while fewer than one-quarter of young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 belong to a white Christian tradition. Young adults are also more than three times as likely as seniors to identify as religiously unaffiliated ― at 38 percent compared to 12 percent, respectively.
White Christians continue to dominate the GOP, while the Democratic Party is increasingly diverse.
Seventy-three percent of Republicans identify as white and Christian. That’s down from 2006, when more than eight in ten, 81 percent, of Republicans identified that way. Thirty-five percent of all Republicans identify as white evangelical Protestant. In 2006 half of the Democratic Party identified as white Christian, and just 29 percent of Democrats identify as such today. Nonwhite Christians tend to lean more toward the Democratic Party, and 68 percent of black Protestants identify as Democrats.
In 1966, some 98 percent of Americans said they believed in God, according to a Gallup survey. When Gallup and Pew Research surveyed Americans in 2014, the number had dropped to 86 percent and 89 percent respectively. Among the youngest adults surveyed by Pew, those born between 1990 and 1996, the share of believers was just 80 percent.
Some researchers argue that the number has decreased simply because Americans are more comfortable now than they were in the 60s admitting that they don’t believe in God.
Christianity has declined.
In 1948, Gallup found that about 91 percent of Americans identified as Christian. That number took a big dip in subsequent decades and continues to decline in recent years. From 2007 to 2014 alone, the percentage of Americans who identified as Christian fell from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent.
A new “religious” group has emerged.
Nearly one in three Americans under 35 today are religiously unaffiliated, meaning they do not identify with any formal religious group. As a whole, these “nones” comprise the second largest religious group in the U.S. behind evangelical Protestants.
Spirituality has taken center stage.
The term “spiritual but not religious” has emerged in recent years to describe how more and more Americans identify. Yes, religious affiliation has declined. But feelings of spiritual peace and wellbeing? Wonder about the universe? Both have significantly increased in the last decade across religious and nonreligious groups. Even among the unaffiliated and those who say religion isn’t particularly important to them, spiritual sentiment is strong and growing. And more than half of atheists say they regularly feel a sense of awe and wonder. Between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of atheists who said they felt a deep sense of wonder about the universe on a weekly basis rose a full 17 points from 37 percent to 54 percent.
The importance of religion in Americans’ lives has shifted.
In 2007, 56 percent of Americans said religion was very important in their lives. Measures of this question from the 1950s and 1960s showed that at that time, over 70 percent of Americans said religion was very important in their daily lives.
Church attendance has declined.
In a 1937 Gallup Poll, 73 percent of Americans said they were church members. That percentage fell to around 70 percent in the '60s and '70s. By the 2000s, that number hovered around 60 percent.
More women are entering the clergy.
In many Christian and Jewish congregations, the number of clergywomen has greatly increased. According to data from the Association of Theological Schools, women today make up about a third of all seminary students. Thirty years ago, women made up less than a fifth of seminary students. This is due in large part to the fact that it wasn’t until after World War II that many of the larger and more prominent denominations started allowing women's ordination. The United Methodist Church and what would later become the Presbyterian Church USA ordained their first women ministers in 1965. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Reform Judaism, and the Episcopal Church followed their lead in the early 1970s.
The religious right got organized.
Contrary to popular belief, it was segregation -- and not abortion -- that mobilized the religious right in the 1960s and '70s. In a series of court cases, Paul Weyrich, a religious conservative political activist, worked to organize evangelicals around segregation as an issue of “religious freedom.” A 1971 ruling in Green v. Connally upheld that racially discriminatory private schools could not receive tax exemption "for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools." Weyrich and others tried to fight this by saying that because private schools received no federal funding, the government couldn't tell them how to operate (ie. they could continue discriminating against African American applicants.) Sound familiar?
Prior to the 1970s, the relationship between evangelical Christians and the Republican party was negligible. In 2016, it’s hard to imagine a Republican party without its evangelical voting bloc.
We entered an era of interfaith engagement.
In 1965, the Catholic Church took a huge step for interfaith relations by publishing a document that acknowledged the divine origin of all human beings. In the decades after, interfaith engagement exploded in the United States, with the founding of countless organizations and conferences dedicated to multi-faith dialogue. The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions formed in 1988 in the spirit of the first interfaith convention that occurred a century earlier, and groups like Interfaith Power & Light and Interfaith Youth Core emerged to usher in a new millennium of interfaith work.
Non-Christian faiths have grown.
Islam, Hinduism and a number of other non-Christian faiths have risen in the U.S. in recent years. This change in the face of American religion might be partially a result of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which led to an influx of immigrants from India and other countries with large Hindu and Muslim populations. Pew Research predicts that by 2050, Muslims will surpass Jews as the second largest organized religious group after Christians. Hindus are also projected to rise from 0.7 percent of the U.S. population to 1.2 percent in 2050. Members of “other religions” (a category that includes Sikhs, Wiccans and Unitarian Universalists) are also expected to continue growing.
Islamophobia has risen sharply.
Anti-Muslim sentiment is not a new phenomenon in the United States. For the first half of the 20th century American courts frequently denied citizenship to Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim, according to legal scholar Khaled A Beydoun.
But many feel that Islamophobia has risen in recent decades, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the last few years anti-Muslim aggression has taken a disturbing turn, with new incidents being reported weekly.
Advocacy agencies were established for frequently targeted religious groups.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, was founded in 1994 as an "organization that challenges stereotypes of Islam and Muslims." The Sikh Coalition was formed in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and ensuing violence toward the country’s Sikh population. The Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy organization for the Hindu American community, was founded in 2003. Lady Liberty League, an organization that fights for religious freedom for Wiccans, pagans, and other nature religion practitioners, formed in 1985. And the list goes on.
The spirituality marketplace exploded.
From spiritual gurus, to self-help books, to wellness retreats, the market for spirituality in the U.S. has perhaps never been so robust. The self-help industry, which often include alternative modes of spirituality along with motivational books and life coaching, brings in $13 billion a year in the form of books, retreats, classes and more. In the last 50 years, modern spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra, Dr. Andrew Weil, Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, Oprah Winfrey, Byron Katie, Marianne Williamson and countless others emerged with a new prescription for well-being. Yoga became a $27 billion industry with more than 20 million practitioners in the U.S. Meditation and mindfulness were quick to follow, gaining fans among major companies like Google, General Mills, Aetna and Goldman Sachs.
The New Atheists became a religion unto themselves.
Non-believers have always been part of the American demographic, but atheists and humanists have perhaps never been as organized, prominent and vocal as they are today. Though many of the largest organizations, like American Atheists, American Humanist Association, and Freedom from Religion Foundation, were established decades ago, the New Atheists emerged in the 2000s with a righteous, anti-religious fervor. Spearheaded by prominent British atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, as well as American atheist Sam Harris, the New Atheists have gained a large following eager to read their books, watch their debates and attend their conventions.
Megachurches have gained popularity.
In 1960 there were just a handful of churches that might be described as “megachurches,” those with a charismatic senior minister, an active social outreach ministry and at least 2,000 people attending every weekend. As of 2012, there were roughly 1,600 megachurches in the U.S.
Americans aren't necessarily sticking with the religion in which they were raised.
Pew Research found in 2014 that between 34-42 percent of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised. (The number depends on whether Protestantism is treated as a single religious group or as three different traditions -- evangelical Protestantism, mainline Protestantism and historically black Protestantism.) Eighteen percent of Americans who were raised in a religion are now unaffiliated, compared with just 4 percent who have moved in the other direction.
Spirituality found a home online.
With the advent of computers, mobile apps and the Internet, faith has gone increasingly high-tech. To access spiritual teachings and communities we need look no further than our cell phones. Pew Research found in a 2014 survey that some 20 percent of Americans shared their faith online in a given week. Sixty-one percent of millennials reported seeing others share their faith online. From Instagram accounts to podcasts to YouTube channels, there are more ways than ever to find and share spirituality.
The neopagan goddess movement emerged.
Although famous 20th century occultists Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner had already died by 1966, the U.S. goddess movement was still yet to fully blossom. In the decades that followed, American pagan authors Starhawk and Margot Adler both published seminal works on the nature religion; priestess Selena Fox started Circle Sanctuary; the Covenant of the Goddess was founded; many different traditions were established; and the first pagan seminary opened its doors.
Gregg Doyel flashed a heart sign at Caitlin Clark at her introductory press conference on Wednesday afternoon to kick off an incredibly strange back-and-forth.
Jake Mintz & Jordan Shusterman give their early season assessment of all thirty MLB teams at the three week mark, as well as discuss the long-awaited debut of Texas Rangers pitcher Jack Leiter.
It's another edition of 'Mock Draft Monday' on the pod and who better to have on then the face of NFL Network's draft coverage and a giant in the industry. Daniel Jeremiah joins Matt Harmon to discuss his mock draft methodology, what he's hearing about this year's draft class and shares his favorite five picks in his latest mock draft.
This week Boston Dynamics retired its well-known Atlas robot that was powered by hydraulics. Then today it unveiled its new Atlas robot, which is powered by electricity. The change might not seem like much, but TechCrunch's Brian Heater told the TechCrunch Minute that the now-deprecated hydraulics system was out of date.
Tesla management told employees Monday that the recent layoffs -- which gutted some departments by 20% and even hit high performers -- were largely due to poor financial performance, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The layoffs were announced to staff just a week before Tesla is scheduled to report its first-quarter earnings. The move comes as Tesla has seen its profit margin narrow over the past several quarters, the result of an EV price war that has persisted for at least a year.
Victor Wembanyama's rookie NBA season is finished. The San Antonio Spurs will sit him in Sunday's regular-season finale. Where does his first season rank among the league's greats?
Jason Fitz and Frank Schwab hop in the lap to concoct the best blockbuster trades possible that are a win-win for both sides. First, the dynamic duo start with the news that Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Devonta Smith is receiving a big-time contract extension, meaning the Eagles are now paying two wideouts $25M annually. Can they manage to keep up the talent and depth on their roster with cap numbers like that? In other news, the New York Jets announced they're wearing their 1980s throwbacks full-time next season, which makes Frank a very happy man.
Fitz and Frank have some fake trades they'd like to see, and they go one-by-one down the list as they send Justin Jefferson to the Buffalo Bills (and Arizona Cardinals), the Minnesota Vikings up to fifth overall, Brandon Aiyuk to the Los Angeles Chargers, Tee Higgins to the Kansas City Chiefs, Dak Prescott to the Minnesota Vikings, Brock Bowers to Kansas City and Micah Parsons to the Atlanta Falcons.
The duo finish off the show by snake drafting the best first overall picks of all time.
Our mostly off-road first drive reveals a well-executed off-roader with cool style and a high-quality interior. Well, not so much the interior in the 1958.
