UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
BY SARAH POSNER MAY 12, 2015
There are two big takeaways in the Pew Research Center’s new Religious Landscape Survey, its first since 2007: the decline in the number of Americans identifying as Christians (down eight percent in seven years, to 70.6 percent), and the rise in the number of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, and otherwise religiously unaffiliated (up six points in seven years, to 22.8 percent).
Greg Smith, Associate Director of Research at the Pew Research Center, called the pace of the continued growth of the religiously unaffiliated “really remarkable.” The number of Americans identifying with no religion grew by 19 million from 2007 to 2014, and now the religiously unaffiliated are “more numerous,” said Smith, than either mainline Protestants or Catholics.
Much of the rise of the “nones” is attributable to religious switching, mainly from Catholicism and mainline Protestantism. One-fifth of Americans raised Christian are now unaffiliated, said Smith. Here, he said, “Catholicism really stands out. Fully 13 percent of the US adult population qualifies as being formerly Catholic.” For every convert to Catholicism, he said, there are six former Catholics. “There is no other religious group analyzed in the survey that has experienced anything close to that kind of ratio of losses to gains via religious switching,” Smith said.
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