In 2023, **** percent of Americans were unaffiliated with any religion. A further **** percent of Americans were White evangelical Protestants, and an additional **** percent were White mainline Protestants. Religious trends in the United States Although the United States is still home to the largest number of Christians worldwide, the nation has started to reflect a more diverse religious landscape in recent years. Americans now report a wide range of religious beliefs and backgrounds, in addition to an increasing number of people who are choosing to identify with no religion at all. Studies suggest that many Americans have left their previous religion to instead identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, with many reasoning that they stopped believing in the religion's teachings, that they didn't approve of negative teachings or treatment of LGBTQ+ people, or that their family was never that religious growing up. Christian controversies Over the last few years, controversies linked to Christian denominations have plagued the nation, including reports of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Christian churches have also been accused of supporting discriminatory actions against LGBTQ+ people and people belonging to other religious groups. In addition, there have been increasing concerns about Christian nationalism, the political ideology that asserts that America was founded to be a Christian nation. Although the majority of Americans still think that declaring the United States a Christian nation would go against the U.S. Constitution, studies found that most Republicans would be in favor of this change.

The 2008 Conversion Recontact Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, is a follow-up to the 2007 "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey." One of the most striking findings from the Landscape Survey was the large number of people who have left their childhood faith. The Landscape Survey found that more than one in four American adults (28%) have changed their religious affiliation from that in which they were raised. This number includes people who have changed from one major religious tradition to another, for instance, from Protestantism to Catholicism or from Judaism to no religion. If change within religious traditions is included (e.g., from one Protestant denominational family to another), the survey found that roughly 44% of Americans now profess a religious affiliation different from that in which they were raised.

The Conversion Recontact Survey is designed to offer a fuller picture of this churn within American religion, with a special focus on the reasons that people change religious affiliation. The Conversion Recontact Survey is based on follow-up interviews with Landscape Survey respondents, including those from the largest segments of the population that have changed religious affiliation as well as those who still belong to the religious faith in which they were raised. Interviews were conducted by telephone with a nationally representative sample of 2,867 adults living in continental United States telephone households. The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI). Interviews were conducted on landline telephones in English and Spanish by Princeton Data Source (PDS), LLC from Oct. 3 to Nov. 7, 2008. Statistical results are weighted to correct known demographic discrepancies. A full report on the survey's findings, "Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.," is available on the Pew Forum's "http://www.pewforum.org/2009/04/27/faith-in-flux/" Target="_blank">website.

In 2023, about 33 percent of Americans were Protestants, down from 69 percent in 1948. In that same year, about 22 percent of Americans were Catholic, while 22 percent said that they had no religion at all.

According to a study conducted between ********* and **********, Muslims and Hindus were more likely to be younger compared to other religious groups in the United States, with ** percent of Muslims and ** percent of Hindus aged below 50 years old. In contrast, most Protestants and Catholics in the U.S. were 50 years or older.

This statistic shows the distribution of political party affiliations among religious groups in the United States, in 2016, by faith tradition. In 2016, about 44 percent of Mormon in the United States affiliated themselves with the Republican Party.

The statistic shows the religious affiliation of the population in the United States in 2017, by age. In 2017, about 38 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 years old were unaffiliated with any religious belief.

This Pew Research Center survey was conducted among a nationally representative sample of adults to provide estimates of the U.S. population’s religious composition, beliefs and practices.

Pew Research Center is releasing two versions of the dataset – a public-use file (PUF) and restricted-use file (RUF). THIS PRODUCT IS THE PUF. Both datasets include information on all 36,908 of the survey’s respondents. The PUF does not include any information about geography, and it excludes information on several other sensitive variables (including detailed variables about religious identity). These geographic and other sensitive variables will be included only in the RUF, which we intend to make accessible via ICPSR with a data use agreement. Refer to the enclosed readme file for additional details.

According to a survey conducted in 2020, ** percent of Indian Americans in the United States said that they identified as Hindu while ** percent said that they identified as Muslim. A further **** percent said that they identified with no religion in particular.

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey completed telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 35,556 adults living in continental United States households. The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI). This extensive survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious makeup, religious beliefs and practices as well as social and political attitudes of the American public.

Information on this page was adapted from the Pew Forum's methodology report for this survey.

This Pew Research Center dataset, collected between October 2013 and February 2014, explores religious affiliation, beliefs, and practices across Latin America. It highlights the region’s shifting religious landscape, including the growth of Protestantism, variations in Catholic identity, and the rise of secular attitudes.

This survey was sponsored by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. A national sample of 2,041 adults with an oversample of African Americans (The oversample included 197 African Americans.) were intereviewed on March 5-8, 2001. Major topics included: volunteerism; church and political matters; religion and its influence on American life; religious affiliation.

Please Note: This dataset is part of the historical CISER Data Archive Collection and is also available at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at https://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31095741. We highly recommend using the Roper Center version as they may make this dataset available in multiple data formats in the future.

This dataset contains measures on religious belief and practice, Christian fundamentalist beliefs, religious context, and deviant behavior from students at four American universities. Two of these universities are public state schools; two are private and have religious affiliations. A total of 1,753 respondents were surveyed regarding their religious beliefs and practices, tattoos, piercings, and engagement in (or abstinence from) sexual intercourse, binge drinking, and marijuana use.

Content

Pew Religions Model

This directory contains the code and data behind the story Evangelical Protestants Are The Biggest Winners When People Change Faiths.

The model uses the Pew Research Center's 2014 Religious Landscape Survey to measure the relative "pull" of different American religious groups by using Pew's transition matrix for rates of conversions between various faiths to compute what the eventual, stable proportions of religious faiths would be, if people kept leaving and joining faiths at the current rates until the overall numbers stabilized.

Context

This is a dataset from FiveThirtyEight hosted on their GitHub. Explore FiveThirtyEight data using Kaggle and all of the data sources available through the FiveThirtyEight organization page!

• Update Frequency: This dataset is updated daily.

Acknowledgements

This dataset is maintained using GitHub's API and Kaggle's API.

This dataset is distributed under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

This statistic shows the religious affiliation of rural Americans in 2019, by religion. During the survey, ** percent of rural Americans reported being Evangelical Protestants.

According to a survey conducted in 2022, 56 percent of Americans said that they left or changed their previous religious affiliation because they stopped believing in the religion's teachings while 30 percent said it was due to negative teachings about, or the treatment of, LGBTQ+ people.

In 2023, 27.5 percent of Americans were unaffiliated with any religion. A further 13.4 percent of Americans were White evangelical Protestants, and an additional 13.3 percent were White mainline Protestants. Religious trends in the United States Although the United States is still home to the largest number of Christians worldwide, the nation has started to reflect a more diverse religious landscape in recent years. Americans now report a wide range of religious beliefs and backgrounds, in addition to an increasing number of people who are choosing to identify with no religion at all. Studies suggest that many Americans have left their previous religion to instead identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, with many reasoning that they stopped believing in the religion's teachings, that they didn't approve of negative teachings or treatment of LGBTQ+ people, or that their family was never that religious growing up. Christian controversies Over the last few years, controversies linked to Christian denominations have plagued the nation, including reports of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Christian churches have also been accused of supporting discriminatory actions against LGBTQ+ people and people belonging to other religious groups. In addition, there have been increasing concerns about Christian nationalism, the political ideology that asserts that America was founded to be a Christian nation. Although the majority of Americans still think that declaring the United States a Christian nation would go against the U.S. Constitution, studies found that most Republicans would be in favor of this change.

This study, designed and carried out by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), compiled data on the number of congregations and adherents for 236 religious groups in each county of the United States. Participants included 217 Christian denominations, associations, or communions (including Latter-day Saints, Messianic Jews, and Unitarian/Universalist groups); counts of Jain, Shinto, Sikh, Tao and National Spiritualist Association congregations, and counts of congregations and adherents from Baha'ís, three Buddhist groupings, four Hindu groupings, four Jewish groupings, Muslims and Zoroastrians. The 236 groups reported a total of 344,894 congregations with 150,686,156 adherents, comprising 48.8 percent of the total U.S. population of 308,745,538 in 2010. Visit the frequently asked questions page for more information about the ARDA's religious congregation and membership data sources.

This statistic shows the share of adults in the United States affiliated to a religious denomination in January 2017, by race/ethnicity. As of January 2017, 15 percent of Asian or Pacific Islanders in the United States identified themselves as Hindu.

This survey was sponsored by the Princeton Religion Research Center and conducted by the Gallup Organization. A national sample of 2,556 adults were interviewed on March 11-20, 1988. Major topics covered: social changes; religious affiliation; church attendance; involvement with a church.

Please Note: This dataset is part of the historical CISER Data Archive Collection and is also available at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at https://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31089297. We highly recommend using the Roper Center version as they may make this dataset available in multiple data formats in the future.

Title: Pew Research Center – American Trends Panel Wave 6 Fieldwork Dates: August 11 – September 3, 2014 Sample Size: N = 3,278 U.S. adults (including 9 partial interviews) Mode: Web and Mail (English and Spanish) Purpose: This wave explores religious affiliation, religiosity, and scientific knowledge among U.S. adults. It includes detailed backcoded religious variables, a knowledge scale, and Catholic-specific questions. The dataset supports Pew’s reports on religion in everyday life and public understanding of science.