Religious Identity & Affiliation

Most U.S. adults – including a solid majority of Christians and large numbers of people who identify with other religious traditions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it. But highly religious Americans are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe.

Whether the U.S. will continue to have a Christian majority in 2070 will depend on many factors, including religious “switching.”

Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades.

Most Black Catholic churchgoers are racial minorities in their congregations, unlike White and Hispanic Catholics – and Black Protestants

While Biden’s rating is still low among White Christians, positive ratings also fell among Black Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated.

Highly religious Americans are much more likely to see society in those terms, while nonreligious people tend to see more ambiguity.

Self-identified Christians make up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago.

In the new survey, the Center attempted for the first time to pose some of these philosophical questions to a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, finding that Americans largely blame random chance – along with people’s own actions and the way society is structured – for human suffering, while relatively few believers blame God or voice doubts about the existence of God for this reason.

Pew Research Center’s political typology sorts Americans into cohesive, like-minded groups based on their values, beliefs, and views about politics and the political system. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.

All major religious groups in India have shown sharp declines in their fertility rates, limiting change in the country’s religious composition since 1951. Meanwhile, fertility differences between India’s religious groups are generally much smaller than they used to be.