THE FASTEST-GROWING US RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION? ‘NONE,’ POLL SAYS

Wed 15 December 2021:

According to a Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday, the number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated has increased by 6 points in the last five years and 10 points in the last decade.

According to the Pew Research Center survey, 29 percent of respondents, or roughly 3 in 10 U.S. adults, said they had “none,” indicating that they were atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.”

“If the unaffiliated were a religion, they’d be the largest religious group in the United States,” Elizabeth Drescher, an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University, told The Associated Press.

Drescher said that the religiously unaffiliated previously resided mostly in urban and coastal communities but now are spread across the country.

According to the survey, Christians, including Protestants, Catholics, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members, and Orthodox Christians, still make up the majority of the population in the United States.

They make up 63 percent of the adult population, down 12 percentage points from 2011 data.

While the number of Catholic adults in the United States has remained relatively stable, accounting for around 21% of the population since 2014, the number of Protestant adults has decreased to 40% this year, down 4 percentage points in the last five years.

Within Protestantism, evangelicals continue to outnumber those who are not evangelical. Currently, 60% of Protestants say “yes” when asked whether they think of themselves as a “born-again or evangelical Christian,” while 40% say “no” or decline to answer the question.

Only 45 percent of respondents, compared to 58 percent in a 2007 survey, say they pray once a day.

the 2021 NPORS finds that 6% of adults identify with non-Christian faiths. This includes 1% who describe themselves as Jewish, 1% who are Muslim, 1% who are Buddhist, 1% who are Hindu and 2% who identify with a wide variety of other faiths. (While 1% of NPORS respondents identify with Judaism as a religion, a larger and more comprehensive Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews conducted in 2020 estimates that 1.7% of U.S. adults identify as Jewish by religion.)

The Pew Research Center polled 3,937 people between May 29 and August 25. It has a plus or minus 2.1 percentage point margin of error.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

_____________________________________________________________________________

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent