A survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre indicated that Christian population in the United States of America is on the decline.
The report revealed that in 2009 when the centre conducted similar survey, of the 233 million adults in the U.S., 77 percent are Christians. Meaning an approximate 178 millions American adults were Christians in 2009.
The data also shows that the trend toward religious disaffiliation documented in the Center’s 2007 and 2014 Religious Landscape Studies, and before that in major national studies like the General Social Survey (GSS), has rapidly continued.
The survey discovered that just like rates of religious affiliation, rates of religious attendance are declining. Over the last decade, the share of Americans who say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month dropped by 7 percentage points, while the share who say they attend religious services less often (if at all) has risen by the same degree.
“In 2009, regular worship attenders (those who attend religious services at least once or twice a month) outnumbered those who attend services only occasionally or not at all by a 52-to-47 percent margin. Today those figures are reversed; more Americans now say they attend religious services a few times a year or less (54 percent) than say they attend at least monthly (45 percent).”
The survey revealed that “there are roughly 23 million more adults in the U.S. than there were in 2009 (256 million as of July 1, 2019, according to the Census Bureau). About two-thirds of them (65 percent) identify as Christians, according to 2018 and 2019. This means that there are now roughly 167 million Christian adults in the U.S. (with a lower bound of 164 million and an upper bound of 169 million, given the survey’s margin of error).”
17 percent of Americans say they never attend religious service, an increase of six percent from what it was in 2009. The survey suggested that the decline in regular church going is attributable mainly to the shrinking share of Americans who say they attend religious services at least once a week, which was 37 percent in 2009 and now stands at 31percent.
Protestantism and Catholicism are both having their share of population lose. Currently, 43 percent of U.S. adults identify themselves as Protestants, a decline from 51 percent it was in 2009. Among the Catholic, it dropped from 23 percent in 2009 to 20 percent in 2019.
While the numbers of Christians continue to drop, those described by the survey as “religious ‘nones'” are increasing. Those who described themselves as atheists now account for 4 percent of the US adult population. In 2009 the percentage of the group was 2. “Agnostics make up 5 percent of U.S. adults, up from 3 percent a decade ago; and 17 percent of Americans now describe their religion as ‘nothing in particular,’ up from 12 percent in 2009. The survey revealed that members of non-Christian religions also have grown modestly as a share of the adult population.
