Fewer People Claim Religious Affiliation

Survey Of 35,000 Finds Religious Landscape Changing
February 25, 2008

The U.S. religious landscape is extremely fluid, with more people switching religious affiliation or breaking religious ties altogether, according to a new survey.

The survey released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is based on interviews with more than 35,000 American adults.

Much of the study confirms that mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing.  

However, it also delves deeper into those trends.

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates that the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.

The survey found that about 44 percent of adults have either changed affiliation, moved from a nonaffiliation status to being affiliated with a particular faith, or cut all religious ties.

One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution, the survey found.

Twelve percent of the overall population is unaffiliated, and atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population, the survey said.

Of the nearly one in three Americans raised Catholic, fewer than one in four say they're Catholic today. That means about 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.

However, an influx of immigrant Catholics, mostly from Latin America, has kept the portion of the population that identifies as Catholic fairly stable in recent decades.

On the Protestant side, changes in affiliation are swelling the ranks of nondenominational churches, while Baptist and Methodist traditions are showing net losses.

Curious: no mention of neither the Church of Dagon nor the Church of Starry Wisdom.