America's Religious Diversity
Statistics from the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey
A 2007 Pew survey shows that religion continues to play an active role in American public and private lives, and that America is not as secular as Europe.
A February 2008 report on the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life, reveals that American religious practices are diverse and in flux, and that the U.S. has not migrated towards the secularism that has popularized Europe.
Many Americans Value Religion
In fact, the study finds that religion continues to play an important role in many Americans’ private and public lives.
The U.S. Census Bureau has not collected information on citizens’ religious affiliations since the 1950s. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey’s purpose was to gather not only statistics on America’s religious makeup and demographics, but also to learn about social and political values. Pew will release a report on the social and political findings later in the spring.
Key Findings on U.S. Religious Diversity
The survey’s key findings on the religious diversity of America include:
- Immigration has greatly impacted America’s religious landscape; race, age and geographical region are also factors.
- Hindus, Muslims and Orthodox Christians have the largest immigrant representation, while members of Christian traditions are predominantly native-born.
- More than one-quarter – 28 percent – of Americans have left the religious affiliation of their childhood.
- Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and followers of “other faiths” (including Unitarian, New Age, and Native American religions) gained the greatest percentages from those who changed childhood affiliation; Hinduism, Catholicism and Judaism gained the fewest adherents from this group.
- Catholicism has lost the greatest number of followers to other faiths or no faiths, but the overall Catholic population remains steady due to Catholic Latino immigrants; Latinos account for approximately one-third of U.S. Catholics.
- One in six Americans is unaffiliated with a particular faith; one-quarter of those is atheist.
- Approximately one-third of married persons have a spouse who claims a different religious affiliation; this includes different denominations within the same faith.
- Protestantism in America may be on the decline; only 51 percent of Americans identify themselves as Protestant, compared to 65 percent twenty years ago (as found in a survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago).
- Muslims are the most racially diverse religious group in the U.S.
- Jews, members of mainline Protestant churches, Orthodox Christians and Mormons have the greatest percentage of white adherents.
- There is notable diversity within religious traditions; for example, the survey lists numerous denominations for the Protestant faith, including Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Anglican/Episcopal and Adventist.
- Men are more likely to claim no religious affiliation than are women, and men are twice as likely as women to be atheist or agnostic.
- Mormons and Muslims are the religious groups most likely to have large families.
- Hindus have the lowest divorce rate of any group.
- Various regions of the U.S. have distinct religious compositions. The Northeast, for example has more Jews and Muslims than other regions; the West has the greatest number of Mormons and people unaffiliated with a religion; and the South has the greatest number of Protestants.
- The Midwest's religious diversity most closely resembles that of the general population.
Pew gathered information for its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by interviewing more than 35,000 American adults from May to August 2007. Some data was also used from the Pew Research Center’s 2007 Survey of U.S. Muslims (American Muslims: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream).
The Pew Forum
The Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life, a project of the Pew Research Center, aims to deliver timely, nonpartisan information related to relgion and public affairs.
