Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Christians remain by far the largest religious group in the United States, but the Christian share of the population has declined markedly. In the past seven years, the percentage of adults who describe themselves as Christians has dropped from 78.4% to 70.6%. Once an overwhelmingly Protestant nation, the U.S. no longer has a Protestant majority. […]
Like the 2007 Religious Landscape Study, the new survey shows a remarkable degree of churn in the U.S. religious landscape. If Protestantism is treated as a single religious group, then fully 34% of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised, which is up six percentage points […]
The centerpiece of Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study is a nationally representative telephone survey conducted June 4-Sept. 30, 2014, among a sample of 35,071 U.S. adults. Approximately 60% of the interviews were conducted with respondents reached on cellphones (n=21,160) and 40% were completed on landlines (n=13,911). A minimum of 300 interviews were conducted […]
The world’s Christian population is expected to grow from 2.2 billion in 2010 to 2.9 billion in 2050.[1. numoffset=”39″ For more information on Christianity and different Christian traditions, see “Defining the Religious Groups.” See also the Pew Research Center’s December 2011 report “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian […]
While the least financially secure Americans are more likely to back Democrats, that support is undercut by low political participation. Those who are financially insecure are far more likely to opt out of the political system altogether.
This appendix details the methods used in this study to project changes in the population size and geographic distribution of eight major religious groups from 2010 to 2050. It is organized in five sections. The first section explains how the baseline (2010) religious composition estimates were derived. The second section describes how key input data […]