Christianity

During the pandemic, a stable share of U.S. adults have been participating in religious services in some way – either virtually or in person – but in-person attendance is slightly lower than it was before COVID-19. Among Americans surveyed across several years, the vast majority described their attendance habits in roughly the same way in both 2019 and 2022.

Most U.S. adults are neutral toward several religious groups, though Americans tend to rate their own religious group positively. More than a third of Americans hold unfavorable views of multiple religious groups.

Not all U.S. Catholics share the pope's concerns on climate change; their views vary by political affiliation, race and ethnicity, and age.

About a third of U.S. parents with children under 18 say it’s extremely or very important to them that their kids share their religious beliefs.

58% of U.S. adults say they do not believe “we are living in the end times” – the destruction of the world as we know it.

Evangelical Protestant adults under 40 are more likely than older evangelicals to say climate change is an extremely or very serious problem.

Most U.S. adults – including a solid majority of Christians and large numbers of people who identify with other religious traditions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it. But highly religious Americans are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe.

But they hold differing opinions about what that phrase means, and two-thirds of U.S. adults say churches should keep out of politics.

Whether the U.S. will continue to have a Christian majority in 2070 will depend on many factors, including religious “switching.”

Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades.