Christians have been declining in number in the U.S.A. for decades. but recently that decline has bottomed out.
Last week, Pew Research noted that Christians have stopped declining in number in the last few years. Pew first started looking at the question in 2007 when 78 percent of Americans claimed to be Christian. But by 2019 that number had fallen to 63 percent.
In the past Pew had predicted that this number would keep falling. And since it was a trend since 2007, it wasn’t a bad guess. However, Pew is now reporting that the 60 to 63 percent number has remained constant since 2019. The decline has halted.
As Pew wrote, “after many years of steady decline, the share of Americans who identify as Christians shows signs of leveling off.”
So, with its latest numbers, Pew found that 62% of American adults identified as Christians, with 40% saying they are Protestants, 19% Catholics, and 3% belonging to other Christian denominations.
Pew added:
Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).
It is good news that the decline has halted, at least for now. A continual decline would be very bad for the country.
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