Six in 10 adults living in the United States today identify as Christian, according to Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study.
This percentage has decreased gradually as Pew’s longitudinal survey has tracked it over time, dropping from 78% in 2007 to 71% in 2014 and now 62%. However, the share of population that is Christian has remained relatively stable over the past five years, between 60% and 64%.
Likewise, rates of prayer and religious service attendance also have remained stable across the general population, and general beliefs in spirituality or supernatural things are widespread, although these sentiments are declining among the youngest cohorts of Americans.
The largest subgroups of Christians in the U.S. are Protestants (40% of U.S. adults) and Catholics (19%).
The largest chunk of Protestant respondents identify with Baptist traditions, with the Southern Baptist Convention still topping the charts. The latest survey found 91 different denominations/sub-identities of Christianity among its participants.
While 17.2% of Americans identified within the larger Baptist family in 2007, that share is down to 12% today. Still, American Protestants are nearly twice as likely to be Baptists as anything else. Nondenominational churches continue to grow, and their share of the Protestant population now stands at 7.1%
Other than Christianity, another 7% of respondents identified with 14 other religious denominations or identities. This has remained fairly consistent over the years, rising only two percentage points since 2007. The largest portion of these respondents are Jews (1.7%) and “other non-Christian religions” (2.2%).
As has been well documented by others, the latest Pew data show the share of Americans who are “nones” has nearly doubled since 2007. These are the religiously unaffiliated who when asked to identify their religion choose “none” or “nothing in particular.”
The 29% of the population Pew found to be religiously unaffiliated matches closely the 28.1% reported by Public Religion Research Institute last year. Like Pew, PRRI found the share of “nones” is not reversing but its rapid growth is slowing.
“Nones” include those who are “nothing in particular,” as well as agnostics and atheists.
Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey is the largest survey it conducts, canvassing 36,000 Americans in 2023 and 2024.
The study also looked at the religious breakdown of four major geographical regions in the U.S.: Northeast, Midwest, South and West. Americans in the South remain most likely to identify as religious, with only 25% of Southerners identifying as religiously unaffiliated and 68% identifying as Christians. By comparison, the West is the least-Christian geographical region, with 35% of residenst identifying as religiously unaffiliated and only 55% as Christian.
The largest share of Jews reside in America’s Northeastern region, where 10% of adults say they are Jewish.
In one data point sure to surprise most Southerners, the state with the largest share of adults who identify as Christian is not in the South. In South Dakota, 79% identify as Christian and only 18% say they are religiously unaffiliated — 11 percentage points below the national average.
The U.S. metro area with the largest share of residents identifying as Christian is Charlotte, N.C. The survey found that 73% of Charlotte residents identify as Christian even as 22% say they are religiously unaffiliated.
In contrast, the least religious metro area is Portland-Vancouver, Ore. There, the religiously unaffiliated surpass Christians by two percentage points, with 44% being religiously unaffiliated — 15 percentage points above the national average — and 42% being Christian, 20 points below the national average.
In tandem, the state of Oregon is the least religious overall, with similar statistics to its metro area. Statewide, 43% are Christian, 10% identify with other religions and 43% are religiously unaffiliated.