May 2015
Featured in this insight: Culture, heritage & leisure, International
Survey finds a sharp decline in US Christians: A recent survey of people in the United States has found that the number of people who describe themselves as Christian has declined by 8 percentage points in just 7 years.
The research discovered that 71 per cent of people in the US identified as Christian in 2014, down from 78 per cent in 2007.
During the 7 year period, the amount of Americans who claimed to have no religion increased, from 16 per cent in 2007 to 23 per cent in 2014.
In the US, 56,000,000 people do not believe in any religion, the second largest community after Evangelicals.
However, the United States still has the largest population of Christians than any other country, with around 70 per cent of Americans claiming to identify with some branch of the Christian faith.
The researchers found that the decline occurred mainly as a result of a fall in liberal Protestants and Catholics across the United States.
In the South, the number of people who said that they did not identify with any religion increased to 19 per cent of the population and in the North East, the figure increased to 25 per cent.
In Western America, those who do not identify with any religion made up 28 per cent of the public.
Since the survey in 2007, around 5,000,000 fewer Americans now claim to be Christian.
The survey was conducted in 2007 and then again in 2014. Each survey questioned 35,000 people.
Christians in the United States:
- Christian: 70.6%
- Protestant: 46.5%
- Evangelical: 25.4%
- Catholic: 20.8%
- Mainline/Liberal: 15.7%
- Mormon: 1.6%
- Jehovah’s Witness: 0.8%
- Other Christian belief: 0.4%
