Spotlight on the United States

The United States is the world’s third most populous country, but it has by far the largest Christian population. With nearly a quarter of a billion Christians, the U.S. dwarfs even Brazil, which has the world’s second-largest Christian community (more than 175 million). About 80% of the U.S. population identifies as Christian, and U.S. Christians represent 11% of the world’s Christians.

Since the birth of the nation in 1776, the vast majority of religious Americans have been Christian. The settlers who colonized the Eastern seaboard between New France in the north and Florida in the south came largely from majority-Protestant Northern Europe, especially England, Scotland, Wales, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Northern Germany.

American Christianity went from being dominated by a few established Protestant denominations in the founding era to today’s highly diverse mix, with innumerable Protestant groups, a large Catholic population and significant numbers of Orthodox and other Christians. In 1776, the vast majority of Americans active in a religious body belonged to only a handful of Protestant denominations: Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist and Quaker. By the mid-19th century, however, the picture had changed. The Methodist Church had become by far the largest Protestant denomination by 1850. And before the end of the 19th century, Roman Catholics — who represented a small portion of the population in 1776 and only 5% in 1850 — became America’s largest single Christian group, although Protestants collectively still greatly outnumbered Catholics. By 1906, the U.S. was home to 14 million Catholics, who represented 17% of the population.¹ Today, fortified by a steady flow of immigrants from mostly Catholic Latin America, Catholics in the U.S. number more than 74 million, about 24% of the U.S. population. The Southern Baptist Convention is now the largest U.S. Protestant denomination.² 

Other factors, too, have diversified America’s religious landscape. Other Christian groups such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, many of which were founded in the United States in the 19th century, have grown dramatically and together number nearly 11 million adherents, or about 3% of the U.S. population. The U.S. is also home to nearly 2 million Orthodox Christians. Membership in long-established Protestant churches, such as Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Methodists, has declined, while membership in newer evangelical and pentecostal churches has grown. Today, the U.S. has more evangelical Protestants than any other country in the world.

At the same time, the proportion of Americans who are Christian has declined in recent years, from well over 90% in 1900 to almost 80% today. This has happened for a variety of reasons, including the growth in “unaffiliated” Americans (atheists, agnostics and those who say they do not have any religion in particular), as well as postwar non-Christian immigration from the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East-North Africa. In addition, a nation whose population was overwhelmingly Protestant a century ago has had, in recent years, a declining Protestant majority (51% in 2007, according to the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey).³ 

Footnotes:  

1 Historical data in this and the preceding paragraph are drawn from Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Rutgers University Press, 2005. (return to text) 

2 Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 and published in 2008. (return to text) 

3 Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 and published in 2008. (return to text)