The study conducted by researchers at the Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., was released on March 9. It also found that the center of the Roman Catholic population in the U.S. has shifted from the northeast of the country to the southwest.
The percentage of people claiming no religion rose from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001 and now stands at 15 percent. About 1.6 percent call themselves atheist or agnostic, and the overall number of avowed atheists has increased from 900,000 to 1.6 million since 2001.
“Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly,” said Ariela Keysar, an associate research professor at Trinity. “We now know it wasn’t. The ‘Nones’ are the only group to have grown in every state.”
For the first time, Catholicism is no longer amassed in the northeast but in California and the southwest region, a product of growing Latino populations in that area.
“The decline of Catholicism in the northeast is nothing short of stunning,” said Barry Kosmin, a principal investigator for the survey. “Thanks to immigration and natural increase among Latinos, California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than New England.”
Meanwhile, the percentage of Christians in the United States fell from 86.2 percent in 1990 to 76 percent. Nine-tenths of the decline is due largely to what are called “mainline” Protestant denominations, which include Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians (Anglicans) and the United Church of Christ. These groups constituted 18.7 percent of the U.S. population in 1990, but now account for only 12.9 percent.
Most of the growth in the Christian population occurred among those who would identify only as “Christian”, “Evangelical/Born Again”, or “non-denominational Christian.”
The number of people attending megachurches has increased from less than 200,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million today. These groups grew from 5 percent of the population in 1990 to 11.8 percent in 2008. Almost four out of 10 “mainline Protestants” — 38.6 percent — now also identify themselves as “Evangelical” or “Born Again.”
Other findings:
The Jewish population remains relatively stable when identified by ethnicity alone, but the number identifying as religiously Jewish declined slightly.
The Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from 0.3 percent in 1990 to 0.6 percent in 2008.
Baptists, who constitute the largest non-Catholic Christian tradition in the United States, have increased their numbers by two million since 2001, but continue to decline as a proportion of the population.
The number of adherents of Eastern religions, which more than doubled in the 1990s, has declined slightly, from just over to just under two million.
Asian Americans are substantially more likely than other racial or ethnic groups to indicate no religious identity.
Adherents of New Religious movements, including Wiccans and self-described pagans, have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s.
ARIS 2008 is the third in a series of large-scale surveys of U.S. adults in the 48 contiguous states. It questioned 54,461 adults in either English or Spanish and has a margin of error of less than 0.5 percentage point. For more information, see its Web site: www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org
