Americans Not Affiliated With Any Religion Now Greater Than White Evangelicals and Catholics
People Continue to Abandon Religion
One of the patterns in the United States is the shift away from organized religion. This isn’t to say these individuals are more broadly subscribing to atheism or agnosticism. Rather, they just don’t affiliate with any religion. There are a few different firms that track this already, like the Gallup and the Pew Research Center, and each tend to have different numbers for the religiously unaffiliated. However, the Public Religious Research Institute (PRRI) also provides these numbers, and that organization just released its annual report, Census of American Religion.
The report highlights the growth—and continued trend—of Americans who don’t affiliate with any religion. This group includes atheists and agnostics, which, together, are 10 percent of the population. In 2020, the percentage of Americans who identified as atheist or agnostic was 6 percent.
According to PRRI, the unaffiliated have grown from 16 percent of Americans in 2006 to 27.4 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, white evangelical or born-again Protestants and white Catholics have declined from 23 percent and 16 percent, respectively, to 13.4 percent and 12.2 percent in 2023.
Put another way, the percentage of Americans who don’t affiliate with any religion (27.4 percent) is greater than the percentage of white evangelicals and Catholics (25.6 percent). Now, this isn’t the first time this has happened. PRRI saw this in its research in 2017, 2018, and 2022. However, the nearly 2-point margin in 2023 is the widest. I’ve excluded mainline Protestants from the group.
Looking more subgroups, the age group with the largest percentage of unaffiliated Americans is those 18 to 29. According to the research, 36 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds were unaffiliated in 2023. That’s up from 32 percent in 2013. The biggest jump is Americans between the ages of 30 to 49. In 2013, 23 percent of this age group didn’t affiliate with any religion. That figure was 34 percent in 2023.
Why have more people shed religion? Unfortunately, PRRI doesn’t explore that in its research. Well, at least not in the data for this particular report. However, we do know that people are increasingly skeptical of religious institutions and organized religion for a variety of reasons, including religious attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community, sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and some Protestant congregations, the availability of biblical scholarship and source criticism, and much more. Some may also view evangelicals’ blind following of Trump, who is the antithesis of Christian teachings, as a reason they eschew organized religion.
There has been a slowdown in the growth of unaffiliated. That could be because we’ve hit a plateau. That said, we’re not talking about static figures here. Older generations tend to affiliate more, but those generations will be replaced over time by Millennials and Generation Z, who are less likely to affiliate.
Why have people lost their religion? Well, 65 percent of former evangelicals and 56 percent of former Catholics say they stopped believing their former religion’s teachings while another 45 of former evangelicals and 36 percent of former Catholics cited negative teachings about the LGBTQ+ community. (As an aside, I have a partially written post on how most, if not all, Christian sects have taken the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament wildly out of context when it comes to homosexuality.) Another 39 percent of former Catholics and 34 percent of former evangelicals said scandals involving their religion are the reason.
I know Christians' reaction to the public's decline in faith is to say that it’s a sign of the times or some other random excuse. The decline of faith has so much more to do with advances in science, the availability of source criticism and scholarship, the hypocrisy of faith leaders, and much, much more. Most of my Christian friends with whom I discuss these topics realize that many who share their faith are doing so much damage to it in the eyes of the public. They also recognize that evangelical Christianity and far-right Catholicism have become political movements with power as their primary focus rather than about spreading the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.