The share of Americans who identify as white and Christian has dropped below 50 percent, a transformation fueled by immigration and by growing numbers of people who reject organized religion altogether, according to a survey released Wednesday.
Christians overall remain a large majority in the United States, at nearly 70 percent of Americans. However, white Christians, once predominant in the country's religious life, now make up only 43 percent of the population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, a polling organization based in Washington. Four decades ago, about eight in 10 Americans were white Christians.
The change has occurred across the spectrum of Christian traditions in the United States, including sharp drops in membership in predominantly white mainline Protestant denominations such as Presbyterians and Lutherans; an increasing Hispanic presence in the Roman Catholic Church as some non-Hispanic white Catholics leave; and shrinking ranks of white evangelicals, who until recently had been viewed as immune to decline.
The trends identified in the survey are fueling anxiety about the place of Christians in society, especially among evangelicals, alarmed by support for same-sex marriage and by the increasing share of Americans -- about one-quarter -- who don't identify with a faith group. President Donald Trump, who repeatedly promised to protect the religious liberty of Christians, drew 80 percent of votes by white evangelicals, a constituency that remains among his strongest supporters.
About 17 percent of Americans now identify as white evangelical, compared to 23 percent a decade ago, according to the survey. Membership in the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant group, dropped to 15.2 million last year, its lowest number since 1990, according to an analysis by Chuck Kelley, president of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
"So often, white evangelicals have been pointing in judgment to white mainline groups, saying when you have liberal theology you decline," said Robert Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute. "I think this [information] really does challenge that interpretation of linking theological conservatism and growth."
The Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 100,000 people was conducted from January 2016 to January 2017 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. Previous surveys had found the Protestant majority that shaped the nation's history had dropped below 50 percent sometime around 2008. The survey released Wednesday included a more in-depth focus on race and religion. Jones said growth among Hispanic Christians and stability in the numbers of black Christians had partly obscured the decline among white Christians.
The survey also found more than a third of all Republicans say they are white evangelicals, and nearly three-quarters identify as white Christians. By comparison, white Christians have become a minority in the Democratic Party, shrinking from 50 percent a decade ago to 29 percent now. Forty percent of Democrats surveyed say they have no religious affiliation.
Among American Catholics, 55 percent now identify as white, compared with 87 percent 25 years ago, amid the growing presence of Hispanic Catholics, according to the report. Over the past decade, the share of white Catholics in the U.S. population dropped from 16 percent to 11 percent. Over the same period, white mainline Protestants declined from 18 percent to 13 percent of all Americans.
Religion on 09/09/2017