The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian appears to have plateaued after more than a decade of decline, Pew Research Center reported this week as part of its 2024 Religious Landscape Study.
Pew occasionally performs a Religious Landscape Study to understand Americans’ religious affiliations because the U.S. census does not request that information. Pew conducted the most recent survey in 2024, with two others in 2014 and 2007. Each time, more than 35,000 Americans responded to the survey.
Key findings from the most recent study included the discovery that younger demographics are significantly less likely than older age groups to be Christian (46% v. 80%). However, younger adults (aged 18-24) are just as likely as the second-youngest demographic (those born in the 1990s) to identify as Christian, which helped cause the plateau.
Pew also noted another contributing factor: The percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans, or “nones,” leveled off after years of steadily rising.
In 2024, 62% of Americans identified as Christian, down from the 71% reported in 2014 and the 78% from 2007. Though the nine percentage-point drop between 2014 and 2024 still constitutes a decline in Christian-identifying Americans, Pew reported that “for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%.”
“The 62% figure in the new Religious Landscape Study is smack in the middle of that recent range,” Pew noted.
Of the share identifying as Christian, 40% said they are Protestant, 19% said they are Catholic, and 3% said they are affiliated with another branch of Christianity, such as Greek or Russian Orthodox Churches. Roughly three in 10 of the overall sample said they have no religious identity or are atheist or agnostic, while 7% are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu.
“Both Protestant and Catholic numbers are down significantly since 2007, though the Protestant share of the population has remained fairly level since 2019 and the Catholic share has been stable since 2014, with only small fluctuations in our annual surveys,” Pew reported.
The study also found that women are more likely than men to be religious, a trend seen across every age group, and the percentage of liberals who identify as Christian has fallen from 62% to 37% between 2007 and 2024. In the same time frame, the percentage of conservatives who identify as Christian has decreased from 89% to 82%.