Faithful are fewer but more diverse, survey finds

THE NUMBER of Americans self-identifying as Catholics has fallen by 3 per cent – or almost 10 million – in the last seven years, a new study by the Pew Research Center has found.

Mainstream Protestant Churches showed a similar decline – 3.4 per cent – but Evangelical Churches showed only a modest decline of 0.8 per cent. Overall the Christian proportion of the population fell from 78.4 to 70.6 per cent.

The survey of 35,000 Americans also indicated that 41 per cent of Catholics are now Hispanic or members of other minorities, up from 35 per cent in 2007.

Those who self-identified as “unaffiliated” – known as the “Nones” – rose from 16.1 per cent in 2007 to 22.8 per cent in the current survey. Within that category, there was an increase in people describing themselves as atheists, agnostics and those who said their religious affiliation was “nothing in particular”.

Most troublesome for mainstream Churches is that “millennials” – people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s – are the most likely to self-identify as unaffiliated. Among those born between 1990 and 1996, 36 per cent said they were unaffiliated to any religion, and only 16 per cent are Catholics.

The median age of Catholics rose from 45 to 49, while the median age of those with no religious affiliation dropped from 38 to 36.

Mark Silk, who studies religion at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, said the rise in Nones [unaffiliated] showed people increasingly viewing religious identity as being more about choice than lifelong ascription.