Born-again believers remain steady, while most religious switching is between mainline Protestants and the ‘nones.’
Editor’s note: In 2014, CT reported how a massive survey by the Pew Research Center found that American evangelicals were weathering the “rise of the nones” much better than other Christian groups. Today, as Billy Graham’s funeral begins, here is another analysis of how social science data shows that the movement the 99-year-old evangelist started remains surprising stable.
The religious landscape is a volatile one, with nearly 1 in 5 Americans switching their religious tradition in a four-year window from 2010 to 2014.
However, what happens when the time period under study is expanded, from four years to more than four decades? What are the macro trends facing American religion? Are evangelicals managing to hold on to their share of the population? Have those with no religion made any significant gains? And what is causing some pretty significant shifts?
The General Social Survey has tracked religious affiliation biannually, beginning in 1972. It provides a summation of a generation of religious movement that is unmatched. The visualization below, which displays the distribution of seven major religious traditions, tells a compelling story.
For the groups that make up smaller shares of the population, the movement is relatively minor. The Jewish share dropped by about a single point, black Protestants stayed relatively stable, and those with “other faith” have stayed around 6 percent of the population since the early 1980s.
Evangelicals and Catholics have had almost identical proportions of the population dating back to 1972. While evangelicals saw a surge in the early 1990s, that number has essentially stabilized to where it is today (23.6% in 2016). The Catholic share, which was reliably ...
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