AFFILIATION to Christianity is shrinking in the United States, and it may no longer be the majority religion in the next few decades, new research reveals.
The Pew Research Center looked at the religious future of the US, on the basis of current trends. It found that there had been an acceleration in the trend for Americans to identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”, and it modelled four different scenarios for the future, based on whether this trend continues at the same rate, declines, or accelerates.
The demographic projections suggest that Christians will shrink from the current 64 per cent of the population to between 35 per cent and 54 per cent by 2070, depending on the rate at which people continue to switch from identifying as Christian to “none”.
The study found that almost one third of people who were raised as Christian in the US become unaffiliated between the ages of 15 and 29. An additional seven per cent lost their faith after the age of 30.
If the rate of switching from Christian to “no affiliation” observed over the past three decades continues at the same pace, then those who affiliate with no faith will approach being the majority of Americans in the next five decades.
“Depending on the future of religious switching, people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or ‘nothing in particular’ could become America’s largest (non)religious group within our lifetime,” a Pew researcher, Stephanie Kramer, wrote.
The change is a sharp decline from the early 1990s, when about 90 per cent of US adults identified as Christian.
Adherents of non-Christian religions are predicted to grow to about 12 to 13 per cent of the US population in the next 50 years, largely owing to migration.
The study said that the projections suggested that the US was following the path taken over the past 50 years by countries in Western Europe, including the UK, where “nones” overtook Christians to become the largest group in 2009, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey. In the Netherlands, where disaffiliation accelerated in the 1970s, just 47 per cent of adults describe themselves Christian.
The Pew researchers noted that their projections were susceptible to external events such as war, depression, the climate crisis, or changing immigration patterns.
But they said: “There is no data on which to model a sudden or gradual revival of Christianity (or of religion in general) in the US. That does not mean a religious revival is impossible. It means there is no demographic basis on which to project one.”