Catholics continue to lose more members than they gain, though the retention rate for Hispanic Catholics is somewhat higher.
A new survey published this week offers this grim assessment of the state of America’s religious affiliations:
“Unaffiliated” is the only major religious category experiencing growth.
- Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).
- While the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” is similar to a decade ago (16% in 2013 to 17% in 2023), the numbers of both atheists and agnostics have doubled since 2013 (from 2% to 4% and from 2% to 5%, respectively).
Catholic loss continues to be highest among major religious groups; white Evangelical retention rate has improved since 2016.
- Catholics continue to lose more members than they gain, though the retention rate for Hispanic Catholics (68%) is somewhat higher than for white Catholics (62%).
- White mainline/non-evangelical Protestants also continue losing more members than they replace and at higher rates than other Protestants.
- The net loss of members among white evangelical Protestants has declined since 2016. In 2023, white evangelical Protestants have one of the highest retention rates of all religious groups (76%), an improvement since 2016, when white evangelicals retained just two in three members (66%).
- Black Protestants (82%) and Jewish Americans (77%) enjoy the highest retention rates of all religious groups.
- The rates of religious churning for Hispanic Protestants, Latter-day Saints, and Jewish Americans result in zero net gains or losses.
While most disaffiliate because they stop believing, religious teachings on the LGBTQ community and clergy sexual abuse now play a more prominent role.
- The reason given by the highest percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans for leaving their faith tradition is that they simply stopped believing in their religion’s teachings (67%).
- In 2016, approximately three in ten people who left their religion cited negative teaching about or treatment of gay and lesbian people as an important factor in their choice to disaffiliate (29%); in 2023, that number rose to 47%.
- The percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans who say they no longer identify with their childhood religion due to clergy sexual abuse scandals rose by more than 10 percentage points, from 19% in 2016 to 31% in 2023. Former Catholics are more likely than former non-Catholics to say they no longer identify with their childhood religion because of sexual abuse scandals (45% vs. 24%).
