White evangelicals among top religious groups at retaining members as “nobodies” grow: study
Among faith groups in the United States, white evangelical Christians are one of the best at retaining members even as the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans continues to grow, according to a new survey.
The nonprofit research organization Public Religion Research Institute released the report on Wednesday titled “Religious Change in America,” which mapped several trends among faith groups in the United States
Data for the report came from a PRRI survey conducted online of 5,627 adults in the United States from November 16 to December 7, 2023, with a margin of error of +/- 1.79 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
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While the report found that nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition in 2023 and became religiously unaffiliated, white evangelicals “have one of the highest retention rates of all religious groups,” retaining 76% of their members in 2023.
That was an improvement compared to 2016, when white evangelicals only kept 66% of their members in the fold, where the report notes that the “net loss of members among white evangelical Protestants declined.”
The religious groups that did the best at retaining members were black Protestants (82%) and Jewish Americans (77%), while white mainline Protestants “continue to lose more members than they replace and at higher rates than other Protestants.”
Catholics continue to lose more members than they gain, with the retention rate for Hispanic Catholics (68%) being slightly higher than white Catholics (62%).
PRRI also found that 26% of Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, an increase from the 21% reported in 2013. The religiously unaffiliated was the “only major religious category experiencing growth,” according to PRRI.
Among Americans who left religious tradition to become unaffiliated, 35% were former Catholics; another 35% were mainline Protestants.
“After observing the growth of unaffiliated Americans for decades, our survey confirms that this trend is not slowing down,” PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman said in a statement. “While most Americans are still religious, the ranks of the unaffiliated will continue to swell with both Americans leaving their religion — increasingly because of religious teachings about LGBT people — as well as those who are now being raised in religiously unaffiliated households.”
Sixty-seven percent of Americans who became religiously unaffiliated said they did so because they stopped believing the teachings of their faith, while 47% cited “negative teaching about or treatment of gay and lesbian people as a major factor.”
In recent years, there has been much debate about whether the decline of white evangelical Americans has accelerated due to a variety of factors, including media portrayals of white evangelicals overwhelmingly supporting President Donald Trump.
In 2016, PRRI Executive Director Robert P. Jones published a book titled The End of White Christian Americain which he argued that white Christians in the United States “have steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainstream and evangelical branches.”
“Today, America is no longer a demographically or culturally majority white, Christian nation,” the book noted. synopsis. “Looking ahead, Jones envisions the ways they might adjust to find their place in the new America — and the consequences for all of us if they don't.”
In 2021, the Pew Research Center released a report finding that the percentage of white Americans who identified as born-again or evangelical during the Trump administration increased.
Using Pew's American Trends Panel, the researchers found that the number of white adults surveyed who identified as evangelical or born-again went from 25% in 2016 to 29% in 2020.
The 2021 survey also found that while 2% of white adults surveyed stopped identifying as evangelical from 2016 to 2020, 6% began identifying as evangelical during the same period.
Source: www.christianpost.com