U.S. Christianity’s Downturn Levels Off, but Catholic Church Faces Precipitous Decline

Catholicism loses 8.4 members for every convert it gains through ‘religious switching’

The decades-long decline in Christianity across the U.S. has stalled, yet Catholics are still leaving in significant numbers, according to a comprehensive Pew Research Center survey published in late February.

The religiously unaffiliated population — who have also come to be known as “nones” — has leveled off; the Christian share of the population after years of downturn has been relatively stable since 2019, the Religious Landscape Study (RLS) reported.

The study, which is the largest single survey of its kind and was conducted over seven months in 2023-24, found that 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christians ( 40% of whom identify as Protestants and 19% as Catholics).

The RLS found that the number of U.S. adults identifying as Christians had dropped from 2007 (78%) and 2014 (71%), but the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable since 2019, hovering between 60% and 64%.

Big Deal

“If you look to the long term, it’s a story of decline in American religion,” said Gregory Smith, a senior associate director of research at Pew. “But it’s a completely different story if you look at the short term, which is a story of stability over the last four or five years.

Much of the shift is among young, conservative white males, says David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame noted. Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, agreed.

“We’re entering a new era of the American religious landscape,” he said, adding that the growth of the “nones” has “either slowed or stopped completely, and that’s a big deal.”

A significant exception to the decline of religiously affiliated adults is the Catholic Church, which continues to hemorrhage members through what the survey labels “religious switching,” a process of moving to another denomination or choosing to leave the church altogether.

Catholicism Nosedives

“For every U.S. adult who has become a Catholic after being raised in some other religion or without a religion, there are 8.4 adults who say they were raised in the Catholic faith but who no longer describe themselves as Catholics,” the RLS found.

In contrast, only 1.8 people have left Protestantism for every person who converted to it after having been raised in another religious group or in no religion, Pew reported, noting that “the ratio for Catholicism is even more lopsided.”

The survey elaborated on the nosedive in the Catholic population:

Catholics have experienced the greatest net losses due to switching. About three-in-ten U.S. adults (30.2%) say they were raised Catholic. But 43% of the people raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic, meaning that 12.8% of all U.S. adults are former Catholics.

Conversely, only 1.5% of U.S. adults converted to Catholicism after being raised in another denomination or no religion, bringing the Catholic population among U.S. adults to 18.9%.

New Reformation

“This is a 1530’s Europe level crisis, and Catholics can’t put their heads in the sand and pretend everything is awesome. We need a new Catholic Reformation,” Crisis Magazine Editor in Chief Eric Sammons lamented on X.

“With respect to my beloved Catholic friends, I don’t know how one could read the Pew report and come away with a triumphalist Catholicism that is very prevalent on X,” wrote Dr. Andrew T. Walker, professor of ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“I should add that, yes, in the same report, you can find very unpleasant things about evangelicalism, too, but it does seem to indicate that Protestants have less of a discipleship problem than Catholicism does,” Walker tweeted.

Catholic numbers have also taken a hit among the Hispanic population, who hail from a predominantly Catholic background. Overall, 36% of Catholics in the U.S. are Hispanic.

Hispanic adults identifying as Catholic sharply declined from 58% to 42%, Pew reported.

“We have reached the point where most Hispanics are not Catholic, and we’ve been there for some time now,” Gregory A. Smith told the Catholic media outlet Crux. “The Catholic share of the Hispanic population in the United States has been declining rapidly for a long time.”

Evangelical Gains

While Protestant churches also lost more people than they gained through religious switching, the losses were significantly smaller, with 13.7% of U.S. adults no longer identifying as Protestants, compared with 7.6% of Americans who were not raised Protestant but now identify as such.

Among Protestants, nondenominational evangelicals have bucked the trend, with more American adults switching to nondenominational churches than those leaving such churches.

While 1.7% of U.S. adults who were raised as nondenominational evangelicals have left, more than three times as many now switched to nondenominal evangelical churches after having been raised in another way (5.7%).

Among those who were raised Protestant, 75% remained Protestant as adults; only 22% of people raised as Protestants quit their churches to maintain no religious affiliation. In contrast, only 57% of those who were raised Catholic remain Catholic as adults.

About 14% of people raised as Catholics converted to Protestantism as adults, and a quarter of those who were raised Catholic now say they are religiously unaffiliated (24%), the survey found.

Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, and nondenominational evangelicals were reported to have among the highest retention rates of Protestant denominations. More than half of Americans who were raised Baptist (54%) remained Baptists as adults; 47% raised Lutheran remained Lutherans; and 45% raised Pentecostal or nondenominational remained that way as adults.

Catholic Decline Worsens

The RLS released in 2014 also reported a precipitous decline of membership in the Catholic Church, stating:

Within Christianity the greatest net losses, by far, have been experienced by Catholics. Nearly one-third of American adults (31.7%) say they were raised Catholic. Among that group, fully 41% no longer identify with Catholicism.

This means that 12.9% of American adults are former Catholics, while just 2% of U.S. adults have converted to Catholicism from another religious tradition. No other religious group in the survey has such a lopsided ratio of losses to gains.

In contrast, the 2014 RLS also noted that

the evangelical Protestant tradition is the only major Christian group in the survey that has gained more members than it has lost through religious switching. Roughly 10% of U.S. adults now identify with evangelical Protestantism after having been raised in another tradition, which more than offsets the roughly 8% of adults who were raised as evangelicals but have left.

Loss of Faith

The Public Religion Research Institute’s Health of Congregations Survey (2023) explained that loss of belief was the primary reason for Catholics leaving the church, with 69% of former Catholics citing it.

Nearly 39% of Catholics left because of clerical sex abuse scandals, 36% because of negative religious teachings about LGBTQ people, and 14% because of a traumatic event in their lives.

The U.S. Catholic Church spent over $5 billion on victim compensation and attorneys’ fees in lawsuits over the clerical sexual abuse of minors between 2004 and 2023, The Stream reported. It now spends an average of $36,399,720 every year to protect minors from predatory clergy.

A quarter of former Catholics (26%) cited growing up in a family that was never that religious as a reason they left the church;15% left because their church or congregation became too politicized. Today, 50% of former Catholics are religiously unaffiliated, and 25% are evangelical or Protestant, the PRRI survey found.

“We know that many of the dechurched have left because of abusive leadership and failing character in their leaders,” authors Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan P. Burge wrote in The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?

Church leaders have a greater burden in front of the Lord than the rest of those in the faith.

The American church today is at a crossroads. While the kingdom of God will go on, its future in this country is not certain. The Great Dechurching could well be the American church’s most crucial moment and greatest opportunity.

Originally published in The Stream.

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Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.