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Aug 31, 2017 · Five hundred years after the start of the Protestant Reformation, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that U.S. Protestants are not united about – and in some cases, are not even aware of – some of the controversies that were central to the historical schism between Protestantism and Catholicism.
The U.S. contains the largest Protestant population of any country in the world. Baptists comprise about one-third of American Protestants. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest single Protestant denomination in the U.S., comprising one-tenth of American Protestants.
Oct 17, 2019 · Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population – a group also known as religious “nones” – have seen their numbers swell.
- Globally, Protestants made up 37% of Christians in 2010. That’s a smaller share than Catholics, who comprised 50% of Christians around the world, but substantially larger than the percentage of Orthodox Christians, who represented 12%.
- The share of Protestants among U.S. adults is in decline, falling from 51% in 2007 to 47% in 2014. The decline is most pronounced among people who identify with mainline Protestant denominations, such as the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
- In Latin America, where nearly 40% of the world’s Catholics live, Protestant populations have risen sharply. In a survey conducted in the region in 2014, 9% of respondents across 19 Latin American countries said they were raised as Protestants, while 19% identified Protestant (or evangelical) Christianity as their current religion.
- One relatively recent and distinctive Protestant movement that has gained ground globally is Pentecostalism. While practices vary, Pentecostal churches often emphasize the “gifts of the Holy Spirit,” such as divine healing, speaking in tongues and receiving direct revelations from God.
The Protestant Reformation was a religious reform movement that swept through Europe in the 1500s. It resulted in the creation of a branch of Christianity called Protestantism , a name used collectively to refer to the many religious groups that separated from the Roman Catholic Church due to differences in doctrine .
The Protestant Heritage, Protestantism originated in the 16th-century Reformation, and its basic doctrines, in addition to those of the ancient Christian creeds, are justification by grace alone through faith, the priesthood of all believers, and the supremacy of Holy Scripture in matters of faith.
As Protestants established their faith as the dominant cultural, religious, and ideological force in North America, they used their religiously inflected definitions of race to create racial and religious hierarchies, enshrining white Protestantism at the apogee of these invented categories.
