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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.
- 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 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.
In fifteen years, after the onset of the American Revolution, the number of religious establishments was effectively reversed with ten of fourteen states (now including Vermont) either disbanding their establishments or declining to enact legislation to support their previous systems.
- Measuring and Categorizing Protestantism
- The Shifting Composition of American Protestantism
- Growth of Non-Christian Faiths
- Atheists and Agnostics Make Up A Growing Share of The Unaffiliated
American Protestantism is diverse, encompassing more than a dozen major denominational families – such as Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and Pentecostals – all with unique beliefs, practices and histories. These denominational families, in turn, are made up of a host of different denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the American...
Recent years have brought a dramatic decline in the share of Americans who identify with mainline Protestant denominations. Today, just 15% of all U.S. adults identify with mainline Protestant churches, down from 18% in 2007. By comparison, evangelical Protestantism and the historically black Protestant tradition have been more stable. Today, 25% o...
The 2014 Religious Landscape Study finds that 5.9% of U.S. adults identify with faiths other than Christianity, up slightly, but significantly, from 4.7% in 2007. The largest of these faiths is Judaism, with 1.9% of respondents identifying themselves as Jewish when asked about their religion. Among Jews surveyed, 44% identify with Reform Judaism, 2...
The religiously unaffiliated population – including all of its constituent subgroups – has grown rapidly as a share of the overall U.S. population. The share of self-identified atheists has nearly doubled in size since 2007, from 1.6% to 3.1%. Agnostics have grown from 2.4% to 4.0%. And those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” h...
- Benjamin Wormald
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.
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.
