Gallup: More U.S. Protestants Have No Specific Denominational Identity

Via Gallup

Americans have become less likely to identify with an official or formal religion in recent decades, and nowhere is this more evident than in the dwindling percentage who identify with a specific Protestant denomination. In 2000, 50% of Americans identified with a specific denomination; by 2016 that figure had dropped to 30%.

This shrinking proportion of Americans who identify with specific Protestant denominations is the result of two trends.

First, an increasing percentage of Americans are “nones,” saying they don’t have a specific religious identity of any kind. Since the percentages of Catholics, Mormons and those who identify with a non-Christian religion have stayed roughly the same over time, this “rise of the nones” — from 10% in 2000 to 20% in 2016 — has generally been accompanied by an associated decrease in the broad category of Protestants, whose numbers shrank from 57% to 47%. Therefore, there are fewer Protestants of any kind in the American population today, and the pool of those who identify with a specific Protestant denomination is smaller.

Secondly, Americans who identify as Christians other than Catholics or Mormons increasingly put themselves into a non-denominational category rather than identifying with a specific denomination such as Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and so forth. Others simply identify their religion as Christian without any reference to Protestantism or a specific Protestant denomination. As a result of these trends, the percentage of Americans who identify with a specific Protestant denomination has dropped from 50% in 2000 to 30% in 2016, while Christians who don’t name a specific religion or denomination have doubled in number, from 9% to 17%.