The U.S. will likely no longer be a majority Protestant nation in years to come, due to a decline in affiliation with many Protestant churches, a new survey found.
Between 1993 and 2002, the share of Americans who said they were Protestant dropped from 63 percent to 52 percent, after years of remaining generally stable, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
The percentage who said they had no religion rose from 9 percent to nearly 14 percent, and many are former Protestants, the survey’s authors said.
The study was based on three decades of religious identification questions in the General Social Survey.
The Roman Catholic population has remained stable over the period, making up about 25 percent of the U.S. population.
