United States of America - Religion

The United States government keeps no official register of Americans' religious status. However, in a private survey conducted in 2001 and mentioned in the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States, 76.7% of American adults identified themselves as Christian; about 52% of adults described themselves as members of various Protestant denominations; Roman Catholics, at 24.5%, were the most populous individual sect; Judaism (1.4%), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1.3%), and other faiths also have firm places in American culture; about 14.2% of respondents described themselves as having no religion; the religious distribution of the 5.4% who elected not to describe themselves for the survey is unknown.

The country has a relatively high level of religiosity among developed nations. About 46% of American adults say that they attend religious services at least once a week, compared with 14% of adults in Great Britain, 8% in France, and 7% in Sweden. Moreover, 58% of Americans say they often think about the meaning and purpose of life, compared with 25% of the British, 26% of the Japanese, and 31% of West Germans. However, this rate is not uniform across the country: regular attendance to religious services is markedly more common in the Bible Belt, composed largely of Southern and Southern Midwestern states, than in the Northeast or the West.

Religion among some Americans is highly dynamic: over the period 1990-2001, those groups whose portion of the population at least doubled were, in descending order of growth, Wiccans, nondenominational Christians, Deists, Sikhs, Evangelical Christians, Disciples of Christ, New Age adherents, Hindus, Full Gospel adherents, Quakers, Bahais, independent Christians, those who refused to answer the question, Buddhists, and Foursquare Gospel adherents.

Over the same period, the group whose portion of the population grew by the most percentage points was those who claimed no religion, making up 8.2% of the adult population in 1990, but 14.2% in 2001. This group includes atheists, agnostics, humanists, secularists and those who answered to the effect of "No religion". The number of those with no religion varies widely with location, reaching a high in Washington, at 25%, and the rest of the relatively agnostic western United States, and a low in North Dakota, at 3%, followed shortly by the Bible Belt. In the U.S. women are generally more religious than men, at 42% and 31%, respectively; and younger Americans are more secular than their older counterparts, at 14% and 7%, respectively. Among racial and ethnic groups, blacks are the most religious, while Asians are the least, at 49% and 28%, respectively.

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