The share of registered voters in the United States who say they are Christian has declined by about 15% since 2008 while the number of religiously unaffiliated voters has nearly doubled, Pew Research Center data suggests.
Pew drew the data from a balanced survey of over 360,000 registered voters surveyed over a 25-year span that include over 12,000 voters questioned in 2018 and 2019.
The data indicates that 64% of all registered voters surveyed in 2019 self-identified as Christian. That figure is down from 79% of registered voters surveyed in 2008 who identified themselves as followers of Christ.
The study shows that the decline in registered Christian voters is most stark in the Democratic Party.
In 2008, 73% of registered Democrats identified as Christian. But by 2019, only 52% of Democrat voters said the same.
Among Democratic Christians, only the number of Hispanic Catholic voters increased. And that figure only increased by 1 percentage point.
Registered Republican voters have seemingly moved away from God at a slower rate, dropping from 87% Christian in 2008 to 79% Christian in 2019.
In comparison, the number of religiously unaffiliated voters has almost doubled from 15% to 28% in the same years.
“What’s going down is faith among the American people. The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has been declining,” Galen Carey, National Association of Evangelicals vice president of government relations, told The Christian Post. “The number of Americans of faith is declining. The concern to us is not how many Christians are registered voters but how many voters are Christians.”
Among registered voters, almost all Christian denominations have decreased in number, the data shows. The two exceptions are Hispanic Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants who didn’t provide their race or belong to small racial minorities.
Click here to read more.
SOURCE: Christian Post, Jackson Elliott
BCNN1 WP 